Turner: Yes. I asked her if she wanted to go back to my dorm.
D: OK. And did she respond?
Turner: Yes.
D: What did she say?
Turner: She said, “Sure.”
D: Approximately, this would have been after 12:30 then, right?
Turner: Yes.
D: Did you ever learn her name that night?
Turner: Yes. I asked her her name while we were dancing, but I didn’t remember it.
He says he put his arm around her and the two of them left the party. As they walked across the back lawn, he says the two of them slipped.
Turner: She just lost her footing and kind of fell down. And she grabbed onto me to try and prevent her fall and that caused me to fall as well…
D: What happened then?
Turner: We laughed about it and I asked her if she was OK.
D: Did she respond?
Turner: Yeah. She said she thought so.
D: What happened then?
Turner: We started kissing.
Normally, in a sexual-assault case, the prosecution would present witnesses to raise questions about the defendant’s account. But that didn’t happen in People v. Brock Turner. By that point, Trea had become so drunk that Emily’s sister and her friend Colleen had taken her back to Julia’s dorm room. Turner’s friend Peter never made it to the party at all: he was too drunk, and had to be taken back to his dorm by two of Turner’s other friends. Presumably there might have been other people at the party who could corroborate or refute Turner’s story. But by this point it was after midnight, the lights had been lowered, and people were dancing on the tables.
So we have only Turner’s account:
D: What happened then?
Turner: We kissed for a little bit after that, and then I asked her if she wanted me to finger her.
D: Did she reply to you?
Turner: Yes.
D: What did she say?
Turner: She said yeah.…
D: After you obtained her concurrence or permission to finger her, and you did finger her, what happened then?
Turner: I fingered her for a minute. And I thought she had an orgasm. And then I—well, during that time, I asked her if she liked it, and she said, “Uh huh.”
And then:
D: And then after that, what did you do?
Turner: I started kissing with her again and then we started dry humping each other.
Under California law, someone is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity if they are either unconscious or so intoxicated that they are “prevented from resisting.” Here is legal scholar Lori Shaw:
It is not enough that the victim was intoxicated to some degree, or that the intoxication reduced the victim’s sexual inhibitions.…Instead, the level of intoxication and the resulting mental impairment must have been so great that the victim could no longer exercise reasonable judgment concerning that issue. As one California prosecutor explained, “the intoxicated victim must be so ‘out of it’ that she does not understand what she is doing or what is going on around her. It is not a situation where the victim just ‘had too much to drink.’”
So was Doe a willing participant at the time of the sexual activity—and passed out afterward? Or was she already incapable of consent at the time Turner put his finger inside her? People v. Brock Turner is a case about alcohol. The entire case turned on the degree of Emily Doe’s drunkenness.
In the end, the jury ruled against Turner. His version of events was simply unconvincing. If—as Turner suggests—they had a warm, consensual encounter, why did he run the moment he was challenged by the two grad students? Why was he “dry humping” her after she had passed out? Just after midnight, Doe left a voice mail for her boyfriend. The tape of that conversation was played for the jury. She’s barely coherent. If the legal standard is “so ‘out of it’ that she does not understand what she is doing,” then she sounded pretty close to that.
During the trial’s closing arguments, the prosecutor showed the jury a picture of Doe, taken as she lay on the ground. Her clothes are half off. Her hair is disheveled. She’s lying on a bed of pine needles. A dumpster is in the background. “No self-respecting woman who knows what’s going on wants to get penetrated right there,” the prosecutor said. “This photo alone can tell you that he took advantage of somebody who didn’t know what was going on.” Turner was convicted of three felony counts associated with the illegal use of his finger: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person, and sexual penetration of an unconscious person. He was sentenced to six months in prison and must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
The who of the Brock Turner case was never in doubt. The what was determined by the jury. But that still leaves the why. How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dance floor end in a crime? We know that our mistaken belief that people are transparent leads to all manner of problems between strangers. It leads us to confuse the innocent with the guilty and the guilty with the innocent. Under the best of circumstances, lack of transparency makes the encounter between a man and a woman at a party a problematic event. So what happens when alcohol is added to the mix?
4.
Dwight Heath was a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University in the mid-1950s when he decided to do the fieldwork for his dissertation in Bolivia. He and his wife, Anna Heath, flew to Lima with their baby boy, then waited five hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines. “These were planes that the U.S. had dumped after World War II,” Heath recalls. “They weren’t supposed to go above 10,000 feet. But La Paz, where we were headed, was at 12,000 feet.” As they flew into the Andes, Anna Heath says, they looked down and saw the remnants of “all the planes where the boosters didn’t work.”
From La Paz they traveled 500 miles into the interior of eastern Bolivia, to a small frontier town called Montero. It was the part of Bolivia where the Amazon Basin meets the Chaco region—vast stretches of jungle and lush prairie. The area was inhabited by the Camba, a mestizo people descended from the indigenous Indian populations and Spanish settlers. The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and seventeenth-century Andalusian Spanish. “It was an empty spot on the map,” Heath says. “There was a railroad coming. There was a highway coming. There was a national government…coming.”
They lived in a tiny house just outside of town. “There was no pavement, no sidewalks,” Anna Heath recalls.
If there was meat in town, they’d throw out the hide in front, so you’d know where it was, and you would bring banana leaves in your hand, so it was your dish. There were adobe houses with stucco and tile roofs, and the town plaza, with three palm trees. You heard the rumble of oxcarts. The padres had a jeep. Some of the women would serve a big pot of rice and some sauce. That was the restaurant. The guy who did the coffee was German. The year we came to Bolivia, a total of eighty-five foreigners came into the country. It wasn’t exactly a hot spot.
In Montero, the Heaths engaged in old-fashioned ethnography—“vacuuming up everything,” Dwight says, “learning everything.” They convinced the Camba that they weren’t missionaries by openly smoking cigarettes. They took thousands of photographs. They walked around the town and talked to whomever they could, then Dwight went home and spent the night typing up his notes. After a year and a half, the Heaths packed up their photographs and notes and returned to New Haven. There, Dwight Heath sat down to write his dissertation—only to discover that he had nearly missed what was perhaps the most fascinating fact about the community he had been studying. “Do you realize,” he told his wife as he looked over his notes, “that every weekend we were in Bolivia, we went out drinking?”
Every Saturday night the entire time they were there, the Heaths were invited to drinking parties. The host would buy the first bottle and issue the invitations. A dozen or so people would show up, and the party would proceed—
often until everyone went back to work on Monday morning. The composition of the group was informal: sometimes people passing by would be invited. But the structure of the party was heavily ritualized. The group sat in a circle. Someone might play the drums or a guitar. A bottle of rum from one of the sugar refineries in the area and a small drinking glass were placed on a table. The host stood, filled the glass with rum, then walked toward someone in the circle. He stood before the “toastee,” nodded, and raised the glass. The toastee smiled and nodded in return. The host then drank half the glass and handed it to the toastee, who finished it. The toastee eventually stood, refilled the glass, and repeated the ritual with someone else in the circle. When people got too tired or too drunk, they curled up on the ground and passed out, rejoining the party when they awoke.
“The alcohol they drank was awful,” Anna recalled. “Literally, your eyes poured tears. The first time I had it, I thought, I wonder what will happen if I just vomit in the middle of the floor. Not even the Camba said they liked it. They say it tastes bad. It burns. The next day they are sweating this stuff. You can smell it.” But the Heaths gamely persevered.
“The anthropology graduate student in the 1950s felt that he had to adapt,” Dwight said. “You don’t want to offend anyone, you don’t want to decline anything. I gritted my teeth and accepted those drinks.”
“We didn’t get drunk that much,” Anna went on, “because we didn’t get toasted as much as the other folks around. We were strangers. But one night there was this really big party—sixty to eighty people. They’d drink. Then pass out. Then wake up and party for a while. And I found, in their drinking patterns, that I could turn my drink over to Dwight. The husband is obliged to drink for his wife. And Dwight is holding a Coleman lantern with his arm wrapped around it, and I said, ‘Dwight, you are burning your arm.’” She mimed her husband peeling his forearm off the hot surface of the lantern. “And he said—very deliberately—‘So I am.’”
When the Heaths came back to New Haven, they had a bottle of the Camba’s rum analyzed and learned that it was 180 proof. It was laboratory alcohol—the concentration that scientists use to preserve tissue. No one drinks laboratory alcohol. This was the first of the astonishing findings of the Heaths’ research—and, predictably, no one believed it at first.
“One of the world’s leading physiologists of alcohol was at the Yale center,” Heath recalled. “His name was Leon Greenberg. He said to me, ‘Hey, you spin a good yarn. But you couldn’t really have drunk that stuff.’ And he needled me just enough that he knew he would get a response. So I said, ‘You want me to drink it? I have a bottle.’ So one Saturday I drank some under controlled conditions. He was taking blood samples every twenty minutes, and, sure enough, I did drink it, the way I said I’d drunk it.”
Greenberg had an ambulance ready to take Heath home. But Heath decided to walk. Anna was waiting up for him in the third-floor walkup they rented in an old fraternity house. “I was hanging out the window waiting for him, and there’s the ambulance driving along the street, very slowly, and next to it is Dwight. He waves, and he looks fine. Then he walks up the three flights of stairs and says, ‘Ahh, I’m drunk,’ and falls flat on his face. He was out for three hours.”
Here we have a community of people, in a poor and undeveloped part of the world, who hold drinking parties with 180-proof alcohol every weekend, from Saturday night until Monday morning. The Camba must have paid dearly for their excesses, right? Wrong.
“There was no social pathology—none,” Dwight Heath said. “No arguments, no disputes, no sexual aggression, no verbal aggression. There was pleasant conversation or silence.” He went on: “The drinking didn’t interfere with work.…It didn’t bring in the police. And there was no alcoholism either.”
Heath wrote up his findings in a now-famous article for the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. In the years that followed, countless other anthropologists chimed in to report the same thing. Alcohol sometimes led people to raise their voices and fight and say things they would otherwise regret. But a lot of other times, it didn’t. The Aztec called pulque—the traditional alcoholic beverage of central Mexico—“four hundred rabbits” because of the seemingly infinite variety of behaviors it could create. Anthropologist Mac Marshall traveled to the South Pacific island of Truk and found that, for young men there, drunkenness created aggression and mayhem. But when the islanders reached their mid-thirties, it had the opposite effect.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, the Mixe Indians were known to engage in wild fistfights when drunk. But when anthropologist Ralph Beals started watching the fights, they didn’t seem out of control at all. They seemed as though they all followed the same script:
Although I probably saw several hundred fights, I saw no weapon used, although nearly all men carried machetes and many carried rifles. Most fights start with a drunken quarrel. When the pitch of voices reaches a certain point, everyone expects a fight. The men hold out their weapons to the onlookers, and then begin to fight with their fists, swinging wildly until one falls down, [at which point] the victor helps his opponent to his feet and usually they embrace each other.
None of this makes sense. Alcohol is a powerful drug. It disinhibits. It breaks down the set of constraints that hold our behavior in check. That’s why it doesn’t seem surprising that drunkenness is so overwhelmingly linked with violence, car accidents, and sexual assault.
But if the Camba’s drinking bouts had so few social side effects, and if the Mixe Indians of Mexico seem to be following a script even during their drunken brawls, then our perception of alcohol as a disinhibiting agent can’t be right. It must be something else. Dwight and Anna Heath’s experience in Bolivia set in motion a complete rethinking of our understanding of intoxication. Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia.
5.
The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.
Here’s an example. Lots of people drink when they are feeling down because they think it will chase their troubles away. That’s inhibition-thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But at other times, when an anxious person drinks they just get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on what the anxious, drunk person is doing. If he’s at a football game surrounded by rabid fans, the excitement and drama going on around him will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly concerns. The game is front and center. His worries are not. But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2
Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thou
ght of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.
This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”
But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self.
So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of “communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long. There were few neighborhood or civic groups. The daily demands of their lives made socializing difficult. So on the weekends, they used the transformative power of alcohol to create the “communal expression” so sorely lacking from Monday to Friday. They used the myopia of alcohol to temporarily create a different world for themselves. They gave themselves strict rules: one bottle at a time, an organized series of toasts, all seated around the circle, only on the weekends, never alone. They drank only within a structure, and the structure of those drinking circles in the Bolivian interior was a world of soft music and quiet conversation: order, friendship, predictability, and ritual. This was a new Camba society, manufactured with the assistance of one of the most powerful drugs on earth.
Talking to Strangers Page 16
