Behold the risk factors for blacking out: a genetic predisposition to holding your liquor, drinking fast, and skipping meals. Oh, and one more: being female.
For a long time, blackouts were thought to be a guy thing. Of course, for a long time, drinking problems were thought to be a guy thing. But researchers now understand that women are more susceptible to blackouts than men. Alcohol metabolizes in our systems differently. Our bodies are smaller. Hormones can affect how quickly we get drunk. It’s pure biology. Nature, as it turns out, insists on a few double standards.
The stories that men and women tell about their blackouts are different, too. All that alcohol can strip us down to our base drives. Our snarling, animal selves. I’ve heard countless tales of men waking up to find their faces bruised, their knuckles bloodied by some fit of unremembered violence.
The stories women tell are scary in another way. As Aaron White says, “When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them.”
I heard a saying once about drunks. Men wake up in jail cells, and women wake up in strangers’ beds. It’s not like that for everybody. But it was like that for me.
IT WAS SPRING 2010 when I heard the term “rape culture.” I was 35, and editing a story for an online magazine, and strapped to my desk all the time, because I had to be.
“I honestly don’t understand what this word means,” I wrote to the author, in the blunt and slightly irritated language of a frazzled editor. The feminist blogosphere where she was a leading voice could get jargony, and I took a grammar snoot’s delight in reminding writers their first duty was clarity.
“I bristled at the term at first, too,” she responded, and sent me a link to a story called “Rape Culture 101.” My eyes scanned a long list of ways that male sexual aggression was favored over women’s safety, from movies that glamorize violent sex to the act of blaming a victim’s behavior for her own rape.
It was one of those moments when I felt adrift from the feminist conversation. I’d only recently started calling myself a feminist. Writers at the magazine urged me to look past the baggage and the bickering around the term and address its core meaning: a belief that both sexes deserve equal opportunity and equal treatment. Back in high school, I’d been obsessed with the civil rights movement. My notebooks were emblazoned with Martin Luther King quotes. But it had never occurred to me to fight for my own gender. Maybe fishes don’t know they’re in a fishbowl, or maybe it’s easier to identify another kid’s short stick than to see the one you are holding.
Anyway, “rape culture” didn’t track for me. Here I was, an editor at a magazine, run by a woman, working almost exclusively with female writers who wrote voluminously about female topics, and yet, we were being straitjacketed by a “rape culture”? I figured the term would sink back into the quiet halls of academic doublespeak. It spread like mad instead.
Over the next years, “rape culture” became one of the central issues around which smart, young women rallied online. And because this corner of the Internet was my neighborhood, the clamoring grew quite loud. A quick scan of personal essay pitches I received during this time: confronting my rapist; the rape I never reported; why won’t my college students stop writing about their rapes?
In 2011, I watched the media coverage of “SlutWalks,” a more provocative version of the old “Take Back the Night” candlelit vigils in which solemnness had been replaced by rage and a kind of punk aesthetic. Torn fishnets and f-bombs. The catalyst had been a police officer in Toronto suggesting that to avoid rape, women “should stop dressing like sluts.” The response was a roar. We can dress however the fuck we want.
I marveled at their conviction. I mean, SlutWalks. How unambiguous is that? The organizers had clearly learned the lessons of social media and search engines, where language must have thrust. The participants were my kind of women—strong women, defiant women—though I felt a queasy mix of envy and alienation when I watched them. Maybe I missed the tigress growl of my own college years. Or maybe it’s the curse of every generation to look at those behind them and wonder how they got so free.