Does alcohol turn every man into a monster? Of course not. Myopia resolves high conflict: it removes the higher-order constraints on our behavior. The reserved man, normally too shy to profess his feelings, might blurt out some intimacy. The unfunny man, normally aware that the world does not find his jokes funny, might start playing comedian. Those are harmless. But what of the sexually aggressive teenager—whose impulses are normally kept in check by an understanding of how inappropriate those behaviors are? A version of the same admonition that Emily Yoffe gave to women can also be given to men:
But we are failing to let men know that when they render themselves myopic, they can do terrible things. Young men are getting a distorted message that drinking to excess is a harmless social exercise. The real message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will commit a sexual crime. Acknowledging the role of alcohol is not excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It’s trying to prevent more young men from becoming perpetrators.
It is striking how underappreciated the power of myopia is. In the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation study, students were asked to list the measures they thought would be most effective in reducing sexual assault. At the top of that list they put harsher punishment for aggressors, self-defense training for victims, and teaching men to respect women more. How many thought it would be “very effective” if they drank less? Thirty-three percent. How many thought stronger restrictions on alcohol on campus would be very effective? Fifteen percent.7
These are contradictory positions. Students think it is a good idea to be trained in self-defense, and not such a good idea to clamp down on drinking. But what good is knowing the techniques of self-defense if you’re blind drunk? Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. It is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently. Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them. And that is exactly what the myopia that comes with drunkenness makes it so hard to do.
The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk. And if they are blind drunk, and therefore at the mercy of their environment, the worst possible place to be is an environment where men and women are grinding on the dance floor and jumping on the tables. A Kappa Alpha fraternity party is not a Camban drinking circle.
“Persons learn about drunkenness what their societies import to them, and comporting themselves in consonance with these understandings, they become living confirmations of their society’s teachings,” Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton conclude in their classic 1969 work Drunken Comportment. “Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.”
8.
So: At the Kappa Alpha party at Stanford, sometime just after midnight, Emily Doe suffered a blackout. That’s what happens when you begin your evening with a light dinner and four quick shots of whiskey and a glass of champagne—followed by three or four shots of vodka in a red Solo cup.
P: And at some point, do you recall your sister leaving the party?
Doe: I do not.
P: What is your next memory after going to the bathroom outside, coming back to the patio, having the beers, and seeing some of the guys shotgun some beers?
Doe: I woke up in the hospital.
Emily Doe has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, no memory of whether she did or didn’t dance with him, no memory of whether she did or didn’t kiss him, did or didn’t agree to go back to his dorm, and no memory of whether she was a willing or unwilling participant in their sexual activity. Did she resist when they left the party? Did she struggle? Did she flirt with him? Did she just stumble, blindly, after him? We’ll never know. After the fact, when she was sober, Doe was adamant that she would never have willingly left the party with another man. She was in a committed relationship. But it wasn’t the real Emily Doe who met Brock Turner. It was drunk and blacked-out Emily Doe, and our drunken, blacked-out selves are not the same as our sober selves.
Brock Turner claimed to remember what happened that night, and that at every step of the way Emily Doe was a willing participant. But that is the story he told at his trial, after months of prepping and strategizing with his lawyers. On the night of his arrest, as he sat in shock in the interview room of the local police station, he had none of that certainty about Emily Doe.
Q: Were you guys hooking up there before or—before you even moved over?
Turner: I think so. But I’m not sure when we started kissing, honestly.
Then the police officer asks him why he ran when the two graduate students discovered him and Emily Doe on the ground.
Turner: I don’t think I ran.
Q: You don’t remember running?
Turner: No.
Keep in mind that the event in question just happened earlier that night, and that even as he is speaking, Turner is nursing an injured wrist from when he was tackled as he tried to escape. But it’s all gone.
Q: Did you get a look at her while she—this was going on, while the guys were approaching you and talking to you?
Turner: No.
Q: Is it possible she was unresponsive at that point?
Turner: Honestly, I don’t know, because I—like, I really don’t remember. Like, I—I think I was kind of blacked out after, uh, like, from the point of me going—like, hooking up to her, to, like, me being on the ground with the other guys. Like, I really don’t remember how that happened.
I think I was kind of blacked out. So the whole story about flirting and kissing and Emily Doe agreeing to go back to his dorm was a fiction: it was what he hoped had happened. What actually happened will be forever a mystery. Maybe Turner and Emily Doe just stood there on the dance floor, repeating the same things to each other, over and over again, without realizing that they were trapped in an infinite, blacked-out loop.
At the end of the trial, Emily Doe read a letter out loud to the court, addressed to Brock Turner. Every young man and woman who goes to a bar or a fraternity party should read Emily Doe’s letter. It is brave and eloquent and a powerful reminder of the consequences of sexual assault: that what happens between two strangers, in the absence of real consent, causes genuine pain and suffering.
What happened that night, she said, shattered her:
My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty. The isolation at times was unbearable.
At work she would show up late, then go and cry in the stairwell. She would cry herself to sleep at night and in the morning hold refrigerated spoons to her eyes to lessen the swelling.
I can’t sleep alone at night without having a light on, like a five-year-old, because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up. I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For three months, I went to bed at six o’clock in the morning.
I used to pride myself on my independence; now I am afraid to go on walks in the evening, to attend social events with drinking among friends where I should be comfortable being. I have become a little barnacle always needing to be at someone’s side, to have my boyfriend standing next to me, sleeping beside me, protecting me. It is embarrassing how feeble I feel, how timidly I move through life, always guarded, ready to defend myself, ready to be angry.
Then she comes to the question of alcohol. Was it a factor in what happened that night? Of course. But then she says:
> Alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked. Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone close to them who has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much. Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk. The difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately, and run away. That’s the difference.
In his own statement to the court, Turner had said he was hoping to set up a program for students to “speak out against the campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.” Doe was scathing:
Campus drinking culture. That’s what we’re speaking out against? You think that’s what I’ve spent the past year fighting for? Not awareness about campus sexual assault, or rape, or learning to recognize consent. Campus drinking culture. Down with Jack Daniels. Down with Skyy Vodka. If you want to talk to people about drinking, go to an AA meeting. You realize, having a drinking problem is different than drinking and then forcefully trying to have sex with someone? Show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.
But that’s not quite right, is it? That last line should be “Show men how to respect women and how to drink less,” because the two things are connected. Brock Turner was asked to do something of crucial importance that night—to make sense of a stranger’s desires and motivations. That is a hard task for all of us under the best circumstances, because the assumption of transparency we rely on in those encounters is so flawed. Asking a drunk and immature nineteen-year-old to do that, in the hypersexualized chaos of a frat party, is an invitation to disaster.
The outcome of People v. Brock Turner brought a measure of justice to Emily Doe. But so long as we refuse to acknowledge what alcohol does to the interaction between strangers, that evening at Kappa Alpha will be repeated again. And again.
P: You’ve heard that voice mail of [Emily], haven’t you?
Turner: Yes.
Turner is being cross-examined by the prosecutor. She’s referring to the slurred phone call Emily Doe made to her boyfriend sometime after she blacked out.
P: You would agree with me that in that voice mail, she sounds super intoxicated?
Turner: Yes.
P: That’s how she was with you that night, wasn’t she?
Turner: Yes.
P: She was very drunk, wasn’t she?
Turner: Not more than anybody else that I had been with.
1 At the time of the incident, her blood-alcohol concentration was .249. His BAC was .171. She was three times the legal limit. He was twice the legal limit. These BAC numbers are according to expert-witness testimony.
2 A group of Canadian psychologists led by Tara MacDonald recently went into a series of bars and asked the patrons to read a short vignette. They were to imagine that they had met an attractive person at a bar, walked him or her home, and ended up in bed—only to discover that neither of them had a condom. The subjects were then asked to respond on a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 9 (very likely) to the proposition: “If I were in this situation, I would have sex.” You’d think that the subjects who had been drinking heavily would be more likely to say they would have sex—and that’s exactly what happened. The drunk people came in at 5.36, on average, on the 9-point scale. The sober people came in at 3.91. The drinkers couldn’t sort through the long-term consequences of unprotected sex. But then MacDonald went back to the bars and stamped the hands of some of the patrons with the phrase “AIDS kills.” Drinkers with the hand stamp were slightly less likely than the sober people to want to have sex in that situation: they couldn’t sort through the rationalizations necessary to set aside the risk of AIDS. Where norms and standards are clear and obvious, the drinker can become more rule-bound than his sober counterpart.
3 Is drunken consent still consent? It has to be, the ruling goes on. Otherwise the vast majority of people happily having sex while drunk belong in jail alongside the small number of people for whom having sex while drunk constituted a criminal act. Besides, if M can say that she was not responsible for her decisions because she was drunk, why couldn’t Benjamin Bree say the same thing? The principle that “drunken consent is still consent,” the ruling points out, “also acts as a reminder that a drunken man who intends to commit rape, and does so, is not excused by the fact that his intention is a drunken intention.” Then the Bree ruling comes to the question taken up by California’s consent. What if one of the parties is really drunk? Well, how on earth can we decide what “really drunk” means? We don’t really want our lawmakers to create some kind of elaborate, multivariable algorithm governing when we can or can’t have sex in the privacy of our bedrooms. The judge concludes: “The problems do not arise from the legal principles. They lie with infinite circumstances of human behavior, usually taking place in private without independent evidence, and the consequent difficulties of proving this very serious offence.”
4 It is also, by the way, surprisingly hard to tell if someone is just plain drunk. An obvious test case is police sobriety checkpoints. An officer stops a number of people on a busy road late on a Friday night, talks to each driver, looks around each car—and then gives a Breathalyzer to anyone they think is drunk enough to be over the legal limit. Figuring out who seems drunk enough to qualify for a Breathalyzer turns out to be really hard. The best evidence is that well over half of drunk drivers sail through sobriety checkpoints with flying colors. In one study in Orange County, California, over 1,000 drivers were diverted to a parking lot late one night. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their evening, then interrogated by graduate students trained in intoxication detection. How did the driver talk? Walk? Was there alcohol on their breath? Were there bottles or beer cans in their car? After the interviewers made their diagnoses, the drivers were given a blood-alcohol test. Here’s how many drunk drivers were correctly identified by the interviewers: 20 percent.
5 In a remarkable essay in the New York Times, Ashton Katherine Carrick, a student at the University of North Carolina, describes a drinking game called “cuff and chug.” Two people are handcuffed together until they can down a fifth of liquor. She writes, “For the supercompetitive, Sharpie pens were used to tally the number of drinks on your arm, establishing a ratio of drinks to the time it takes to black out—a high ratio was a source of pride among the guys.” She continues:
The way we as students treat the blacking out of our peers is also partly responsible for its ubiquity. We actually think it’s funny. We joke the next day about how ridiculous our friends looked passed out on the bathroom floor or Snapchatting while dancing and making out with some random guy, thus validating their actions and encouraging them to do it again. Blacking out has become so normal that even if you don’t personally do it, you understand why others do. It’s a mutually recognized method of stress relief. To treat it as anything else would be judgmental.
6 Nor is it just a matter of weight. There are also meaningful differences in the way the sexes metabolize alcohol. Women have much less water in their bodies than men, with the result that alcohol enters their bloodstream much more quickly. If a 195.7-pound female matches a 195.7-pound male drink for drink over four hours, he’ll be at 0.107. She’ll be at 0.140.
7 Adults feel quite differently. Fifty-eight percent of adults think “drinking less” would be very effective in reducing sexual assault.
Part Four
Lessons
Chapter Nine
KSM: What Happens When
the Stranger Is a Terrorist?
1.
“My first thought was that he looked like a troll,” James Mitchell remembers. “He was angry, he was belligerent, he was glaring at me. I’m doing a neutral probe, so I’m talking to him basically like I’m talking to you. I took the hood off and I said, ‘What would you like me to call you?
’”
The man answered in accented English, “Call me Mukhtar. Mukhtar means the brain. I was the emir of the 9/11 attacks.”
It was March 2003, in a CIA black site somewhere “on the other side of the world,” Mitchell said. Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, as he was otherwise known—one of the most senior Al Qaeda officials ever captured. He was naked, hands and feet shackled, yet defiant.
“They had shaved his head by that point and shaved his beard,” Mitchell said. “But he just was the hairiest person I’d ever seen in my life, and little, real little. He had a huge, like Vietnamese pot-bellied pig belly. I thought—this guy killed all those Americans?”
Mitchell has a runner’s build, tall and slender, with longish white hair parted in the middle and a neatly trimmed beard. He speaks with a mild Southern accent. “I look like some guy’s uncle,” is how he describes himself, which is perhaps overly self-deprecating. He gives off a sense of unshakable self-confidence, as if he always gets a good night’s sleep, no matter what he did to anyone that day, or what anyone did to him.
Mitchell is a psychologist by training. After 9/11, he and a colleague, Bruce Jessen, were brought in by the CIA because of their special skills in “high stakes” interrogation. Jessen is bigger than Mitchell, quieter, with a cropped military haircut. Mitchell says he looks like “an older [Jean-]Claude van Damme.” Jessen does not speak publicly. If you hunt around online, you can find portions of a videotaped deposition he and Mitchell once gave in a lawsuit arising from their interrogation practices. Mitchell is unruffled, discursive, almost contemptuous of the proceedings. Jessen is terse and guarded: “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do.”
Talking to Strangers Page 18
