Photo by Luca Francesco Giovanni Bertolli/iStock/Thinkstock 
 
 In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped. As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril. 
 
 Emily Yoffe Emily Yoffe is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. 
 
 A 2009 study of campus sexual assault found that by the time they are seniors, almost 20 percent of college women will become victims, overwhelmingly of a fellow classmate. Very few will ever report it to authorities. The same study states that more than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol. Frequently both the man and the woman have been drinking. The men tend to use the drinking to justify their behavior, as this survey of research on alcohol-related campus sexual assault by Antonia Abbey, professor of psychology at Wayne State University, illustrates, while for many of the women, having been drunk becomes a source of guilt and shame. Sometimes the woman is the only one drunk and runs into a particular type of shrewd—and sober—sexual predator who lurks where women drink like a lion at a watering hole. For these kinds of men, the rise of female binge drinking has made campuses a prey-rich environment. I’ve spoken to three recent college graduates who were the victims of such assailants, and their stories are chilling. 
 
 Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 Experts I spoke to who wanted young women to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has become to give warnings to women about their behavior. “I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.” 
 
 The “Campus Sexual Assault Study” of 2007, undertaken for the Department of Justice, found that the popular belief that many young rape victims have been slipped “date rape” drugs is false. “Most sexual assaults occur after voluntary consumption of alcohol by the victim and assailant,” the report states. But the researchers noted that this crucial point is not being articulated to young and naïve women: “Despite the link between substance abuse and sexual assault it appears that few sexual assault and/or risk reduction programs address the relationship between substance use and sexual assault.” The report added, somewhat plaintively, “Students may also be unaware of the image of vulnerability projected by a visibly intoxicated individual.” 
 
 “I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. “But when your judgment is compromised, your risk is elevated of having sexual violence perpetrated against you.” 
 
 The culture of binge drinking—whose pinnacle is the college campus—does not just harm women. Surveys find that more than 40 percent of college students binge drink, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as consuming five or more drinks for a man and four or more for a woman in about two hours. Of those drinkers, many end their sessions on gurneys: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that about 600,000 students a year are injured due to their drinking, and about 700,000 are assaulted by a classmate in a drunken encounter. Some end up on slabs: About 1,800 students a year die as a consequence of alcohol intake. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 The site Compelled to Act, started by the grief-stricken father of a college-student daughter who died because of a drunken snowmobile accident, keeps a tally of alcohol-related death, including reports of students who perish due to alcohol overdoses, falls, and drownings. The typical opening weeks of school (except perhaps at Brigham Young University) result in stories like this one at the University of Maryland: In the first three weeks of the semester, 24 students were taken to the hospital for alcohol-related causes. Then police were called to an off-campus bar known for serving freshmen to investigate a stabbing involving underage students. 
 
 I don’t believe any of these statistics will move in the right direction until binge drinking joins smoking, drunk driving, and domestic abuse as behaviors that were once typical and are now unacceptable. Reducing binge drinking is going to require education, enforcement, and a change in campus social culture. These days the weekend stretches over half the week and front-loading and boot and rally are major extracurricular activities. Puking in your hair, peeing in your pants, and engaging in dangerous behaviors have to stop being considered hilarious escapades or proud war stories and become a source of disgust and embarrassment. 
 
 As a parent with a daughter heading off to college next year, I’ve noted with dismay that in some college guidebooks almost as much space is devoted to alcohol as academics. School spirit is one thing, but according to The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, when the University of Florida plays Florida State University, “Die-hard gator fans start drinking at 8 am. No joke.” I guess I’m supposed to be reassured to read that at the University of Idaho, “Not everyone is an alcoholic.” 
 
 “High-risk alcohol use is the one thing connected to all, and I mean all, the negative impacts in higher education,” says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law and author of The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University. He cites the problems of early student attrition and perpetually disappointing graduation rates. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men. 
 
 If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate. Surely this University of Richmond student, acquitted in one of the extremely rare cases in which a campus rape accusation led to a criminal trial, would confirm that. 
 
 The federal government has taken steps to acknowledge the campus sexual assault problem by using the pressure of Title IX, which prevents sex discrimination in education, to require schools to improve programs to protect students from sexual assault and to deal more effectively with it. (Occidental College students filed a Title IX complaint against the school after administrators allowed a serial rapist to continue his studies.) Educating students about rape, teaching them that by definition a very drunk woman can’t consent to sex, is crucial. Also important are bystander programs that instruct students in how to intervene to prevent sexual assault on drunk classmates and about the need to get dangerously intoxicated ones medical treatment. 
 
 But nothing is going to be as effective at preventing alcohol-facilitated assaults as a reduction in alcohol consumption. The 2009 campus sexual assault study, co-authored by Krebs, found campus alcohol education programs “seldom emphasize the important link” between women’s voluntary alcohol and drug use “and becoming a victim of sexual assault.” It goes on to say students must get the explicit message that limiting alcohol intake and avoiding drugs “are important sexual assault sex protection strategies.” I think it would be beneficial for younger students to hear accounts of alcohol-facilitated sexual assault from female juniors and seniors who’ve lived through it. 
 
 Collective intoxication is intoxicating, one of the reasons that it’s been so difficult to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campuses. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 Of course, perpetrators should be caught and punished. But when you are dealing with intoxication and sex, there are the built-in complications of incomplete memories and differing interpretations of intent and consent. To establish if a driver is too drunk to be behind the wheel, all it takes is a quick test to see if his or her blood alcohol exceeds the legal limit. There isn’t such clarity when it comes to alcohol and sex. According to “Prosecuting Alcohol-Facilitated Sexual Assault,” a study by the National District Attorneys Association: “Generally, there is not a bright-line test for showing that the victim was too intoxicated to consent, thereby distinguishing sexual assault from drunken sex.” Bringing these cases is, the study notes, “an extreme challenge.” And college student victims rarely turn to law enforcement. Instead, often days later, they bring a complaint to campus authorities to adjudicate. 
 
 Some think changing the campus drinking culture requires lowering the drinking age from 21 years. The Amethyst Initiative, started by chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges, and the group Choose Responsibility both make the case that since most college drinking is illegal, that gives it the allure of the forbidden, encourages excess, and increases danger because students are reluctant to turn to the authorities when drinking gets out of hand. But changing the drinking age is a policy that’s gotten little traction. 
 
 Lake says that administrators often take an overly simplistic approach to curbing alcohol consumption. In the 1990s that meant crackdowns, which he says sent a lot of drinking off campus, probably elevating the risks. He says binge drinking is so entrenched it requires a multifaceted approach that includes coercion, enforcement, and social engineering. For example, he says weekends often begin on Thursday because many colleges have few, if any, Friday classes. “In the alcohol wars, you can see where battlefields are and where booze has beaten the academy,” he says. “The academic program has receded, and they’ve given up on Friday.” He says a full day of classes should be scheduled on Friday, and it should be a standard day for tests and exams. He says since millennials (like young people forever) keep vampire hours, unless there are evening alternatives on campus, those purveying alcohol will win. 
 
 And who is it purveying alcohol? In some cases it’s a type of serial predator who encourages his victim to keep pouring the means of her incapacitation down her own throat. Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes. Lake observes that these offenders can be campus leaders, charming and well liked—something that comes in handy if they are accused of anything. “They work our mythology against us,” says Lake. “We would like to see our daughters hang out with nice boys in navy blue blazers.” 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 The three young women I spoke to who were victims of such men attended different colleges, but their stories are so distressingly similar that it sounds as if they were attacked by the same young man. In each case the woman lost track of how much she’d had to drink. Then a male classmate she knew took her by the hand and offered her an escort. Then she was raped by this “friend.” Only one, Laura Dunn, reported to authorities what happened, more than a year after the fact. In her case she was set upon by two classmates, and the university declined to take action against either one. 
 
 One of the rape victims was a senior who had been to a school-sponsored celebration where the wine flowed, then everyone went to a bar to continue the festivities. Her memories are fragmentary after that, but a male classmate came by. She remembers running down the street with him, then being in bed, then waking up the next day with her clothes inside out. She was sickened at herself for what she thought was cheating on her longtime boyfriend and confessed her infidelity to him. Ultimately that led to their breakup. 
 
 As she dealt with her shame and guilt, she talked to friends about that night, and the real story emerged. She was so intoxicated that her friends were worried about her when she stumbled out of the bar disoriented and without her shoes. They said they saw her being led away by the male classmate who was not drunk. She came to understand that she had been raped. “Since I realized it wasn’t my fault, I crawled out of a deep, dark hole,” she says. She also knew he’d done it before. “He had this reputation if you were going to be drunk around him, he was probably going to have sex with you.” 
 
 The young woman laments the whole campus landscape of alcohol-soaked hookup sex. “Women are encouraged to do it, which ignores all the risks for us,” she says. “You get embarrassed and ashamed, so you try to make light of it. Then women get violated and degraded, and they accept it. Who does this culture benefit? Alcohol predators. It doesn’t liberate anybody.” 
 
 I get what all the beer bongs, flip cup, power hours, even butt chugging is about. (OK, maybe not butt chugging.) It’s fun. In Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard, Ohio University sociologist Thomas Vander Ven got an inside look at what he calls “the shit show.” He writes, “To some university students, the decision to drink at college is a redundancy. To them, college means drinking.” Vander Ven documents the pleasure that group intoxication brings: the suppression of inhibitions and self-consciousness, the collective hilarity, the thrill of engaging in potentially perilous adventures, and the sense of camaraderie. Even nursing hangovers and regrets becomes a group endeavor, a mutual post-battle support group. Collective intoxication is intoxicating, one of the reasons that it’s been so difficult to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campuses. 
 
 I know many people will reflect on their own bacchanalian college experiences with nostalgia and say the excesses didn’t hurt them—at least what they’re able to remember. So I will present myself as an example that it’s possible to have fun without being drunk. I enjoy moderate drinking and have only been hung over three times in my life. I have never been so drunk that I browned out, blacked out, passed out, or puked from alcohol ingestion. Still, as a young person, I did my share of fun, crazy, silly, stupid, and ill-advised things. But at least I always knew that I was responsible for my behavior, not the alcohol. ||||| Yesterday morning, I read and was infuriated by Emily Yoffe's Slate article, "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk". Just once, I'd love it if anyone -- especially (radically!) a woman -- actually wrote an article that tells men not to be rapists, instead of suggesting that "putting all the responsibility of preventing sexual assault on the victims" is somehow a feminist point of view. So, for fun, I rewrote her article. Most of the words below are her own. I changed only references to gender. Everywhere that Ms. Yoffe said something about giving "warnings to women about their behavior," I changed it to a warning for men. I bolded the changes I made, to make it easier for you to see them. 
 
 That's all I did, the rest (including all links to other articles and studies) is still in her own words. Just imagine a world in which articles like this actually got written. 
 
 College Men: Stop Raping Women 
 
 It IS sexual assault. And yet we're reluctant to tell men to stop doing it. 
 
 In one awful high-profile case after another -- the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo. -- we read about a young man, sometimes only a boy, who goes to a party and ends up raping a girl. As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young man incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. But a misplaced fear of blaming the perpetrators has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young men that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves at risk of becoming rapists.... 
 
 Let's be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let men know that when they drink to excess, they can end up becoming these very perpetrators. Young men are getting a distorted message that having sex with any woman they want -- regardless of whether the woman consents -- is their right. The real message should be that when you drink so much that you lose the ability to be responsible for actions, you drastically increase the chances that you will become a sexual predator and a threat to women around you. That's not villainizing all men; that's trying to prevent them from becoming rapists. 
 
 Experts I spoke to who wanted young men to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has always been to give warnings to men about their behavior. "I'm always feeling defensive that my main advice is: 'Don't rape. Don't make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties so that you think it's ok to rape,'" says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth -- that they are responsible for their own actions -- she worries that we are "infantilizing men." 
 
 The "Campus Sexual Assault Study" of 2007, undertaken for the Department of Justice, found that the popular belief that many young rape victims have been slipped "date rape" drugs is false. "Most sexual assaults occur after voluntary consumption of alcohol by the victim and assailant," the report states. But the researchers noted that this crucial point is not being articulated to young and naïve men: "Despite the link between substance abuse and sexual assault it appears that few sexual assault and/or risk reduction programs address the relationship between substance use and sexual assault." The report added, somewhat plaintively, "Students may also be unaware of the image of predatoriness projected by a visibly intoxicated individual." 
 
 "I'm saying that men are responsible for sexually victimizing women," says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. "When your judgment is compromised, your risk of becoming a rapist is elevated." 
 
 The culture of binge drinking -- whose pinnacle is the college campus -- does not just harm men. Surveys find that more than 40 percent of college students binge drink, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as consuming five or more drinks for a man and four or more for a woman in about two hours. Of those drinkers, many end their sessions on gurneys: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that about 600,000 students a year are injured due to their drinking, and about 700,000 are assaulted by a classmate in a drunken encounter. Some end up on slabs: About 1,800 students a year die as a consequence of alcohol intake.... 
 
 As a parent with a son heading off to college next year, I've noted with dismay that in some college guidebooks almost as much space is devoted to alcohol as academics. School spirit is one thing, but according to The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, when the University of Florida plays Florida State University, "Die-hard gator fans start drinking at 8 am. No joke." I guess I'm supposed to be reassured to read that at the University of Idaho, "Not everyone is an alcoholic." 
 
 "High-risk alcohol use is the one thing connected to all, and I mean all, the negative impacts in higher education," says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law and author ofThe Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University. He cites the problems of early student attrition and perpetually disappointing graduation rates. 
 
 I've told my son that it's his responsibility to take steps to ensure he does not become a sexual abuser. ("I hear you! Stop!") The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell him I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it's illegal for most college students) but that he'll have a good chance of knowing what's going on around him if he limits himself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly -- no shots! -- and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If male college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their female counterparts -- and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary human principle -- I hope their restraint reduces the likelihood that they will victimize women. 
 
 If I had a daughter, I would tell her that it's in her self-interest not to be the drunken sorority girl who finds herself accusing a classmate of raping her. Because this University of Richmond student is an example of what would probably happen. He was acquitted in one of the extremely rare cases in which a campus rape accusation led to a criminal trial. 
 
 The federal government has taken steps to acknowledge the campus sexual assault problem by using the pressure of Title IX, which prevents sex discrimination in education, and should require schools to improve programs to educate students about not perpetrating sexual assaults and to deal more effectively with it. (Occidental College students filed a Title IX complaint against the school after administrators allowed a serial rapist to continue his studies.) Educating students about rape, teaching them that by definition a man who does not ask for or get consent from a woman is a rapist, is crucial. Also important are bystander programs that instruct students in how to intervene to prevent sexual assault on or by drunk classmates and about the need to get dangerously intoxicated ones medical treatment. 
 
 But nothing is going to be as effective at preventing alcohol-facilitated assaults as a reduction in alcohol consumption, or perhaps a radical strategy to educate men about not preying on vulnerable or intoxicated women, and not allowing themselves to become rapists. The 2009 campus sexual assault study, co-authored by Krebs, found campus alcohol education programs "seldom emphasize the important link" between men's voluntary alcohol and drug use "and becoming a perpetrator of sexual assault." It goes on to say students must get the explicit message that limiting alcohol intake and avoiding drugs "are important sexual assault prevention strategies." I think it would be beneficial for younger students to hear accounts of alcohol-facilitated sexual assault from male juniors and seniors who've perpetrated it. 
 
 Of course, perpetrators should be caught and punished. But unfortunately when you are dealing with intoxication and sex, there are the built-in barriers for women to report sexual assaults (which are rarely prosecuted anyway) -- including shame, guilt, and a well-founded fear of not being believed, because our society still blames victims and puts the onus on them to "prove" that they have been assaulted, in spite of the fact that intoxication (both voluntary and involuntary) can result in incomplete memories and differing interpretations of intent and consent. To establish if a driver is too drunk to be behind the wheel, all it takes is a quick test to see if his or her blood alcohol exceeds the legal limit. There isn't such clarity when it comes to alcohol and sex. According to "Prosecuting Alcohol-Facilitated Sexual Assault," a study by the National District Attorneys Association: "Generally, there is not a bright-line test for showing that the victim was too intoxicated to consent, thereby distinguishing sexual assault from drunken sex." Bringing these cases is, the study notes, "an extreme challenge." Besides, college student victims rarely turn to law enforcement or even campus authorities, as the students responsible for sexual assault rarely face punishment, while their victims' lives are turned upside down. 
 
 Some think changing the campus drinking culture requires lowering the drinking age from 21 years.The Amethyst Initiative, started by chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges, and the group Choose Responsibility both make the case that since most college drinking is illegal, that gives it the allure of the forbidden, encourages excess, and increases danger because students are reluctant to turn to the authorities when drinking gets out of hand. But changing the drinking age is a policy that's gotten little traction. 
 
 Others think that changing campus rape culture requires less focus on how the victims behave and what their drinking habits are, and more focus on perpetrators' behaviour. Educating men about the dangers of becoming sexual abusers -- with or without the aid of alcohol or drugs -- and giving them the tools to ensure they do not become rapists, might just be the key. 
 
 Lake says that administrators often take an overly simplistic approach to curbing sexual assault by approaching it as primarily an issue of alcohol consumption on the part of female victims, as opposed to a learned behavioural issue on the part of male perpetrators. In the 1990s that meant crackdowns, which he says sent a lot of drinking off campus, probably elevating the risks. He says rape culture is so entrenched it requires a multifaceted approach that includes education, enforcement, and social engineering. And yet, administrators are focused mainly on the issue of alcohol use. For example, he says weekends often begin on Thursday because many colleges have few, if any, Friday classes. "In the alcohol wars, you can see where battlefields are and where booze has beaten the academy," he says. "The academic program has receded, and they've given up on Friday." He says a full day of classes should be scheduled on Friday, and it should be a standard day for tests and exams. He says since millennials (like young people forever) keep vampire hours, unless there are evening alternatives on campus, those purveying alcohol will win. 
 
 And who is it purveying alcohol? In some cases it's a type of serial predator who encourages his victim to keep pouring the means of her incapacitation down her own throat. Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes. Lake observes that these offenders can be campus leaders, charming and well liked -- something that comes in handy if they are accused of anything. "They work our mythology against us," says Lake. "We would like to see our daughters hang out with nice boys in navy blue blazers - and for some inexplicable reason, we do not believe that those boys are capable of being rapists, but it's hardly surprising that they are capable of it, since we don't focus much of our time on trying to teach them not to rape." 
 
 The three young women I spoke to who were victims of such men attended different colleges, but their stories are so distressingly similar that it sounds as if they were attacked by the same young man, who was probably never given any rape prevention education in an effort to ensure he did not become a rapist. In each case the woman lost track of how much she'd had to drink. Then a male classmate she knew took her by the hand and offered her an escort. Then she was raped by this "friend." Only one, Laura Dunn, reported to authorities what happened, more than a year after the fact. In her case she was set upon by two classmates, and the university declined to take action against either one.... 
 
 We should all lament the whole campus landscape of alcohol-soaked hookup sex and rape. Men are encouraged to "score", which ignores all the risks for them to become sexual predators. Men become aggressive and disregard women's inability to give consent. Then women get violated. Who does this culture benefit? Sexual predators. 
 
 I get what all the beer bongs, flip cup, power hours, even butt chugging is about. (OK, maybe not butt chugging.) It's fun. In Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard, Ohio University sociologist Thomas Vander Ven got an inside look at what he calls "the shit show." He writes, "To some university students, the decision to drink at college is a redundancy. To them, college means drinking." Vander Ven documents the pleasure that group intoxication brings: the suppression of inhibitions and self-consciousness, the collective hilarity, the thrill of engaging in potentially perilous adventures, and the sense of camaraderie. Even nursing hangovers and regrets becomes a group endeavor, a mutual post-battle support group. Collective intoxication is intoxicating, one of the reasons that it's been so difficult to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campuses. Of course, when talking about campus drinking, we often neglect to mention that we live in a society that only believes it is acceptable for men to have all that "fun". For women, it is a dangerous game. After all, if they get drunk, they might get raped -- and it is their responsibility to ensure that they are not victimized by dangerous assailants. Fortunately for (most) men, they don't need to worry about those kinds of consequences. 
 
 I know many people will reflect on their own bacchanalian college experiences with nostalgia and say the excesses didn't hurt them -- because if they were hurt, it was by human assailants, not a pitcher of beer. So I will present myself as an example that it's possible to get drunk without being raped. I enjoy drinking and have been incredibly lucky to have not been the victim of a sexual predator in my life. Many women are not that lucky, and we don't tell them often enough that it's not their fault for drinking -- it's the rapist's fault for raping them. Still, as a young person, I did my share of fun, crazy, silly, stupid, and ill-advised things. But at least I always knew that my drinking was not responsible for the behaviour of another person who wished to do me harm. 
 
 Lake says that it is unrealistic to expect colleges will ever be great at catching and punishing sexual predators; that's simply not their core mission. Colleges are supposed to be places where young people learn to be responsible for themselves. Lake says, "The biggest change in going to college is that you have to understand that becoming a rapist begins with you. For better or worse, fair or not, just or not, you are the one who decides to rape, even though if you do, sadly it is unlikely that appropriate consequences will fall on your head." I'll drink (as many drinks as I damn well please) to that. 
 
 Katarina Gligorijevic is a writer, producer and musician living in Toronto. You can buy her writing here or see her film production company, Ultra 8, here. Why don't you follow her on Twitter while you're at it too. A longer version of this article originally appeared on her blog. It is reprinted here with permission. 
 
 Image: flickr/tensory ||||| Photo by Corepics VOF/Shutterstock 
 
 
 
 My colleague Emily Yoffe wrote in Slate on Tuesday about the alarming frequency of a certain sad news story: “a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.” Yoffe goes on to argue that parents, schools, and sexual assault prevention experts can help bring down the number of those incidents by telling young women to stop drinking so much. As a woman who once went to a party and ended up being raped—though that’s not my preferred grammatical structure I’d use to describe what happened—I’m also invested in preventing these types of assaults. But Yoffe's approach strikes me as myopic. 
 
 Amanda Hess Amanda Hess is a David Carr fellow at the New York Times. Follow her on Twitter. 
 
 Rape is a societal problem, not a self-help issue. Parents can tell their own daughters not to get drunk, but even if those women follow instructions, it won’t keep other people’s daughters safe. It will just force campus rapists who rely on alcohol to execute their crimes to find other targets. As Yoffe notes, the research of David Lisak suggests that most rapes are committed by a small group of predators who claim a large number of victims. We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing those perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 Peter Lake, the director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law, told Yoffe that, in her words, “it is unrealistic to expect colleges will ever be great at catching and punishing sexual predators; that’s simply not their core mission. Colleges are supposed to be places where young people learn to be responsible for themselves.” Punishing rapists is not the “core mission” of any society, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. That’s especially true for colleges, which are legally required under Title IX to not just catch and punish predators who operate in their institutions but to also take serious action to prevent students from victimizing each other in the first place. Failing to do so directly affects the schools’ ability to focus on academics. To cite just one relevant case: In 2007, the University of Colorado at Boulder was compelled to pay out nearly $3 million to two women raped on its campus after a court ruled that the university "had an official policy of showing high-school football recruits a 'good time' on their visits to the CU campus," and failed to supervise the “players who served as hosts” despite having knowledge of at least one previous case of a high school student who was assaulted by the school’s recruits. Failing to address the culture that contributed to those assaults constituted "deliberate indifference." 
 
 Furthermore, while a striking number of college assaults occur while both victims and perpetrators are intoxicated, rape has been a popular tool for subjugating women long before they joined in the “butt-chugging” craze. According to the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey—which surveys Americans ages 12 and older about crime they’ve experienced, whether or not they reported it to the authorities—rape has declined markedly in the United States since 1979, even as female binge drinking has risen. That suggests that something other than a youthful appetite for Jäger bombs has shifted in this country—mainly, that women have made significant gains in educational attainment, economic independence, and sexual agency since the '70s. As public policy researchers Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler note, intimate partner violence declines “as women’s alternatives outside their relationships improve” and they’re “able to achieve self-sufficiency in the long-run.”* Interpreting Title IX to include sexual violence on campus as a form of discrimination against women didn’t hurt. 
 
 When it comes to equalizing the playing field, we still have a long way to go. The huge gains women have made in higher education over the past few decades—they now constitute 57 percent of undergraduate students—has not translated to them having dominance over the campus social scene. In 2012, Carolyn L. Hsu, an associate professor of sociology at Colgate University, conducted a study on campus binge drinking and found that heavy alcohol consumption “is a symbolic proxy for high status in college,” because it’s “what the most powerful, wealthy and happy students on campus do.” Hsu identifies “higher-status” groups on campus as “wealthy, male, white, heterosexual, and Greek affiliated undergraduates.” Yoffe writes that if "female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men." But a "feminist" impulse for women to protect themselves by staying sober will not "trickle down" to boys, because they’re situated at the top of the social ladder. Booze may be a common accessory of powerful men on campus, but banning it won't rob them of their influence. We'll see real change on college campuses when we focus on dismantling the social structures that prioritize white, straight men and marginalize everyone else. 
 
 Colleges can start changing those structures by refusing to put the onus on victims to prevent their own assaults and instead holding perpetrators accountable for the crimes they commit—often, while drunk. Wayne State University psychologist Antonia Abbey notes that one study of college date rapists found that 62 percent “felt they had committed rape because of their alcohol consumption.” They “believed that their intoxicated condition caused them to initially misperceive their partner’s degree of sexual interest and later allowed them to feel comfortable using force when the women’s lack of consent finally became clear to them.” Importantly, the rapists “did not see themselves as ‘real’ criminals because real criminals used weapons to assault strangers.” 
 
 This belief isn’t just shared among perpetrators; when you tweet that you are “warning young women that there are rapists who use alcohol, not violence,” you reinforce the idea that rape does not constitute a violent crime if alcohol is involved. Banishing that idea is central to preventing these crimes. Abbey suggests that in rape cases where the perpetrator has been drinking, alcohol can encourage him to prioritize his “immediate sexual arousal and anger” over the “potential risk of being accused of sexual assault.” Colleges could instruct men to not drink so much, but again, most keg-loving frat boys are not rapists. Colleges can help crack down on sexual assault, Abbey writes, by increasing the “risks” inherent in raping other people. “If the costs of sexual assault are obvious, undesirable and immediate, then intoxication-driven sexual assaults are less likely to occur because the potential perpetrator cannot forget about the likely, undesirable consequences. This suggests that colleges need strong, consistent, well-publicized policies that no one can ignore.” 
 
 I agree with Yoffe that excessive alcohol consumption is a problem on college campuses (as it is elsewhere) that can contribute to a variety of social ills: disease, addiction, accidents, crime, even death. Singling out one gender of drinkers for alcohol education is counter-productive. It’s important to remember that our approach to sexual assault on college campuses won’t just influence the number of women who are victimized, and the percentage of perpetrators who are punished. Our approach will also affect the health and happiness of victims after the fact. Rape is damaging not just in a physical sense but also in a psychological one. It’s common among victims to internalize the crime and blame ourselves. As Gina Tron put it in her powerful Vice essay this year, “I got raped, then my problems started.” Telling women that they can evade rape by not drinking will only exacerbate that problem when it does happen, through no fault of their own. One victim of alcohol-assisted rape Yoffe spoke with said that she was overwhelmed with “shame and guilt” following the assault, and only began to come to terms with the crime when “I realized it wasn’t my fault.” That realization felt like climbing out of a "deep, dark hole." Victims should never be put in that hole in the first place—no matter how many drinks they've consumed. ||||| Emily Yoffe is taking flack for pointing out what everyone who went to college should already know: that young women who drink to the point of insensibility are at risk of being raped. The reason her piece is supposed to be objectionable is that she is counseling the women to avoid drinking, rather than the men. 
 
 Actually, she also counsels men not to drink themselves to the point of insensibility: “If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate.” But it’s true, the article focuses on pointing out to women that drinking a lot is extra-risky for them, so they probably shouldn’t do it. Not because it’s wrong, but because they could end up getting sexually assaulted while they’re not really in control. 
 
 Let’s get this out of the way: If you get really drunk, and someone uses that to take advantage of you (or perhaps feeds you the drinks first), that doesn’t mean that you did anything morally wrong. The person doing the wrong thing is the one who consciously decided to have sex with someone clearly incapacitated. We shouldn’t live in a world where getting drunk will be taken as an invitation to rape. 
 
 But even though we shouldn’t, the fact is, we do. We can reduce the number of these sorts of rapes that take place, through education, by stigmatizing people who commit them and by looking out for friends and strangers who have had too much. But that sort of change will take time, and young women are at the risk of rape right now. Moreover, even if we do succeed in educating those who didn’t quite understand how wrong this is, there will still be bad people out there, and a drunk woman will still be vulnerable to those bad people. It’s not somehow crazy or sexist to tell woman that hey, there is a thing you can do to dramatically reduce your risk of sexual assault. 
 
 When people come to visit me, I tell them which streets they should avoid walking down at night, because those streets tend to be deserted and have a history of previous assaults. That doesn’t mean that I’m saying mugging is okay, much less that I’m somehow in league with mugging culture. But it would be lunatic to tell them it’s fine to act as if our neighborhood right now is as safe as I hope it someday will be. And realistically, telling my guests where it’s safe to walk is more likely to be effective than telling the muggers that what they’re doing is wrong. I can press for more police patrols and vote on the issue of crime, but at the moment when a guest gets up to leave, I also need to tell them how to be safe. 
 
 When I was a freshman in college, I went to a fraternity party and fell asleep on the couch. (I wasn’t drunk, just tired -- I did my share of drinking at college, but on this particular night, I was stone cold sober, and exhausted from an ill-considered decision to try out for a varsity athletic team.) One of the fraternity brothers, a junior, woke me up. “Don’t ever pass out in a fraternity house,” he told me. “You’ll end up in some brother’s bed.” It was advice that stood me in good stead for the next four years. 
 
 Do I wish he’d told his brothers, in no uncertain terms, that they shouldn’t drag passed-out women to their beds? Of course I do. (And to be fair, for all I know, he did.) But I’m still awfully glad he told me, rather than letting me sleep. ||||| This is the very definition of rape culture. And it is so completely tired. 
 
 These arguments are offensive and damaging to victims, but they are also familiar to the point of being banal. It's the reason why responding to them can be a challenge, because it is hard to find new ways to say the same things. 
 
 Like that female sexuality or female vulnerability do not cause rape. That rape is a crime, but that being drunk is not. These things have been written before, and they will most certainly be written again. 
 
 Yoffe has plenty of good data to support her argument that binge drinking on college campuses isn't healthy. The over-consumption of alcohol can literally kill people. What it can't do, however, is make a woman responsible for a crime committed against her. 
 
 "We are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them," Yoffe frets. She is wrong. There isn't some vacuum of "truth-telling" about the dangers women face on a daily basis, simply because they are women. Our culture is swimming with examples of women -- in movies, television and real life -- who are "punished" for their "bad choices" with sexual violence. "Bad choices" include wearing a short skirt, staying out too late, getting too drunk, trusting too much. The list of reasons that Americans believe women deserve rape is long. ||||| This morning, Slate ran a rape prevention piece by Emily Yoffe with the aggressive headline: COLLEGE WOMEN: STOP GETTING DRUNK. Subhed: "It's closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we're reluctant to tell women to stop doing it." The URL of the piece advertises telling silly women to stop drinking is "the best rape prevention." Unsurprisingly, this bit of e-prudery by the woman otherwise known as Dear Prudence was poorly received because, you know, we're all pretty tired of the "ladies be getting themselves raped" trope — and for good reason. Is there a way to discuss rape prevention and personal safety that both acknowledges the sad, rapey reality of the world without blaming the victims and, by extension, coming across like a scoldy asshole? Of course. Here's how. 
 
 DO encourage people of both genders to pay attention to their personal safety 
 
 As Jennifer Marsh, VP of Victim Services at RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) explained to me by phone, "[Rape prevention literature] shouldn't just be about sexual assault and awareness; it should be about being safe in the face of general danger." Excessive alcohol consumption, in addition to being Bad For You, can make a person vulnerable to anyone — muggers, robbers, evangelizing Christians trying to engage you in a conversation about America as a modern Gomorra. It's not victim-blamey to suggest that a person of any gender be mindful of their laptop bag on the bus, or to discourage a person who has been drinking from walking home alone through a neighborhood with a high crime rate. Promoting personal safety and vigilance for the safety of others is a good practice, and doesn't constitute "blaming the victim." 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 It's true that alcohol consumption compromises a person's personal safety, and it's true that rapists sometimes use alcohol to weaken their targeted victims. All of these things are helpful things for college-aged women to know. That being said... 
 
 DON'T write a piece admonishing women for not doing enough to stop their own rapes. 
 
 Yoffe's assertion — that alcohol plays a role in a lot of on-campus sexual assaults — is a valid one, and she's got data to back it up. 
 
 A 2009 study of campus sexual assault found that by the time they are seniors, almost 20 percent of college women will become victims, overwhelmingly of a fellow classmate. Very few will ever report it to authorities. The same study states that more than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol. Frequently both the man and the woman have been drinking. 
 
 Fair enough. Yoffe totally has the "booze-in-rape" game on lock. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to understand that while alcohol plays a role in many sexual assaults, there's only one element that plays a role in all sexual assaults: a rapist. Which brings me to my next point. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 DON'T write a piece about rape prevention without talking about rapist prevention. 
 
 If alcohol plays a role in so many rapes, then ostensibly encouraging men to stop drinking excessively would prevent rapists — and therefore rapes— from happening. Right? I mean, if you locked me in a room with a handle of vodka and told me to drink it until I couldn't walk, at no point would a rapist materialize from the ether to sexually assault me. Drunk potential victims don't make rapists appear; for as miraculously good a dancer it makes me think I am, alcohol isn't magic. Therefore, a piece about the role of alcohol in rape that doesn't acknowledge the role of alcohol in rapists is half-written. Yoffe makes an effort to state, multiple times, that it's not a victim's fault for getting raped but it sort of kind of is the victim's fault for being a drunky mcdrunkpants, and does nothing to explain the role of alcohol in the lowering of inhibitions of rapists. 
 
 To re-applly Yoffe-ian logic to another fact about rape: know what else plays a role in many sexual assaults? Men who women know. Maybe if women stopped having male acquaintances then they wouldn't get raped so much. 
 
 DON'T write this paragraph: 
 
 If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate. Surely this University of Richmond student, acquitted in one of the extremely rare cases in which a campus rape accusation led to a criminal trial, would confirm that. 
 
 If Emily Yoffe had a son, she'd teach him how not to be accused of rape at a party. Not how to stay sober enough to remain vigilant and interfere with potentially alcohol-fueled rape situations, or how it's not okay to have sex with a woman who is too drunk to consent. Nope. Just how not to get accused of rape. Got it. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 DON'T hoist your own weird neurotic shit about your college-aged daughter and your own self-righteous semi-teetotaling on the general public. 
 
 Yoffe admits in the piece that her daughter is preparing to go off to school in the fall (and hates how large a role alcohol plays in campus social life, to the point that she suggests college schedule all exams on Fridays so students can't go out on Thursdays) and also that she's never been drunk. 
 
 I will present myself as an example that it’s possible to have fun without being drunk. I enjoy moderate drinking and have only been hung over three times in my life. I have never been so drunk that I browned out, blacked out, passed out, or puked from alcohol ingestion. Still, as a young person, I did my share of fun, crazy, silly, stupid, and ill-advised things. But at least I always knew that I was responsible for my behavior, not the alcohol. 
 
 Is it possible to have fun without being a drunken idiot? Of course! But Yoffe has a history of sanctimony when it comes to her status as a light drinker. As Lori Adelman points out at Feministing, Yoffe has, multiple times, used her Dear Prudence column as a platform to scold women who were sexually assaulted after drinking. So is this column actually supposed to dish out helpful advice? Or is it yet another opportunity for smug piety? 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 DON'T write "how not to get raped" columns in the first place 
 
 According to RAINN's Jennifer Marsh, encouraging women to prevent rape by drinking less is an "oversimplification" of the crime of sexual assault. "[Rape] can take place anywhere, at any time," she says. "It's not just in a fraternity bedroom after a party." And it can happen to women who are sober, too. 
 
 Further, Marsh points out, rape is such an awful crime that no one wants to believe they'll ever be rape victims, or that they or their friends could be rapists. Because of this, literature that focuses exclusively on rape prevention often falls on deaf ears. Promoting sexual assault awareness in the context of general safety, community responsibility, and both physical and mental health is much more effective than hammering on it as though it's an isolated sort of event that ~*hApPeNs*~ to drunk girls. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 DON'T close with a weird statement about self-control and omit links to organizations that can help survivors. 
 
 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Here's how Yoffe closes her piece — 
 
 Colleges are supposed to be places where young people learn to be responsible for themselves. Lake says, “The biggest change in going to college is that you have to understand safety begins with you. For better or worse, fair or not, just or not, the consequences will fall on your head.” I’ll drink (one drink) to that. 
 
 According to Marsh at RAINN, while women (and men) can empower themselves to avoid the sort of vulnerability that predators target and avoid the sort of attitudes that can make them more inclined to prey on the weak, writing about rape prevention without pointing survivors to resources is a big no-no. So, if you, or someone you know has been sexually assaulted and needs to talk to someone — it's not your fault and you can call RAINN. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 I'm no rape recovery expert, but I'd advise against writing a letter to Dear Prudence. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 [Slate]
– Slate columnist Emily Yoffe is taking a lot of heat for yesterday's column imploring women not to get wasted, lest they "end up being raped," with other writers pointing out that it smacks of victim blaming. (You can read our summary of the original here.) Here's what people are saying: "This is the very definition of rape culture. And it is so completely tired," writes Katie McDonough at Salon. "Let's start with this: Our culture is not, and never has been, 'reluctant' to tell women to stop doing things. In fact, people build entire careers around it." "If alcohol plays a role in so many rapes, then ostensibly encouraging men to stop drinking excessively would prevent rapists," points out Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel. "If you locked me in a room with a handle of vodka ... at no point would a rapist materialize from the ether to sexually assault me. Drunk potential victims don't make rapists appear." Yet Yoffe's piece only focuses on the role of alcohol in creating victims. Katarina Gligorijevic took this concept and ran with it, rewriting Yoffe's piece in a Rabble.ca post by changing the references to gender. Example: "We are failing to let men know that when they drink to excess, they can end up becoming these very perpetrators. … That's not villainizing men; that's trying to prevent them from becoming rapists." "Rape is a societal problem, not a self-help issue," writes fellow Slate writer Amanda Hess. "Rape has been a popular tool for subjugating women long before they joined in the 'butt-chugging' craze." Yoffe tweeted that she wanted to warn women "that there are rapists who use alcohol, not violence." But that just reinforces "the idea that rape does not constitute a violent crime if alcohol is involved." But Megan McArdle at Bloomberg comes to Yoffe's defense, writing that when people come to visit her, she warns them not to go down streets where people tend to get robbed. "That doesn't mean that I'm saying mugging is OK, much less that I'm somehow in league with mugging culture."