Does warning your daughter that sexual assault is a risk of binge drinking make you a "rape apologist"?

[Updated: Quote from an article by Slate's legal correspondent Emily Bazelon at the end.]

The interwebs have been lit up over the last couple of weeks about how to talk (or write) about "rape culture" and the hazards faced by women who get blitzed at parties. I gather from some of what I read that this has been an ongoing point of anger within a segment of the feminist community, but I was stunned at the outpouring of vitriol in response to a column by Slate writer Emily Yoffe, "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk" (title probably provided by her editor) with subtitle "It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it." The article made many points that struck me - and from comments evidently a lot of other readers - as perfectly sensible, motherly advice. To wit: there are predatory men out there, and women who get drunk - especially to the point where they lose control - are putting themselves at risk of becoming rape victims. This seems no more controversial than telling kids to look both ways before they cross the street, but evidently there's a long history of some sort of feminist view that any advice to women about how to stay safe amounts to "apologizing" for or "denying" the "rape culture", victim blaming and slut shaming. Apparently the only correct way to talk about rape is to talk about the men who are raping. Parents should "tell their sons not to rape". But they should never ever warn their daughters about the risks of being incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. Because that's just blaming the victims.

I've read a bunch of these feminist manifestos, and I still don't get it. [I use the word "feminist" here as a shorthand for the people espousing these views. I consider myself a feminist in the sense that I don't think gender should be grounds for discrimination, and I want my daughter to find the world entirely open to her in every respect, unlike, say, the way it is for Saudi women. But that doesn't mean I haven't warned her about the risks of alcohol.] This hoo-hah came in the wake of the news of two teenage girls from a small Missouri town who went to a party at the house of some HS football players, got passed-out drunk, were raped by some of the boys, then dropped off at their homes (one semiconscious and unable to get in her front door on a freezing night). After a subsequent investigation by the police and local prosecutor, charges against the boys were dropped; the reasons are disputed, but I don't think anyone openly argues that what the boys did wasn't rape or was OK. The "rape culture" meme is, I think, about the macho jock culture that tells guys that anything they do to score is OK, including sticking it in a drunk passed out 13 year old. I'm pretty sure that's a real thing, not just a feminist fantasy. But it seems hard to argue that the bulk of society is OK with this kind of thing - people all over the world were shocked at the Maryville story. It's no more acceptable than was the Matthew Shepard murder in the late '90s or the bullying that pushed a S. Hadley, Mass. girl to suicide a few years ago. It's bad shit and pretty much everyone agrees that it's bad shit and we should keep working to keep it from happening again. Humankind being what we are, it seems unlikely that these efforts will ever be completely successful.

What doesn't always happen in these rape cases is for the justice system to punish the perpetrators. The feminist claim is that when it doesn't happen it's because police, prosecutors and judges don't take it seriously. That might also sometimes be true, though it seems uncontroversial that the lack-of-consent part of a rape conviction is going to be tricky to prove in situations where the woman can't recall exactly what happened, particularly since there's such a thing as consensual sex, sometimes after drinking. Obviously that doesn't apply to cases like Maryville, but that's not what's being debated. What many of these folks are saying is that drunk consent is not consent, period, end of story. I don't know what these people's experience of the real world is - how many times they've gotten it on with someone after a few drinks. I'm guessing it doesn't heavily inform their polemics. The criminal justice system is a very blunt instrument for "solving" the complexity of interpersonal relationships.

[A case that got Yoffe a lot of flack from the same merry band is one where a married woman wrote to her (as "Dear Prudence") about how she & her husband drank, then got into bed & started going at it but she doesn't remember everything and is now really upset. ("I liked it and went along, only to wake up in the morning and remember only half of it.") Yoffe's response was not sympathetic, except to the woman's husband. Apparently, though she should just have told the woman that yes, her husband is a rapist and she should divorce him. This woman is a rape survivor who is being slut-shamed by Yoffe. (There's a much more nuanced response by Lindsay Beyerstein here. Though I don't agree with everything she says, she shows much more sensitivity to the unusual aspect of the story than the rest of the dial-at-11 rants of outrage.)]

There's a lot more along these lines at the websites Jezebel, Feministing, Salon and even on Slate, where Amanda Hess wrote a piece subtitled "We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties." The theme is that its so tired to be warning women about the risks of alcohol - they all have heard it a thousand times - and so the only thing that needs to be written about is how we're going to lock up all the rapists.

What all this seems to miss is the completely straightforward observation that it's a risky world out there right now. All the good intentions in the world about "changing the rape culture" don't change it tomorrow. As Yoffe says in her reply: "In the meantime, this weekend, some young, intoxicated women will wake up next to guys they never wanted to sleep with. I believe it’s worth talking about how keeping within a safe drinking limit can potentially help young women avoid such situations." A common thread I notice in many of the replies is how young the writers are. I'm guessing they don't have daughters yet, and aren't thinking about this issue from the very immediate perspective of their daughter's safety today and tomorrow. (Though one of the more ridiculous pieces is by Soraya Chemaly, who has young boys.) Their responses are purely political: to give safety advice to girls is a distraction from the only correct path, telling boys not to be rapists. Chemaly says "These are profoundly systemic problems, and this approach - taking up valuable time and space -  is counter-productive." Umm… there’s a lot of space on the internet. And “counterproductive”? It's not like we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is a subject that seems to invite analogies in the blog comments, such as about not wandering into a bad part of town with $100 bills poking out of your pocket. (Which does seem to verge on telling women not to dress “seductively”, though that's not how it's meant.) But to continue the one that I started with: when we tell our children to look both ways before crossing the street – even though they have the right to be in the crosswalk and cars are required to stop for them, and this is the tenth time we've said it – are we being apologists and enablers of the car-centric aggressive driving culture? (Also, taking up valuable time!) Or are we just giving them utterly commonsense instruction in how not to get hurt?

[Update]
A month after the Yoffe article, Emily Bazelon, Slate's legal correspondent wrote another, using a study on underreporting of drinking-related rape as a basis to defend Yoffe from the PC gang. Closing paragraph:

In the vast majority of sexual assaults, Krebs says, the victim knows the offender. And sometimes she may not remember exactly what happened—because her memory is blurred by intoxication. That’s why Emily Yoffe called for rape prevention education that reaches women as well as men. Not instead of men—of course we need to make clear that men who force sex are fully responsible for their violence, no matter what the circumstances. But we also should treat women as fully capable of agency by giving them the information they need to understand that binge drinking is a risk factor for sexual assault. I’m the mother of sons, not daughters. It is absolutely my responsibility to teach my boys that there is no excuse—none—for having sex unless they can be absolutely sure the other person wants to. But if I had girls, I would want to open their eyes to the reality that drinking to the point of passing out will make them more vulnerable. That doesn’t mean blaming them. It means arming them.