Alcohol Clarification (oxymoron?)

Creepy, but still. 

Since I posted about the reality of sexual assault, I have been SO HAPPY to have people asking me "what if?" questions about various situations in which consent may seem a little more grey than black and white. This is why my blog exists. Like I said before: No shame in questions! Shame in actions! A lot of the questions have been about drinking and one-night stands and I thought that this topic deserved its own post. It can be a complicated issue and I think it's okay to acknowledge that. Sexual assault is not just committed by vicious men waiting to pounce! So, without further ado, here's my alcohol post.


Here's a very real situation: You are a dude and you're uptown drinking. You meet the hottest woman you've ever seen in your whole life (insert potential beer goggles here) and decide that you and she could make the sweetest love the world has ever known. You end up going home together, both tipsy on alcohol and maybe even life. You do it.

Here are the consequences: 
1. You wake up in the morning, look at her and think "I have found my future wife" and she looks at you and says "ugh I'm gonna have to go, you kind of sucked last night and then you cried afterwards and told me you love me..."
2. You wake up in the morning, look at her and think "I have found my future wife" and she looks at you and says "you rocked my world, let us never be parted again". Marriage, babies, die in each other's arms, etc. 
3. You both deeply regret it in the morning and refuse to make eye contact, vowing to never speak of it again
4. You regret the whole sloppy night but she's already talking about a relationship update on Facebook so you fake an emergency call from your mother and peel. 
5. She feels as though she has been sexually assaulted.

Shameless puppy snuggles

For options 1-4, you handle those your own way bro. You do what you need to do.






For option 5, things get serious. Here's why: If a woman is drunk she cannot legally give consent. If you are drunk as well this does not remove your responsibility. If you have a drunk hook-up and she feels as though she was assaulted, SHE WAS. If she says she was raped, SHE WAS. This is not the same as regretting the act (but for the record, even if she did regret it and claimed she was sexually assaulted, according to the law you are still guilty, because she could not LEGALLY give consent. It's not cool on her part, and false claims of sexual assault are very rare, but in the eyes of the law you are an offender). If I come home from work and my boyfriend is drunk after watching the Montreal Canadiens lose to the far superior Toronto Maple Leafs and I seduce him with my wiles and we have sex, have I sexually assaulted him? Not morally, because he totally wanted it. But legally, if the police happened to enter the room (awkward) during the act I would be arrested because he was drunk and could not consent. 

In the Steubenville case, one of the topics that came to light was alcohol and responsibility. (Underage girl gets drunk, passes out, and is sexually assaulted by at least two boys who then take photos and distribute them). The people in that nightmare of a city basically took the opposite stance of the law in terms of how they treated the parties involved. In the same breath that they were blaming the survivor for the assault because she drank to the point of unconsciousness, they were using drunkenness as an excuse for the aggressors. This is wrong. I don't mean morally wrong, which it obviously is, but it is legally wrong as well.

I think we can all agree that women should be allowed to get stupid-drunk, confess their love to the bouncer, eat a street-meat sausage that they dropped on the ground, and roll their ankles because they thought they could rock stilettos on cobblestones. While I don't necessarily applaud this behaviour, and I can't exactly say I would never do it (let's not rehash my frosh year at Memorial University). But does that mean she has no legal ground to stand on if she has been sexually assaulted? Of course not. If I had gone home to a stranger's apartment and been murdered, would we let my murderer walk because I basically asked to be stabbed? Of course not. Even if I was drunk, and was murdered by a drunk, he'd be arrested and convicted (hopefully) of murder. The same goes for assault of any kind, including sexual assault. 

I sure hope not...

ONE LAST NOTE: I promise this blog is almost over. You're in the home stretch! Congrats. Here's the number one reason why people should not commit sexual assault: IT'S WRONG. Not because you could get caught, not because it could make you look bad, not because you could be convicted for it. Because it is wrong. It is wrong to sexually assault someone from a moral standpoint. If we had no laws and no prisons and no judges, it would still be wrong.