Why Being Drunk Is Not A Feminist Issue

So, here’s a low-hanging fruit for internet feminist critique. Yesterday, Kate over at The Frisky contended that “being drunk is a feminist issue” and was promptly smacked down by Jill from Feministe. I’ve quoted a representative excerpt from Kate’s essay below:

The more I think about alcohol and its relationship to sexual assault, the more I am convinced that binge drinking is a feminist issue—one that young women in the U.S. need to think about in addition to more obvious issues like equal pay for equal work, better access to gynecological care, and the need for more women representing us in government. Extreme drinking—the kind we see on “Jersey Shore,” the kind we know goes down on college campuses all across the country, the kind we see around us in bars on weekend nights, the kind that fueled “The Hangover,” the kind that inspires all those “last night, I was so drunk” stories that people like to tell—regularly puts women in danger in the name of a good time.

A look at the statistics is sobering. In 47% of reported rapes (and I’m talking in this essay about heterosexual rape with female victims, though of course many other types exist), both the victim and the perpetrator had been drinking. In an additional 17%, the perpetrator only was intoxicated and in 7% of cases on top of that the victim only was tipsy. This has me wondering if changing our culture—from one where binge drinking is allowed, normalized, and in many situations even encouraged to one where people are urged to know their limits and always have their wits about them—could lead to a significant drop in the number of women who have to endure sexual assaults.

Jill has already done the leg work of calling this article out for condoning victim-blaming, the reprehensible process by which rape survivors become responsible for crimes committed against them by rapists:

This is how victim-blaming works: You point to something a victim of assault did wrong, and you imply (or just say) that if she hadn’t made X choice, she wouldn’t have ended up raped. You say, of course no one is to blame but the rapist! But I’m talking about prevention! Except rape isn’t a drunken miscommunication. It’s not a gray area. If you’re blacked out and a dude takes your clothes off and penetrates you, I promise it’s not because he was under the impression you consented. It’s because he’s a rapist.

Okay, so Jill is right! And she’s right because the tenets of anti-rape activism—which are amazingly powerful but, in my opinion, sometimes verge on dogmatic—tell us that she’s right. It’s really, really essential to call out victim-blaming in action, and, as many of you probably know, a hell of a lot of victim-blaming happens across individual, organizational, and societal levels every single day. It manifests as friends of survivors asking questions such as “Why did you walk home alone?” in the initial seconds after a woman discloses her experience to news reports about “gray rape” to this well-intentioned but effectively rape-mythtastic article in The Frisky. But I think there’s a catch here. While the tenets of anti-rape activism make for some really great rallying cries, they also lack nuance. And when crudely applied, they can preclude thoughtful feminist analysis and criticism.  

I’ve written about the whole binge-drinking conundrum before, so I’m inclined to give Kate’s piece a chance, however misguided it may be. After all, her argument is, at least in part, evidence-based. Statistics tell us that sexual assault incidents, especially on college campuses, are associated with binge-drinking. (I’m currently studying toward a Master of Public Health, so this is something that’s hard for me to overlook.) Nevertheless, two of the essay’s underlying premises are flawed.

First of all, there’s this whole analogy:

But recently, I’ve been thinking about sexual assault like a cancer. If cancer spreads, your odds of fighting it are slim. But if you go for preventative screenings and catch it early, your chances of survival are much higher. What I’m talking about here is prevention.

Secondary prevention in the form of cancer screenings saves lives. But cancer is wholly different from sexual assault. You can’t exactly compare something whose cause lies at the cellular level to something caused by interpersonal- and societal-level factors. And encouraging women to protect themselves from the possibility of being attacked by drinking less or making sure to never stumble home from the bar alone is not prevention. It’s risk reduction. What’s the problem with risk reduction, you ask? Well, I can certainly decrease the likelihood that I will be raped by drinking less when I’m at the club. But a rapist will simply target someone else. There’s nothing preventive about it.

Secondly, Kate’s argument is not a feminist argument, even though she tries to spin it this way. Let’s look at what she has to say:

The more I think about alcohol and its relationship to sexual assault, the more I am convinced that binge drinking is a feminist issue—one that young women in the U.S. need to think about in addition to more obvious issues like equal pay for equal work, better access to gynecological care, and the need for more women representing us in government.

Again, this analogy isn’t working for me. Binge-drinking is not like health care access and equal pay for equal work. The latter two issues are feminist issues because they address deeply entrenched social inequalities that systematically disadvantage marginalized folks. Binge-drinking is associated with sexual assault, which is a form of violence that upholds patriarchal power. When we use primary prevention techniques to eliminate sexual violence, we are combating social inequality. Changing social norms around binge-drinking addresses a health problem, not a societal-level disparity that privileges one group of people while subordinating another. Drinking is not a feminist issue because, as Jill said, feminism isn’t simply about “Helping Women.” It’s about dismantling long-standing structures of power and oppression that perpetuate rape culture and social inequality.