Society long has considered alcohol as having an oppressive quality to it. For example, historians consider Europeans' introduction of "firewater" to Indians during the colonial period as having large-scale detrimental effects on the latter's society. Something that weakens one's facilities of reason and judgment must be inherently oppressive on some level.
The rise of binge drinking by female college students has critics directing their worries about alcohol consumption to this particular demographic. Some feminists claim that women suffer socially due to exposure to alcohol. In last Wednesday's forum, Kate Kennedy implied that because alcohol fueled a campus "hook-up culture," its consumption by women hurt the feminist cause. But stigmatizing female drinking is far from being feminist. Specifically condemning the use of alcohol by women is unfair and furthers gender inequality. Alcohol consumption does not oppress women; thinking that it does is oppressive to women.
Kate Kennedy calls alcohol the "substitute for dating," and the "elixir for hooking up." Kennedy defines "hooking up" as a physical encounter where neither party necessarily expects a relationship. Her impression of the college-wide "hook-up culture" is decidedly negative, and blaming women's consumption of alcohol on it makes alcohol consumption negative by association as well. It's true that alcohol is involved in probably the vast majority of hook-ups, but this need not be a harmful situation for women. Alcohol does not need to make women victims -- it can make them agents. If drinking makes women more susceptible to being hit on by men, it also makes them more likely to hit on men themselves. Increasing the frequency of women taking on this traditional male role of the initiator is a small step forward in social, gender equality. Considering the woman a casualty of the hook-up is to deny her agency in the occurrence.
Unfortunately, hooking up is still not completely socially acceptable for women. Alcohol provides a temporary scapegoat, an excuse for the less brazen. She may have known what she was doing, but blaming the liquor helps her avoid that nasty "slut" epithet. Not that this is ideal; women should feel free to admit that they intentionally hooked up and enjoyed it. But both after the fact and during the act, alcohol gives women a kind of freedom from negative judgment. And for now, women can pursue pleasure without having to worry about social repercussions.
But this can cause at least one concrete problem with alcohol consumption is that it makes women more susceptible to sexual assault. Drinking lessens a woman's facilities of resistance, both mental and physical. Additionally, men who have been drinking are less reasonable, making them more likely to consider assault and further, unable to understand no. Asking women to curb their alcohol consumption is not the solution. Women don't need to stop drinking, men need to change their attitudes toward drunk women. The good news concerning alcohol and sexual assault is that the law protects the victim, usually the woman, and not the perpetrator, usually the man. Being in a drunken state during the assault should not prevent the woman from prosecuting her attacker -- a woman does not deserve to be assaulted just because she is drunk. If acute intoxication prevents her from physically resisting, she still has a case against her rapist. Moreover, if a man was drinking when he committed the assault, his state in no way absolves him of his actions. In both cases, alcohol simply is not an excuse for sexual assault.
Alcohol needn't be a vehicle of female oppression. The problem lies in society's continued negative stigmatization of both women who drink and the party/hook-up culture. It's a subtler facet of equality but still an important one. Alcohol itself does not oppress women -- creating a double standard for its consumption and limiting women's social privileges does.
So, I propose a toast to the women of the University: We've come a long way for the freedom to make our own decisions, may we enjoy the right to social privileges as much as the next man.
(Kimberly Liu's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kliu@cavalierdaily.com.)
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