I got a great email the other day from someone who, I’ve just got confirmation, would prefer to remain anonymous.

You’ve probably blogged about this before, but I couldn’t read your whole blog to find out. Consumption of alcohol makes a woman more culpable, and a man less culpable. Rape? Mr. Drunk Man can’t be blamed, he was drunk. Woman, however, was asking for it, she was drunk.

No attribution by original author’s preference.

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never made that point. But it’s a good one.

Inside the dominant paradigm not only are women are declared to be innately, angelically disinterested “no-sex” class, men are defined as perpetually, bestially, desperately, and indiscriminately eager for it. And so for that reason I think my contributor’s point about alcohol is particularly excellent point. In the majority of cases of sexual assault and rape the perpetrator is even more likely than the victim to be under the influence. In which case the social permission for men to be sexually, um, initiating translates easily into internal permission for a man to impose himself criminally.

Aided and abetted by the even more overt social assumption that the victim must always, somehow, some way, have been “asking for it.”