- College women: Stop getting drunk – I don’t know if Emily Yoffe lives under a rock, but she seems to think that young women aren’t told enough that getting drunk will get them raped. Two excellent responses- College Men: Stop getting drunk from Moniqa and You don’t have to be such a jerk about rape.
- New gender-specific Kinder eggs – I always thought part of the charm was that they weren’t gender-specific. From Steph.
- My female students don’t seem as impressed with me as they used to be – Love this.
- Man banter, big cans, and harassment at New York Comic Con – A gross ad campaign and a film crew for a cable access show that, “…made quite a name for themselves (they have since deleted their YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts) by politely asking female cosplayers for interviews and then peppering them with come ons and deliberately lewd, racist questions and comments.”
Featured image by Kyle Sullivan
And yet another round of victim blaming. Despicable.
I’m really just so disbelieving that Yoffe thinks women don’t get warned about drinking enough. Were my teenage years so abnormal? Because that’s about all I ever heard about the dangers of drinking for young women.
I got a lot of that, too, Amanda, and also thought it was the norm. Not surprisingly, my knowledge didn’t stop men from trying to take advantage of me all the damn time when we were drinking. Imagine that.
Michael Barry,
I agree. Victim blaming is stupid, and only hurt the innocent victim even more. It doesn’t help solve the problem.
Emily Yoffe may be well intentioned, but she is so ignorant that she causes more harm than good. Her advice column is more about showing off her supposed wit and validating (most) of her questioners than offering insightful advice. And then, when she gets a letter from someone whose problem is outside of what is generally understood by the average person, she almost always fails to respond appropriately. Her belief, for instance, that anonymous notes to offending neighbours is a good idea is so bizzarre. Rape of a woman who’s drunk unfortunately counts as an incontrovertible law of nature in the mind of the average idiot, so of course Emily Yoffe responds like the average idiot.
What’s so disgusting, though, is her concern for her college-aged son in case he is ever accused of rape. What about worrying about him not understanding the concept of “yes means yes”? Shouldn’t she be more worried about him raping someone? It’s far more likely, and ought to make her pull up her parenting socks and wade in there and try to teach him about how to be a decent human being.
I didn’t see those guys at NY Comic Con, though I did catch glimpses of the ‘Big Cans’ campaign (I only saw one thing on the Main Stage and I was late for that). It’s still disheartening, the casualness of this behavior.
I blogged about doing the ‘Sci Fi Speed Dating’ event this year, and though most of it was fine, the Playboy sponsorship that included a “get your photo taken with a Bunny” promotion happening right behind us in the room while the “selection” phase of the session was still going on, and some of the trite gender-differences “advice” and jokes reminded me we still have a lot of work to do.
re: Yoffe
Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue.
I missed that e-mail. Does anyone have a copy they can forward?
If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men.
That might be the most disgusting thing I have read this year.
Two tropes in collision
a) victim-blaming and anti victim-blaming backlash
b) the absolute refusal to treat alcohol as a serious problem.
In cases like the Missouri example the impact reaches the absurd. If the perpetrators had slipped rohypnol into the victim’s cola, everyone would be reaching for torches and pitchforks no matter what their grandads did. If they had illegally incapacitated underage girls with alcohol ans STOLEN THEIR PURSES, no one would squeal about ‘victim blaming.’
Alcohol is an appallingly toxic drug. Yoffe did point out that predators use alcohol as a date-rape drug, AND target women who are almost certainly at special hazard (e.g. alcoholics who can’t control their intake once started, and the very young who may have no experience of how alcohol will affect them).
The fact that Yoffe made NO mention of alcoholism as a factor shows that she shares the media blindness to the issue.