The more I read about “rape culture,” the more sense it made. Rape culture was a mind-set: the default view that a woman existed for a man’s pleasure, that his desires somehow superseded her comfort in the world. I began to see it more and more. The construction workers at the Marcy stop on the JMZ train, who told me they wanted to titty-fuck me. That was rape culture. The guy on the subway who took a creepshot of my cleavage on his phone, making nausea spill over my insides. That was rape culture.
This younger generation seemed to understand—with a clarity I never possessed—that they didn’t have to tolerate so much bullshit in the world. And I felt a little foolish, and a little complicit, that I spent so many years accepting this barbed wire as the way things are only to watch those women barreling into it, middle fingers raised.
By 2014, the term “rape culture” had made its way to Time magazine, which ran a cover story on campus sexual assault illustrated by a university sports banner emblazoned with the words “rape.” Meanwhile, another media narrative was unfolding, this one about women and alcohol. CNN: “Why are more women drinking?” USA Today: “Binge drinking is a serious problem for women, girls.”
To publicly connect these two narratives was to waltz into a very loaded minefield. Every once in a while, a columnist would come along and suggest women should drink less to avoid sexual assault. They contended if women didn’t drink as much, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to danger. And those columnists were disemboweled upon arrival into the gladiator arena of public discourse. The response was a roar. We can drink however the fuck we want.
I understood the pushback. For way too long, women had been told how to behave. Women were sick of altering their behavior to please, to protect, to safeguard—while men peed their names across history. The new motto became “Don’t tell us how to act, teach men not to rape.” The entire conversation offered a needed corrective. Women are never to be blamed for getting raped. Women are never “asking for it” because of the way they dress or what they do.
And we women can drink however the fuck we want. I certainly did, and I’m not interested in taking away anyone’s whiskey sour. But reading these salvos from entrenched battlegrounds made me feel kind of alone. In my life, alcohol often made the issue of consent very murky. More like an ink spill and nothing close to a clear line.
I knew why the women writing on these issues didn’t want to acknowledge gray zones; gray zones were what the other side pounced on to gain ground. But I kept longing for a secret conversation, away from the pitchforks of the Internet, about how hard it was to match the clarity of political talking points to the complexity of life lived at last call.
Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it. Sex was a complicated bargain to me. It was chase, and it was hunt. It was hide-and-seek, clash and surrender, and the pendulum could swing inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t.
I drank to drown those voices, because I wanted the bravado of a sexually liberated woman. I wanted the same freedom from internal conflict my male friends seemed to enjoy. So I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously. Many yeses on Friday nights would have been nos on Saturday morning. My consent battle was in me.
I HAD WANTED alcohol to make me fearless. But by the time I’d reached my mid-30s, I was scared all the time. Afraid of what I’d said and done in blackouts. Afraid I would have to stop. Afraid of a life without alcohol, because booze had been my trustiest tool.
I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong. My mind could cobble together a thousand PowerPoint presentations to keep me seated on a bar stool. But when the lights were off, and I lay very quietly in my bed, I knew: There was something fundamentally wrong about losing the narrative of my own life.
This book might sound like a satire of memoir. I’m writing about events I can’t remember. But I remember so much about those blackouts. The blackouts leveled me, and they haunt me still. The blackouts showed me how powerless I had become. The nights I can’t remember are the nights I can never forget.
PART ONE
ONE
THE BEER THIEF