This editorial board likes to focus in calling our community to practicable action. Regarding sexual assault, there's an act we can all perform, beyond just reporting assault and supporting its survivors.
Is your friend, male or female, considering a sexual encounter with someone they do not know very well while either one or both of them are intoxicated? Stop it, right away, if you can.
This may very well get your wingperson insignia revoked, but that is a price worth paying. Telling a friend to stop before they hurt themselves or others is quite acceptable regarding other acts. Drunken driving is now regarded as criminal behavior, and while many may disagree with the technical specificity of what constitutes drunk and irresponsible driving, virtually no one publicly disagrees with this central premise: operating technology in a way potentially harmful to other human beings while intoxicated is morally wrong and ethically indefensible.
If you patiently ask older people about it, drunken driving a scant few decades ago was not a particularly pressing concern. While this seems unconscionable now, drunken driving was simply seen as an inevitable cost of drinking culture, of blowing off steam, of holiday party this or graduation that. These characterizations should sound woefully familiar, echoing those too often deployed to excuse drunken sexual assault.
The body is the original technological artifact. The act of sexual engagement with and through bodies, much like driving with and through cars, requires training in and adherence to rules of engagement and implicit trust in others to do the same. Intoxication potentially blunts this training, and therefore potentially violates this trust. Those in this condition need to be guarded from themselves and others. The state can legislate this, but bedrooms are not roadways. What happens in largely private spaces lies beyond dependable state oversight.
This is as it should be. We must guide sexual behavior as individuals, community members and, most of all, friends.
Sex at its best facilitates a greater, more complete shared life with another person. Good pleasurable sex, even if an end in itself, involves people at their most vulnerable, trusting lovers to keep the pleasure of other and self in focus, to balance the fulfillment of partnered bodies and souls. Alcohol tends to center judgement around the immediate pleasures of the self, pushing the wellbeing of others from foreground to background. Many of us are all too well-acquainted to the scene of a friend getting wobbly, eyes glazing over, starting to talk a bit too loud, flail the arms a bit too much, repeating themselves constantly. "Dude, I'm so gonna hit that;" "I bet he's great in bed;" "I just want to have fun tonight." Rarely heard from the drunken friend, or the friend targeting a drunken person, is the line, "I would like to know that beautiful creature better and make them feel good once I know how."
Sex engaged in by intoxicated people who know little about each other can end harmlessly, even ecstatically. More often than not, it ends up in indifference, melancholy and disappointment. At worst, drunken sex ends as an event of violence and trauma, inscribing damage unable to be undone no matter how much regret attaches.
We are all trained early to keep ourselves and others from crushing people with a steel machine on the road. Should we not also be trained to keep flesh from harming flesh and soul from harming soul? Can we minimize the pain of our fellow creatures by attempting to keep friends from liaisons they may regret later?
