Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.
6.
In 2006, England had its own version of the Brock Turner trial, a high-profile case involving a twenty-five-year-old software designer named Benjamin Bree and a woman identified by the court only as “M.” It is a textbook example of the complications created by alcohol myopia.
The two met for the first time at Bree’s brother’s apartment and went out that same night. Over the course of the evening, M had two pints of cider and between four and six drinks of vodka mixed with Red Bull. Bree, who had been drinking earlier in the day, matched her round for round. Footage from closed-circuit cameras showed the two of them walking back to her apartment, arm in arm, around one in the morning. They had sex. Bree thought it was consensual. M said it wasn’t. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to five years in prison—only to have the verdict thrown out on appeal. If you have read any other accounts of these kinds of cases, the details will be depressingly familiar: pain, regret, misunderstanding, and anger.
Here is Bree, describing his side of the story.
I was hoping to avoid sleeping on the floor and thought that maybe I could share her bed, which in hindsight seems such a stupid thing to do.
I wasn’t looking for sex, just a mattress and some human company. She woke up and I lay down next to her and eventually we started hugging, and then kissing.
It was a bit unexpected, but nice. We were indulging in foreplay for about thirty minutes and it sounded like she was enjoying it.
And then, from the court’s decision:
He insisted that M appeared to welcome his advances, which progressed from stroking of a comforting nature to sexual touching. She said and did nothing to stop him. He told the jury that one needed to be sure about consent which is why he stroked her for so long. The complainant could not gainsay that this foreplay lasted for some time. Eventually he put the top of his fingers inside the waistband of her pyjama trousers, which would have given her an opportunity to discourage him. She did not. She seemed particularly responsive when he put his hand inside her pyjama trousers. After sexual touching, he motioned for her to remove her pyjama trousers. He pulled them down slightly, then she removed them altogether.
Bree thought he could infer M’s inner state from her behavior. He assumed she was transparent. She wasn’t. Here, from the court’s filings, is how M was actually feeling:
She had no idea how long intercourse lasted. When it ended she was still facing the wall. She did not know whether the appellant had in fact used a condom or not, nor whether he ejaculated or not. Afterwards he asked if she wanted him to stay. She said “no.” In her mind she thought “get out of my room,” although she did not actually say it. She didn’t know “what to say or think, whether he would turn and beat me. I remember him leaving, the door shutting.” She got up and locked the door and then returned to lie on her bed curled up in a ball, but she could not remember for how long.
At 5 a.m., M called her best friend, in tears. Bree, meanwhile, was still so oblivious to her inner state that he knocked on M’s door a few hours later and asked M if she wanted to go and get fish and chips for lunch.
After several months in prison, Bree was freed when an appeals court concluded that it was impossible to figure out what the two of them did or did not consent to in M’s bedroom that night. “Both were adults,” the judge wrote:
Neither acted unlawfully in drinking to excess. They were both free to choose how much to drink, and with whom. Both were free, if they wished, to have intercourse with each other. There is nothing abnormal, surprising, or even unusual about men and women having consensual intercourse when one, or the other, or both have voluntarily consumed a great deal of alcohol.…The practical reality is that there are some areas of human behaviour which are inapt for detailed legislative structures.3
You may or may not agree with that final ruling. But it is hard to disagree with the judge’s fundamental complaint—that adding alcohol to the process of understanding another’s intentions makes a hard problem downright impossible. Alcohol is a drug that reshapes the drinker according to the contours of his immediate environment. In the case of the Camba, that reshaping of personality and behavior was benign. Their immediate environment was carefully and deliberately constructed: they wanted to use alcohol to create a temporary—and, in their minds, better—version of themselves. But when young people today drink to excess, they aren’t doing so in a ritualized, predictable environment carefully constructed to create a better version of themselves. They’re doing so in the hypersexualized chaos of fraternity parties and bars.
Defense: What was your observation that you’ve made of the kind of atmosphere that existed at parties at Kappa Alpha before?
Turner: A lot of grinding and—
D: What do you mean by grinding?
Turner: Girls dancing…facing away from a guy, and the guy behind them dancing with them.
D: All right. So you’re describing a position where—are you both facing in the same direction?
Turner: Yes.
D: But the boy’s behind the girl?
Turner: Yes.
D: And how close are their bodies during this grinding dancing?
Turner: They’re touching.
D: Is that common at these parties that you noticed?
Turner: Yes.
D: Did people dance on tables? Was that a common thing, too?
Turner: Yes.
Consent is something that two parties negotiate, on the assumption that each side in a negotiation is who they say they are. But how can you determine consent when, at the moment of negotiation, both parties are so far from their true selves?
7.
What happens to us when we get drunk is a function of the particular path the alcohol takes as it seeps through our brain tissue. The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations. It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria, and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala. The amygdala’s job is to tell us how to react to the world around us. Are we being threatened? Should we be afraid? Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch. The combination of those three effects is where myopia comes from. We don’t have the brainpower to handle more complex, long-term considerations. We’re distracted by the unexpected pleasure of the alcohol. Our neurological burglar alarm is turned off. We become altered versions of ourselves, beholden to the moment. Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated. These are the predictable effects of getting drunk.
But under certain very particular circumstances—especially if you drink a lot of alcohol very quickly—something else happens. Alcohol hits the hippocampus—small, sausage-like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08—the legal level of intoxication—the hippocampus starts to struggle. When you wake up the morning after a cocktail party and remember meeting someone but cannot for the life of you remember their name or the story they told you, that’s because the two shots of whiskey you drank in quick succession reached your hippocampus. Drink a little more and the gaps get larger—to the point where maybe you remember pieces of the evening but other details can be summoned only with the greatest difficulty.
Aaron White, at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, DC, is one of the world’s leading experts on blackouts, and he says that there is no particular logic to which bits get remembered and which don’t. “Emotional salience doesn’t seem to have an impact on the likelihood that your hippocampus records something,” he says. “What that means is you might, as a female,
go to a party and you might remember having a drink downstairs, but you don’t remember getting raped. But then you do remember getting in the taxi.” At the next level—roughly around a blood-alcohol level of 0.15—the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely.
“In the true, pure blackout,” White said, “there’s just nothing. Nothing to recall.”
In one of the earliest studies of blackouts, an alcohol researcher named Donald Goodwin gathered ten men from an unemployment line in St. Louis, gave them each the better part of a bottle of bourbon over a four-hour period, then had them perform a series of memory tests. Goodwin writes:
One such event was to show the person a frying pan with a lid on it, suggest that he might be hungry, take off the lid, and there in the pan are three dead mice. It can be said with confidence that sober individuals will remember this experience, probably for the rest of their lives.
But the bourbon drinkers? Nothing. Not thirty minutes later, and not the next morning. The three dead mice never got recorded at all.
In a blackout state—in that window of extreme drunkenness before their hippocampus comes back online—drunks are like ciphers, moving through the world without retaining anything.
Goodwin once began an essay on blackouts with the following story:
A thirty-nine-year-old salesman awoke in a strange hotel room. He had a mild hangover but otherwise felt normal. His clothes were hanging in the closet; he was clean-shaven. He dressed and went down to the lobby. He learned from the clerk that he was in Las Vegas and that he had checked in two days previously. It had been obvious that he had been drinking, the clerk said, but he had not seemed very drunk. The date was Saturday the 14th. His last recollection was of sitting in a St. Louis bar on Monday the 9th. He had been drinking all day and was drunk, but could remember everything perfectly until about 3 p.m., when “like a curtain dropping,” his memory went blank. It remained blank for approximately five days. Three years later, it was still blank. He was so frightened by the experience that he abstained from alcohol for two years.
The salesman had left the bar in St. Louis, gone to the airport, bought a plane ticket, flown to Las Vegas, found a hotel, checked in, hung up his suit, shaved, and apparently functioned perfectly well in the world, all while in blackout mode. That’s the way blackouts work. At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it is entirely possible that the frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker—at the same time—can continue to function more or less normally.
“You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,” White said.
You’re just not going to remember it. That could be ordering stuff on Amazon. People tell me this all the time.…People can do very complicated things. Buy tickets, travel, all kinds of things, and not remember.
It follows that it’s really hard to tell, just by looking at someone, whether they’ve blacked out. It’s like trying to figure out if someone has a headache exclusively from the expression on their face. “I might look a little drunk, I might look wasted, but I can talk to you,” White said.
I can have a conversation with you. I can go get us drinks. I can do things that require short-term storage of information. I can talk to you about our growing up together.…Even wives of hardcore alcoholics say they can’t really tell when their spouse is or is not in a blackout.4
When Goodwin was doing his pioneering work in the 1960s, he assumed that only alcoholics got blackout drunk. Blackouts were rare. Scientists wrote about them in medical journals the way they would about a previously unknown disease. Take a look at the results of one of the first comprehensive surveys of college drinking habits. It was conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at twenty-seven colleges around the United States. Students were asked how much they drank, on average, “at a sitting.” (For the purposes of the question, drinking amounts were divided into three groups. “Smaller” meant no more than two glasses of wine, two bottles of beer, or two mixed drinks. “Medium” was from three to five beers or glasses of wine, or three to four mixed drinks. And “Larger” was anything above that.)
Beer
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
46
73
Medium
45
26
Larger
9
1
Wine
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
79
89
Medium
17
11
Larger
4
0
Spirits
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
40
60
Medium
31
33
Larger
29
7
At these consumption levels, very few people are drinking enough to reach blackout.
Today, two things about that chart have changed. First, the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, ‘Pft, that’s just getting started,’” reports alcohol researcher Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge-drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.5
Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation ago, has narrowed considerably—particularly among white women. (The same trends aren’t nearly as marked among Asians, Hispanics, or African Americans.)
“I think it’s an empowerment issue,” Fromme argues:
I do a lot of consulting work in the military, and it’s easier for me to see it there because in the military the women are really put to the same standards as men in terms of their physical boot camps and training and all of that. They have worked very hard to try to say, “We’re like the men and therefore we can drink like the men.”
For physiological reasons, this trend has put women at greatly increased risk for blackouts. If an American male of average weight has eight drinks over four hours—which would make him a moderate drinker at a typical frat party—he would end up with a blood-alcohol reading of 0.107. That’s too drunk to drive, but well below the 0.15 level typically associated with blackouts. If a woman of average weight has eight drinks over four hours, by contrast, she’s at a blood-alcohol level of 0.173. She’s blacked out.6
It gets worse. Women are also increasingly drinking wine and spirits, which raise blood-alcohol levels much faster than beer. “Women are also more likely to skip meals when they drink than men,” White says.
Having a meal in your stomach when you drink reduces your peak BAC [blood-alcohol concentration] by about a third. In other words, if you drink on an empty stomach you’re going to reach a much higher BAC and you’re going to do it much more quickly, and if you’re drinking spirits and wine while you’re drinking on an empty stomach, again higher BAC much more quickly. And if you’re a woman, less body water [yields] higher BAC much more quickly.
And what is the consequence of being blacked out? It means that women are put in a position of vulnerability. Our memory, in any interaction with a stranger, is our first line of defense. We talk to someone at a party for half an hour and weigh what we learned. We use our memory to make sense of who the other person is. We collect things they’ve told us, and done, and those shape our response. That is not an error-free exercise in the best of times. But it is a necessary exercise, particularly if the issue at hand is whether you are going to go home with the person. Yet if you can’t remember anything you’ve just
learned, you are necessarily not making the same-quality decision you would have if your hippocampus were still working. You have ceded control of the situation.
“Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice,” critic Emily Yoffe writes in Slate:
But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.
And what of the stranger talking to you? He may not know you are blacked out. Maybe he leans in and tries to touch you, and you stiffen. Then ten minutes later he circles back, a little more artfully. Normally you would stiffen again, because you would recognize the stranger’s pattern. But you don’t this second time, because you don’t remember the first time. And the fact that you don’t stiffen in quite the same way makes the stranger think, under the assumption of transparency, that you are welcoming his advances. Normally he would be cautious in acting on that assumption: friendliness is not the same thing as an invitation to intimacy. But he’s drunk too. He’s in the grip of alcohol myopia, and the kind of longer-term considerations that might otherwise constrain his behavior (what happens to me tomorrow if I have misread this situation?) have faded from view.
Talking to Strangers Page 17
