This originally appeared on Salon. Republished here with permission.
Last week, the terrible news came from Maryville, Mo. In a well-reported story for the Kansas City Star, Dugan Arnett details a situation as appalling as it is familiar. The comparisons to what took place in Steubenville are inevitable. Young men and women, popular athletes and the girls who want to enter their orbit, alcohol, allegations of rape, video evidence, a town that has, for the most part, rallied around the young men and blamed the victims, and charges eventually dropped.
Or the terrible news comes from Athens, Ohio, where onlookers took pictures and video, and gleefully turned to social networks to comment on an alleged sexual assault taking place on a public street.
Or the terrible news comes from Annapolis, Md., the U.S. Naval Academy, and two Naval football players facing a court-martial for sexually assaulting a young woman at a party. She learned the extent of what happened to her via social media.
There is a strange intersection lately between young men and women, the consumption of alcohol, sexual assault and social media—downward spirals where the horror only compounds as new details are revealed. Whenever such cases come to light, vigorous discussion is inevitable and probably necessary. We have to talk about these cases, right? We have to point out each new sign that rape culture thrives in our country. We have to try to come up with solutions that keep people safe.
As I’ve considered what happened in Maryville, or Steubenville, what happens all over this country, day after day and year after year, I wonder about the line between having necessary conversations about sexual violence and losing sight of what prompted these conversations. Are we fighting for these victims? Are we fighting for ourselves? Or are we just fighting?
We have to talk about young women exercising better judgment to reduce their risk because it’s such a seductive fantasy: If we’re good enough girls, maybe we won’t get raped. Slate’s Emily Yoffe offers the latest iteration of this fantasy in a piece that purports to advocate common sense. Young women should avoid binge drinking; they should avoid making themselves unnecessarily vulnerable. Yoffe essentially suggests that an excess of alcohol in a woman’s bloodstream turns otherwise normal men into rapists, so we best avoid that. Yoffe also works through her own anxieties as a parent. She has a daughter heading off to college next year, you see. And of course, there is this incontrovertible evidence: “I have never been so drunk that I browned out, blacked out, passed out, or puked from alcohol ingestion.” If she can maintain her self-control, so should we all.