I'm more worried about alcohol than agreeableness

In my experience binge drinking is far more dangerous than politeness

If you want to know what worries me about sexual interactions between college kids, it’s the lack of caution in regards to alcohol… 

My college was so into drinking that we had multiple alcohol related deaths within the first semester of my freshman year. So I’ll acknowledge that my experience was probably on the more extreme side of the drinking school spectrum for Canada. Still, adjusting for the fact that we didn’t have Greek life I’d expect it wasn’t too far from the North American norm. I had a great college experience overall, but writing about consent and agency has led me back to a central factor in many stories of ambiguous (and sometimes not at all ambiguous) sexual encounters between young people. 

Apparently Gen Z drinks less than Millennials did in college, so this problem is likely smaller than it once was. But heavy drinking was a common element in almost all of the traumatic sexual stories that I heard in my early 20s. Blacking out (or at least browning out) was a normal recurring experience for us, and there was almost always one girl in the group who needed to be taken care of and shepherded home. It wasn’t like we exactly planned to black out but we also didn’t try very hard to prevent it. 

Back then everyone was warning women that guys might try to roofie them. “Don’t EVER leave your drink unattended!” But while we were all watching our drinks to make sure guys didn’t drug us we barely worried about the risk of drugging ourselves into total incapacitation. It’s not like no one said it was a bad idea to get blacked out drunk, it’s just that telling young women they should moderate their drinking could sound a little too much like subtle victim blaming. After all, shouldn’t we be condemning the unethical men who might take advantage of such a drunk woman instead? Sure… but by failing to highlight the real danger we were putting ourselves in ahead of time, many women had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Somehow I failed to process the implicit inconsistency here. If there are concentric circles of male sexual aggression, the circle of men who would have sex with a likely blacked out but conscious woman is obviously larger than the circle who would rape a passed out drunk girl which is again obviously larger than the circle who would plan ahead to drug and rape a woman. I mean, if we really thought there was a non trivial chance that some male classmate at a party would drug our drink then we should have assumed there’s a much more significant chance that someone there is capable of taking advantage of an incapacitated woman who’s essentially drugged herself.

Part of the problem here, and this is truly embarrassing to admit, was that we often got too drunk or blacked out in part because… we wouldn’t eat all afternoon so that we could look skinny for going out. Plus if we drank on an empty stomach we didn’t have to consume as many alcohol calories to get drunk. Plus we saved money! Win-win-win! Body positivity obviously hadn’t quite taken off yet and looking thin trumped staying safe. And the “going out outfits” of the time were not very forgiving.

Of course, when so much alcohol is involved it often means that no one is quite sure what happened and there’s no easy way to determine what’s true when the views of the two participants meaningfully diverge. How do we interpret cases where not only the alleged victim was drunk but the alleged assailant was too. Even if it’s a minority of the cases, some of these instances can be best described as non-consensual / non-consensual sex - as in, cases where the perpetrator was truly unaware of the inability of the other party to consent. Of course, it’s obviously in the interest of the assailant to make this claim, but when both people were drunk it’s also pretty believable.

So, I hope that binge drinking has gone down in Gen Z, let them smoke pot instead. But I’d expect that there are still many schools or subcultures within those schools where binge drinking remains central. And in those places I expect that drinking is still a factor when it comes to traumatic or ambiguous sex between young people. So, don’t have sex with people that you’re not sure are all there… but also don’t endanger yourself. You might have great girlfriends who always get you home, but at the end of the day you’re best off to make sure you can take care of yourself.