Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 245

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity," by Peggy Orenstein.

From the earliest ages, children are subject to messages that present women primarily as objects for male use, as rewards for victory, wealth, and fame; messages that disregard women’s perspective and inaccurately represent their gratification. Parents of little girls may surround their daughters with books and movies and images of complex female characters in an effort to offset all that, but rarely do parents of boys do the same: the distorted depiction of women in media is seen as a problem for girls alone.

“The sex can feel like two people having two very distinct experiences,” observed Andrew, a second-semester freshman in Los Angeles who had hooked up with ten girls since school began and had intercourse with five. “There’s not much eye contact. Sometimes you don’t even say anything. And it’s weird to be so open with a stranger.” He paused, searching for a way to encapsulate the experience. “It’s like you’re acting vulnerable, but not actually being vulnerable with someone you don’t know and don’t care very much about. It’s not a problem for me. It’s just—odd. Odd, and not even really fun.” 

To gird against disappointment—as well as a near-fanatic generational fear of the “awkward”—it’s crucial to get hammered. Hence, the pregame. To say that hookup culture is lubricated by alcohol would be a gross understatement: it is dependent on binge-drinking to create what Wade calls the “compulsory carelessness” necessary for a hookup. Alcohol is, above all, what establishes a couple’s indifference: hooking up sober is almost by definition serious. Inebriation itself—“I was so drunk”—can even become the reason (or the excuse) for an encounter, as opposed to, say, attraction, interest, or connection. “In the stairwells of my dorm,” Andrew told me, “people will talk about how if you didn’t black out, you didn’t go out.” 

Most of the guys I met were acutely aware that sex with an incapacitated person is assault. Yet, since you need to be drunk in order to hook up, the trick becomes being (and finding someone who is) wasted enough to want to do it but sober enough to be able to express a credible “yes.” And who is to be the judge of that? “I’m very careful about not doing anything if I’m super drunk,” a college freshman in North Carolina told me. “I don’t want to make decisions I’d regret. So I usually limit it to six or seven drinks. But sometimes more.” Even so, he woke up one morning about a month into his first semester with no memory of the night before and a strange girl’s number entered into his phone. “I was freaking out, but I texted her and she said she’d had fun, so luckily it was all right.” 

College anti-assault activists are fond of saying, “Don’t tell girls not to drink, tell rapists not to rape.” Personally, I don’t see it as a zero-sum game. As the parent of a daughter, I firmly advocate talking to young women about the unique way female bodies metabolize liquor: drink for drink a girl will become incapacitated more quickly than a guy who is the same size and weight. I also endorse discussing how alcohol reduces power and obscures judgment, making it more difficult to recognize and escape dangerous situations. At the same time, it’s clear that we need to be far more active in discussing how guys’ alcohol consumption adversely affects their judgment, putting them at risk of engaging in the kind of sexual misconduct that could get them suspended or expelled from school—not to mention harming another human being. Alcohol has been shown to diminish boys’ ability to read social cues or notice a partner’s hesitation. It gives them the nerve they might not otherwise have to use coercion or force to get what they want; drunk guys are more aggressive when they assault and less aware of their victims’ distress. Inebriation also makes boys less likely to step in as bystanders than they would be if they were sober.