{"id":6880,"date":"2020-01-12T12:35:22","date_gmt":"2020-01-12T16:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=6880"},"modified":"2022-03-24T15:53:42","modified_gmt":"2022-03-24T19:53:42","slug":"alcohol-and-consent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/alcohol-and-consent\/","title":{"rendered":"Alcohol and Consent: What Are the Rules?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is consent while drunk valid? What are the rules around alcohol and consent?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although recent events have brought questions about alcohol and consent to the forefront, it’s been a thorny issue for decades, particularly on college campuses. Can you give consent while you’re drunk? Should you trust the consent of someone else who’s drunk? Here are some things to keep in mind about alcohol and consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Problems with Alcohol and Consent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The assumption of transparency is clearly a problem for trained police professionals attempting to make sense of a suspect and seasoned judges trying to read a defendant. But the assumption of transparency also has devastating effects for young people across the nation<\/strong>. 
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For example, approximately one in five American female college students has been a victim of sexual assault. Many of these cases follow a similar pattern:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Two young people (often strangers) meet and have a conversation.<\/li>
  2. At some point, a sexual encounter begins.<\/li>
  3. One party feels violated by the encounter. <\/li>
  4. Later on, it is difficult to reconstruct how things escalated: Was there consent from both parties? If not, did one person actively ignore the other\u2019s objection? Or did one person simply misunderstand the other\u2019s sexual intentions? <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    It has been established that it is nearly impossible to judge a person\u2019s general intentions based on their behavior or expressions. So how can we expect young, immature people to judge a person\u2019s sexual<\/em> intentions based on their behavior? 
    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Role of Alcohol in Consent Issues<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    There are two major elements that contribute to this pattern of sexual assault among young people:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    1. There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes consent, so people are forced to make assumptions<\/strong>: In a 2015 study, 1,000 college students were asked whether sexual activity when both<\/em> people have not clearly given consent should be considered sexual assault. Half of the students answered that they were unsure. What are the implications of the fact that half of all young people are unsure <\/em>whether consent needs to be clearly given in a sexual interaction? How can we expect young people to respect boundaries if there is no real consensus of what those boundaries are?<\/li>
    2. Alcohol makes it much more difficult to express yourself and to understand others, and young people are often drunk during these sexual encounters<\/strong>: Alcohol puts the drinker into a transformative state of myopia in which only the short-term seems important and longer-term consequences are easy to ignore. Even more problematic, many young people drink to a state of \u201cblackout.\u201d This is key in the issues surrounding alcohol and consent. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      The misunderstanding of consent is essentially an assumption of transparency gone wrong, and alcohol only adds to the confusion. <\/strong>Consent is something that two people must negotiate together, and it requires both people to be who they say they are and want what they say they want. When under the influence of alcohol, neither person is their true self<\/a> and neither person can manage their short-term wants with the long-term consequences. (Shortform note: Gladwell doesn’t address situations in which rape happens with true lack of consent, rather than when alcohol is involved.) Can you truly give consent while drunk?
      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Blackouts, Consent, and Sexual Assault <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

      In a state of blackout, all of the strategies people typically use to interact with strangers are dull\u2014most notably the memory.<\/strong> This is a huge issue regarding alcohol and consent. Memory is usually the first line of defense when talking to a stranger<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n