Via Anna Lekas Miller of Gender Across Borders, the Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton "Don't be that guy" campaign is taking an approach I've endorsed in the past: don't just tell men not to rape, tell them how. The first sentence in the following quote hints at why that's radical rather than, say, self-evident.

Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That's why our campaign is targeting potential offenders - they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

"Don't be that guy"

"Don't be that guy" will be launched on November 22, 2010. Our posters are available to download, below. Please feel free to print and distribute as you like. Just click on the image for a high resolution PDF.

Source: Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton

In this context it's not quibbling to say we could but shouldn't spend all day debating whether most date rapists know exactly what they're doing, or instead know what they're doing but have radically impaired judgment, or are just so fucking indoctrinated to the bogus Two Rules of Desire fueled status quo that it simply never occurs to them that what they're doing is raping their impaired or unconscious dates.

It's not quibbling because the campaign's message targets the behavior, not the motivation. Even better (or worse from the date-rapist's perspective) it clearly identifies cases that make people "that guy." You can argue that it might provide desperately needed clues to the clueless perpetrator but won't stop intentional predators.

Maybe not.

But the beauty of the campaign is that it doesn't just warn you not to be "that guy," also it clearly warns your peers to recognize when you're being "that guy." As opposed to, say, identifying you as "lucky," or "good with women."

In other words by identifying what "that guy" behavior looks like the campaign helps erase most of the "gray" in those infamous "gray area" cases both predatory and clueless perpetrators are most comfortable operating in.  The benefit there is twofold: first, when there's no ambiguity the merely clueless don't perpetrate, which in turn leaves the genuinely predatory with no "but everybody does it" protective cover.

The best thing about the campaign, though, is it's implicit message that most men really aren't "that guy!" Even better it acknowledges that most men don't and never will want to be "that guy."  Not even accidentally.   The beauty of it is that nobody wants to be "that guy."  And the campaign helps clearly define how not to be one.

So.  Summary: Not automatically blaming the victim? Check.  Not automatically blaming all men either?  Check!  Clearly identifying the problem though? Check!  Framing it in a way that makes date rapists familiar characters?  Check.  Framing it in a way that makes date rapists look really lame to their peers instead of glamorous or macho?  Check!  Making it sound like no, you really don't want to be "that guy?"  Or even mistaken for him?  Check.  Best of all?  Making men part of the solution and not just the problem?  In a way we can go along with instead of object to resent?  Check.  If inadvertently or on purpose you ever were "that guy" does it give you a clear idea how to stop being one?  Check.

I love this kind o

[I fear this post could be a bit long and maudlin. And nowhere near as personal-sounding as it feels.  There's a bit about sex at the end but this is mostly about the social impact of other "vices."  --fl]

Via Daily Kos, an article by health editor Sarah Boseley of England's The Guardian points out, very correctly, that if alcohol had been introduced recently instead of thousands of years ago it would be considered a class A narcotic (comparable to the U.S. Schedule I classification.)

Alcohol is the most dangerous drug in the UK by a considerable margin, beating heroin and crack cocaine into second and third place, according to an authoritative study published today which will reopen calls for the drugs classification system to be scrapped and a concerted campaign launched against drink.

Led by the sacked government drugs adviser David Nutt with colleagues from the breakaway Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, the study says that if drugs were classified on the basis of the harm they do, alcohol would be class A, alongside heroin and crack cocaine.

Source: The Guardian

This is one of those areas where I really earn my prudish libertine stripes. That cannabis and heroin are illegal and alcohol is not (or, conversely, that alcohol is legal and cannabis and heroin are not) just sticks in my craw the way a law saying men but not women may own property would. Nor is this because I think heroin or even cannabis is just a hunky-dory walk in the park.

For instance consumption of what drug coincides with virtually all violent sexual assaults? And consumed more often, contrary to myriad stereotypes and admonitions, by assailants than their victims? Why that would be alcohol! (Don't even get me started on "ordinary" non-sexual violent assaults!)

And for instance consumption of which drug, exactly, is responsible for great huge quantities of consensual but dysfunctional sex? Alcohol? Why yes!

And for instance consumption of which drug, exactly, is responsible for astonishing quantities of unsafe sex or sex where sex safety is carried out incompetently? Right again!

And finally (for now) for instance which drug is responsible for... disappointing quantities of erectile dysfunction in men, response insufficiency in women, anorgasmia in both, fractured penises, bruised vulvas, blah, blah, blah? No, it's not cannabis, cocaine, methamphetamine, "hillbilly heroin," real heroin, huffing glue, or even commonly prescribed legal drugs. Nope. Not dope, it's alcohol yet again.

And to get off my editorial hobby horse for another minute, Boseley adds in her article that (emphasis mine)

Today's study offers a more complex analysis that seeks to address the 2007 criticisms. It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual "from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships" and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.

Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack. The most dangerous drugs to their individual users were ranked as heroin, crack and then crystal meth. The most harmful to others were alcohol, heroin and crack in that order.

Harmful to one's self I can nearly waive off with a small-l libertarian shrug (or could if I didn't hadn't watched a few too many alcoholics and heroin addicts slowly destroy their own lives.) Harm to others, however, is almost by-definition invisible to libertarians... which is just one more reason I'll never be a libertarian with a big L.

And just for the record, don't assume I think the default choice ought to be legalization -- for living in such a generally middle-class urban neighborhood it's kind of surprising how prevalent addiction... and it's consequences... can be.

I think I've hinted over the last half year or so that the lives of my neighbors and family have been affected by substances both illegal (heroin) and perfectly, completely, medically (painkillers, mood "elevators") or hardly-a-party-without-it (alcohol) legal.

From the nominal oasis* of my immediate, nuclear family it sure doesn't seem like there's that much difference between the teenager who was found to be poaching booze from neighbor's liquor cabinets was materially different from the young adult who was found to be lifting expired prescription bottles from medicine cabinets. And it doesn't really seem to matter that the quiet young man in the front room of the nearby boarding house, and the equally unassuming young man from the backroom are both unemployable and will soon be homeless, even though one's uncontrollably addicted to a legal substance and the other to an illegal one. Nor does the family down the street with the alcoholic father seem any less textbook clinically-dysfunctional than the one around the corner where the mom's hooked on some kind of oxycodone. They're just all equally fucked up.

And finally, a bit of Googling turns up 40 AlAnon weekly meetings in Seattle. (AlAnon, if you don't know, is an organization not for families of alcoholics and drug addicts, not the addicts themselves.) Forty separate meetings sounds like a lot. At least it sounds like a lot to me! Or it would sound a lot if a bit more Googling turned up 130 (one hundred and thirty!) Alcholics Anonymous meetings in the same city.

130 meetings just on Sundays!

Monday-Friday there's an average of 145 meetings per day. (There are closer to 15 narcotics-anonymous meetings a day in the same area though that's seriously apples to oranges -- a lot of drug addicts attend AA instead.)

Point being that just for alcohol that's a fuck of a lot of impact! And yet it's legal as pencils or polyester batting. More legal in a lot of places than vibrators, condoms, or abortion services.

And Dick Cheney wasn't shooting heroin or snorting coke or even tuffing hemp when he shot his hunting companion in the face. He was "just" drunk. And yet alcohol is legal and dope is not.

Almost all rape occurs when one or both the victim and perpetrator are drunk. Yet alcohol is legal and coke is not.

An inordinate amount of unsafe sex happens when one or both participants have been drinking. And yet alcohol is legal and OTC codeine is not.

Sigh.

I wonder how many people a year die of over-use a year -- from straight-up overdoses to cirrhosis to "collateral" deaths from drunk drivers and drive-by or turf-battle murders?  How does it compare to, oh, say, death by HIV?  (Oh wait!  A lot of HIV is transmitted by exchanged dope needles.  More is transmitted by people to drunk to remember condoms save lives.)

* Yeah, like we're unaffected just because it's not happening inside our four walls.

Matthew Yglesias has a serious, legitimate beef with an NPR piece on campus rape researcher David Lisak. Yglesias says the piece (which I haven’t heard) first covers men who admit having sex with women against their will and then… maybe out of some perverse j-school “to be sure” reflex… brought up another professor, Stetson University law professor Peter Lake, who says naah, a lot of college students just drink too much, engage in risky behavior, and then regret it later.

The two concepts are not a good combination in a single piece. Says Matt, emphasis his:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He said it here.

That sounds right.

You wanna know something else about the mentality that brings us the bogus Two Rules of Desire? If you’re convinced it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for women to have sexual desire then of course you’re going to believe they’re going to claim rape ever time they have a drunken hookup.

In fact most people who have drunken hookups just say “oh well, that was dumb.” You know who tends to claim rape instead? People who were actually raped.

Just a thought.

Abby Spector, guest-posting at Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. has the one really critical takeaway about sex and alcohol.

I’m being honest, I’m not planning on swapping my flask for a carton of soy milk anytime soon — I’m still in college, for chrissake.

But what I am trying to teach myself is that every positive experience I’ve had while intoxicated, I am capable of achieving sober. Alcohol is a permission slip, but nobody is stopping me from signing those permission slips myself, in the clear light of day. My bisexuality was not hiding in a keg — it was there all along. Alcohol simply provided the burst of confidence I needed for self-acceptance.

Here’s a toast to the joy of uninhibited sobriety. Because the only thing better than awesome, toe-curling, uninhibited sex is awesome, toe-curling, uninhibited sex that you can remember in exquisite detail the next morning.

She said it here.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I pretty much quit drinking when I turned 21. So its been a while (turns out I have a defective gene for the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol) but Spector really brings home what’s important about drinking and sex.

It’s not so much that one shouldn’t (that would just be my sour grapes since I can’t) as that for an awful lot of us alcohol gives us an excuse to do stuff we’d… at least be willing to try anyway.

With the added advantage you mention of having more memorable experiences to remember… and fewer we wish we could forget. :-)