PBR never raped anybody

So the American Psychological Association publishes a journal called Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, which recently published the results of a study on college women's drinking habits. Specifically, the study asked hetero female students how many drinks they thought their male peers preferred them to drink in social situations. Hetero male students were asked how many drinks they wanted female friends, potential sex partners, and dates to drink. (Prior studies have determined that college students in general overestimate how much their peers drink/find acceptable for others to drink, and that female students may be more susceptible to the influence of their peer groups' normative behaviors.)

The study found that women greatly overestimated how many drinks they thought their male peers wanted them to have. The journal article concludes that this discrepancy between what women think men want them to do and what men actually want can be exploited to get female students to drink less.

Here's what's fucked up: That alcohol abuse educators, however well-intentioned, still base efforts to curb binge drinking among women by invoking what men will think of them. I remember a pretty offensive anti-drinking ad campaign at Michigan that strongly implied that getting drunk would lead to women -- only women -- to (regrettable, of course) whorish behavior. If they're not invoking the spectre of sexual assault (which the APA article does in a section of statistics on women and drinking), they're warning you about stepping outside the bounds of male-defined femininity. Never mind trying to educate men on the consequences of binge drinking, and god forbid we recognize and address that what causes rape and sexual assault is the action of the rapist or attacker, period.

I can't judge the women in the study for the reasons they decide to drink, but it's really fucking depressing that this kind of thing still factors into the thinking of so many women in just about any area of life from clothes to careers to everyday behaviors like this.

Grrr. The super-short version of the study's findings is here. The 6-page peer-reviewed article is here.