A comment on Annals of dismissive contempt by a first-time commenter calling himself Vincent:
Unless you waterboard them, you cannot “make” someone drink. So, one can never say “he made me drink” without being a hypocrite. That is what Dawkins was talking about, probably irritated by exaggerations like “plying a woman with alcohol”, “sexual predator” and “meat market”. Predators kill, market is where you buy stuff, meat is dead. The use of exaggerations to amplify emotional impact is a sure sign of lack of otherwise convincing arguments. I consider that people old enough to drink alcohol are mature enough to stop drinking before getting themselves into trouble. We live in a world full of dangers for drunks and getting hit on by Michael Shermer is certainly among the least of them. If I ever get so drunk as to wake up in a man’s bed with a dreadful lower-back pain with no memory of how I got there, I would, yes, consider myself partly responsible for what I got myself into. Especially if I let him serve me drinks till I drop while being certain he wants sex with me. Ending up raped cannot be an excuse for acting stupid. If you get home so drunk that you fall asleep with all doors and windows open, and your house gets broken in during the night, that would not be an excuse for the robber, but I’m pretty sure that your insurance company will consider you responsible and will not give you a penny for your sorrow. You can never say that someone “got you drunk”. That is the only thing Dawkins was saying. He is famous for holding hypocrisy in infinite contempt.
Part of that is true; part of it is not. There are two steps to it. There is the getting drunk, and there is the being raped.
Yes, adults are adults, and adults have to take responsibility for doing silly or reckless things. (Adults have to take much more responsibility for doing things that are reckless with respect to other people – getting drunk before driving a car or performing surgery, for instance.) Yes, it can be silly or reckless to get drunk. Yes, it’s very hard to force someone else to drink alcohol, at least in a public place. Yes, adults are better able to cope with manipulation or pressure than children are. All that is true.
But what is not true is that therefore adult women who get drunk are responsible for being raped.
No, it’s not a reasonable expectation that if you’re a woman and you drink too much alcohol at a bar or a party, then one of the men present will walk you to his room and rape you.
What is a reasonable expectation for what will happen if you’re a woman and you drink too much alcohol at a bar or a party? Lots of things – embarrassing behavior, quarrels, throwing up, loud singing, getting thrown out of the bar. But being raped? No, women should not have to factor that into their thinking about how absent-minded to be when counting the drinks.
If a woman drinks too much at a bar or a party and then gets in her car and drives away, she is doing a very bad thing, and that’s her responsibility (although in the nature of things other people present may share some responsibility if they don’t try to stop her).
But if a woman drinks too much at a bar or a party and then the guy next to her leads her off to his hotel room and rapes her – he is the one who has done a bad thing.
I know that’s a very complicated subtle nuanced difficult thought to have. I’m sorry about that. It’s just how life is.
tigtog left a relevant comment over at PZ’s.
Also reposting my comment about the ‘nobody FORCED it down her throat’ business. (at PZ’s)
Even the getting drunk part is false. Persistently topping off a woman’s drink so she can’t readily keep track of how much she’s drinking is, in fact, getting her drunk. Persistently adding an extra half-shot of vodka to a woman’s drink that’s fruity or otherwise flavorful enough to hide the extra alcohol is, in fact, getting her drunk. Just because she is a causal agent in her drunkenness doesn’t mean that other people can’t be as well, and it doesn’t mean that other people can’t be the primary causal agent. “He made me drink more than I intended or knew, causing me to get a lot drunker than I had reason to believe I’d get” happens all the time.
Those things too. I followed some of those discussions at the time but I’ve forgotten much of the content. By all means remind us of these details.
It’s staggering how willing people are to throw men under the bus with these excuses. Apparently the presence of alcohol in a woman’s bloodstream just renders some men completely incapable of not raping. You should just assume there will be men around who want to rape you because, really, everyone knows men are such abject slaves to their sexual urges that they can’t stop themselves . But, if you dare cross to the other side of the street when a man you don’t know is walking behind you or feel uncomfortable when a total stranger in a foreign country invites you up to his hotel room in the wee hours of the morning then MISANDRY!!1!ONE!!!ELEBENTY!!1!
Even if I completely agreed with every single word of Vincent’s which I don’t, Alison “sharing some of the responsibility” with Shermer (who, when she couldn’t even walk straight anymore, took her to his room instead of her own and chose to have sex with her as opposed to, say, keeping an eye on her until she was sober enough to be left on her own) is NOT what Dawkins suggested should be happening. He’s put the blame solely on her.
Watch it, fella. You might end up held in infinite contempt for hypocrisy.
That’s just a very ignorant view of human psychology general. I was going to point out how it is known that larger bowl or plate sizes result in people eating more, but in trying to search for a reference, I found something even better:
I don’t see any reason why the same shouldn’t hold true for drinks.
@7 I suppose I’d better make a slight correction. Vincent said “you cannot ‘make’ someone drink.” What I’m talking about is where someone has already made the choice to drink. However, you indeed can make someone drink more than they intended.
That is probably why neither Richard Dawkins nor I ever wrote that. And probably because neither of us thinks it.
The point is that when you say “he made me drink”, you are hypocrite. You did the drinking yourself.
That is what Dawkins wrote. The rest is your interpretation and slander.
It gets worse if you consider that women are everlasting children who will drink whatever when told to. Special mention for R Johnston
Why specifically a woman ? Doing it to a man to rape him is alright, or do you mean that men are too smart to fall for such cheap tricks. Boy, that would be very sexist.
Leo, have you any evidence that Shermer gave her such a “special” glass ? Or are you just making that up for the drama ?
@7 Thinking about this even more, given Shermer’s background, he should darn well know about studies like this. Shermer should know many different ways into tricking people into doing things they didn’t intend to do. That’s a scary thought.
Pathetic. No where did I make any claims about what Shermer may or may not have done. So, who’s making stuff up for the drama?
@10 Vincent the clueless.
Shermer is a notorious “drink topper-offer.” It’s his preferred method of predation. He’s well practiced in the art of getting women massively more inebriated than they intended.
You seriously need to fuck off now, Vincent.
Vincent even specified “waking up in a man’s bed” in the OP, before claiming it’s sexist to talk about drunk women specifically. Nice try Vincent.
Alcohol – The new short skirt
Well, given the background of slander and unsupported accusations I read here, I understand that, supposing that he could know how to trick people into drinking, knowing that he seduces different girls all the time, and that he also cracks salacious jokes, he must be a rapist. He even hit on a girl in an elevator, once.
Yes Pteryxx, and your last comment is sexist, and probably homophobic. You imagine that only a girl could end up drunk in a man’s bed.
Today’s clinic on unintentional irony is brought to you by Vincent in the form of accusing others of making unsupported accusations while simultaneously completely making shit up and accusing other people of saying it.
Actually Vincent, one of the people reporting that Shermer raped him using alcohol-based tactics is a man. (Timeline at Lousy Canuck)
Are you four years old? I’m asking because this is the sort of semantic gambit that four-year-olds are famous for coming up with: “But…but…I didn’t pull my classmate’s hair! tail. I just held on to his hair and screamed, and he did all the pulling himself!”
What do you suppose Prof. Dawkins would say if he saw you trying to defend him in such an embarrassingly bad way?
Now you’re just being silly.
You don’t need a special glass to refill it without the drinker being aware of it. You just need to refill the glass when they’re not paying attention to it.
Seven of Mine, I would gladly link to all the sources I found reading this blog all day if I didn’t feel so disgusted at the idea of reading that crap again. Fortunately, I don’t have to, because you can find them yourself if you try. Apply critical thinking and scepticism to this blog too.
Ophelia, could you clarity what you meant by the following passage?
To me, a reasonable expectation is one that has a sufficiently high probability of happening. Since this is situation that happens to women with deplorable regularity, so why don’t you consider it a reasonable expectation?
Because it’s generally recognized that giving a man more alcohol than he asked without telling him is is “getting him drunk”:* it’s only when women are raped that people starts whining about how the women weren’t forced.
*Hell, I frequently use the term for giving alcohol to a friend who wants to get drunk; enabling another to get drunk is generally referred to as “getting them drunk,” except in the aforementioned context.
That’s enough of Vincent now.
Beth, you should be able to figure that out from what I said before that passage. It’s right there on the screen.
@ Vincent
I’m talking about things you’ve said in this thread in response to people in this thread.
@ Beth
You’re being dishonest here. You know full well Ophelia is not talking about probability but about how people ought to treat each other.
By the way,
I’m pretty sure your insurance company will pay, and the burglar will be prosecuted, regardless of whether the doors and windows were left open. Or even if your diamond ring was stolen when you left it on the bar while you were in the loo. People go to prison for stealing things that don’t belong to them, regardless. So much for your analogy.
Vincent, you do need to fuck off.
I’m a man, who wasn’t raped–but I has had the experience of being “made to drink.” I’m just this side of a teetotaler, but I was tapped to host a reception in graduate school at which I ended up opening the wine bottles. I had a glass of wine next to me, and opened bottles for the next 2-3 hours. Along the way, I sipped my wine. It was quite a while before it occurred to me to wonder why my glass was always full, because I was distracted by my duties as host. At some point I noticed one of the professors topping up my glass. I remember the rest of the evening, with great horror: from explaining X-rated jokes to my thesis advisor, to somberly explaining a colleague’s shortcomings to his girlfriend, to loudly declaiming on various political topics.
Luckily, another grad student took me back to his apartment to sleep it off; otherwise I had a long drive ahead of me, and was quite possibly drunk enough to try. I’d been drunk exactly twice before in my then 26 years, and the other times only mildly tipsy. This time I was not far from alcohol poisoning, and was practically incapacitated the next day.
“You’re a big boy–you should know the level of your drink at all times, and watch people so they don’t top you up.” Fuck you with a garden rake, friend.
Because the rapey folks shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that shit, much less in plain sight.
—
Here’s another account from last year’s discussion. (comment)
And at the end of the day and all of the alcohol consumption, it is still the responsibility of only one side of the equation to not be a rapist.
If someone puts a chemical designed to cause memory loss, disinhibition, and pliability into another person’s drink without them knowing, realizing, or consenting, we rightly say that Person 1 “drugged” Person 2, even though Person 2 is the one who consumed the drug.
Somehow, when the drug in question is not rohypnol or GHB but alcohol, some people think the situation is different. It’s not.
Remember, Alison Smith was 20 or 21 at the time of the assault.
The only time I ever saw my father being horribly drunk was after he’d played a gig at a wedding where the youngsters, who were doing bartender duty, were under instruction to “make sure the musicians’ glasses were never empty.” My dad was focused on playing, wasn’t paying attention, and ended up having to call my mom to pick him up. Us kids came with because it was late at night and we were young. On the way back, she had to stop the car to let my dad vomit by the side of the road. This was when my father was in his late 30s or early 40s. He’s not a big drinker but it’s not like he never drinks.
It’s really quite easy to deceive someone into thinking that they’ve drunk less than they have–even unintentionally, as my story demonstrates.
So, Vincent is trying to pretend like this is an impossible thing. He’s acting like he doesn’t live in the real world, where people drink, and young people who have less experience drinking have a harder time knowing when to stop, and people both accidentally and deliberately deceive other people into thinking that they’ve drunk less than they actually have.
More hair-splitting being held up as “exposing lies”–the other two examples that spring to mind are Nugent’s hyping of the distinction between a rapist assaulting you when you “were drunk” vs. when you “had been drinking,” and the possible distinction between women’s participation in skeptic/atheist organizations leadership and speaking gigs rising from zero vs. rising from a very small number.
@Masked Avenger
Please don’t.
As someone who’s regular intake of alcohol commonly exceeds evidence-based daily and weekly guidelines for healthy drinking, I have an incredibly high tolerance for alcohol, as well as select other substances. I can mix my substances and drink all night on an empty stomach, and still appear only as tipsy as an occasionally light-drinker who’s had two glasses of wine. And I’ll still misjudge my own sobriety or lack thereof on occasion. (I rarely drink anything at all and drive, for this reason.)
This also means I take some responsibility for those who don’t drink as much when I’m out with them. If we’ve had a few, and the question of another round comes up, I’ll do some assessing of my friend(s)’ state. “How are you feeling?” “Are you going to work tomorrow?” “Feel like some food?” “Let’s get a round of water before we order another pint.” I do this because I know from experience that one more pint won’t much impact my ability to go to bed and wake up and go to work the next day, but it might pose a real problem for my friend who’s having a great time but doesn’t drink often and doesn’t realise how drunk s/he is. (I’m also friendly with the staff at the bars I frequent, and here there are legal consequences for overserving, so I’d rather look out for my friends than force that upon the serving staff and management.)
Maybe I’m just used to drug culture, where it’s common for someone with a high tolerance for, say pot, to warn people if the j they’re passing around is particularly strong and likely to hit an occasional smoker hard, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t extend the same concern for people I care about, even if I’ve only met them that evening and don’t plan to ever see them again. And if I don’t care about them, why am I getting drinking with them in the first place?
The more important subject about alcohol, predators, and rape has been well addressed so I’ll get this one.
One big problem I’ve seen in this controversy are people claiming that ANY intense emotional message is to be dismissed just because it is emotionally intense. The same people that seem to have no problem with emotional intensity when it comes to creationists and such. Shermer’s behavior deserves quite a few emotionally intense negative characterizations.
There is a difference between exaggeration and simplification. A simple message can get attention better and can be expanded on. Assuming it’s an exaggeration is fallacious motivated reasoning. An emotionally intense message, even to the point of being an insulting characterization may in fact be totally legitimate. Assuming a positive or negative emotionally intense characterization is just an insult or unacceptable just because it is also insulting is also fallacious motivated reasoning.
Shermer looks like a predatory rapist to me.
RE:Vincent
What the fuck? Nowhere does the OP say anything about anyone making anyone else drink. Everything was about manipulating social situations.
Regardless of HOW Ms. Smith became drunk, the fact remains that she WAS drunk and Shermer offered to walk her back to her room but didn’t, and instead brought her to his room and then had sex with her, while she was horribly drunk. Which is rape.
Which is something poor Vincent doesn’t want to consider.
Hence the red herrings.
@Sonderval:
I can see how someone might perceive implied violence in my choice of phrase, and for that I apologize.
However, in the context of my tale of nearly experiencing alcohol poisoning due to involuntary consumption of alcohol, I’m not in much of a mood for tone trolling, which is how I’m perceiving your comment. He needs to fuck off hard, and in your case I’m torn between apologizing (see above) and suggesting that you fuck off as well.
I’m pretty sure sonderval was criticizing the violent rhetoric rather than your tone, A Masked Avenger. I had the very same happen to me yesterday. It annoyed me at first, but after some reflection I’m glad I was called out for it.
I guess Vincent has never drunk any alcohol, so let me help explain part of its effects. It can reduce your good judgement about how much to drink. So someone can pour more and cajole you and you’re liable to overdo it.
This happened to me just last week, in a minor way, a a Sunday brunch with surprisingly decent all you want sparkling wine. When I was in my mid twenties it happened with a bottle of tequila, more major that time. And I’m generally pretty good with judgement when alcohol-impaired.
The violence. (I don’t know how sonderval has read my mind, other than by paying attention, but there it is.)
Anger is allowed, just not violent imagery.
@Ophelia # 23:
I’m not getting the connection. That they are not responsible for being raped does not change the probability of it occurring in particular situation. Either it is or is not a reasonable expectation.
Are you actually meaning what was said in #24:
While people ought not to rape other people, there are places and situations where crimes (such as rape) are more likely to occur. It doesn’t make sense to me to base ‘reasonable expectations’ on how people ‘ought’ to behave rather than how they actually behave. But if this was just a way of saying that people often do not behave as they ought, then we are in agreement.
Sorry, I messed up the quoting on that last post.
@Ophelia, #39:
Thank you. I apologize for the violent imagery. Thank you to Sonderval and Anthony K as well.
I’m surprised how much anger came up, remembering that incident.
Yes, Beth, that’s what I meant. I didn’t mean “expectation” in the sense of “prediction.” I still think that’s perfectly clear from the sentence before the one about expectation.
It’s like saying “I expect you to be polite to our guests.” That’s not a prediction but an expectation.
AMA – thank you.
Yes, I know that feeling!
#Ophelia
Thanks for the confirmation.
@SallyStrange #35:
That’s what I’ve been thinking. It’s a red herring to argue whether or not Alison is responsible for getting too drunk. OK, let’s say she is. She’s not saying that she agreed to have sex with Michael Shermer, but was too drunk to give that consent. She’s saying he had sex with her when she was too drunk to realize what was happening, let alone stop it, which is rape. Claiming that date-rape makes men legally responsible for a women’s drunken mistake is a common tactic of rape apologists; so it’s not surprising to see some people try to steer the conversation in that direction.
Ay. The whole thing is a red herring. It wouldn’t matter if Smith or anyone deliberately and knowingly downed a 26 in one go. Now, I’m happy to use someone’s manipulations as evidence that they knew what they were doing (i.e. to show that “I didn’t know they were drunk” isn’t a good excuse if, say, one is spiking drinks with an extra shot), but otherwise, it’s a distraction.
Vincent, think of it this way–the worst thing guys generally think when they wake up from being drunk at a gathering is, “Oh, crap! Did someone take a Sharpie to my face and post photos to the Internet?” The worst thing most women get to worry about was, “Did I get raped?” That, of course, is if they’re lucky enough not to “wake up” dead.
How would you like to live in a world where it was, apparently, acceptable for a passing stranger at a party to notice you were drunk, “help” you to a room and cut off your testicles? Just one of them things, eh? Do you suppose you, or Richard Dawkins for that matter, would just throw up your hands and say, “Welp, that’s just the cost of getting drunk!”? Honestly?
And please, for the love of whatever strikes your fancy, stop throwing the word “slander” around until you understand what it means.
You are wrong about this. I say this as an insurance agent who has just reviewed a standard homeowners policy form. It’s not a condition of coverage that you be sober – or even present – nor with doors and windows locked. This is because burglary is a crime and leaving doors and windows unlocked is not. If you don’t believe me your state’s deptartment of insurance probably has the top 10 homeowners policy forms used in your state. Review for yourself.
There was a video posted somewhere around here, not many weeks ago. In it, a young man is shown bringing an obviously inebriated young woman into a room. He then lays her down on the couch, and…..puts a blanket on her so she can sleep it off.
Guys, do that.
There’s plenty of examples of what not to do.
I AM ATHEIST! MY GUT FEELINGS IS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!
While some people above have pointed out that this is not, in fact, how insurance policies work, I’d like to add: so what if they did? Are we really supposed to model how we treat rape victims after heartless insurance companies denying claims whenever possible for profit?
Warning: I’m going to write about being raped.
.
The first night I was on a study abroad trip on a ship, I got drunk. Really drunk. Three of us bought $10 drink passes and each bought a round. Several people gave me free drinks. Unlimited wine was served with dinner. I don’t remember much after that. Apparently, my fellow students saw me making out with a 33-year-old Marine by the bar. Soon after we went to his room. I don’t remember much of the night but I do remember him attempting to have sex with me and me refusing saying he wasn’t wearing a condom. He told me if I didn’t want to have sex, I could leave, ignoring the fact that I was incapable of standing, let alone walking, at this point.
.
I woke up around 9 or 10am, already late for class and managed to join the other students despite having the worst combination of seasickness and hangover imaginable. Some older passengers brought me ginger and home remedies as I threw up off the side of the ship. At the time, I was convinced that we must’ve just kissed and then I fell asleep, ignoring my lack of clothes as part of a make-out session. I was in a lot of pain, but I ignored that too.
.
On the shore of the island we reached that day, the man tried to talk to me and I was purposely rude to him, which evidently made him worry that he’d taken advantage of me – as if my protests during the act weren’t enough to inform him. He spent several days of the trip laughing at me as he told me new and humiliating aspects of the event, despite my protests that I didn’t want to know. He had had anal sex with me, even though it was something I refused to do in even relationship situations. He attempted to urinate on me, which I managed to fight back enough to avoid. He claimed I was the initiator and aggressively into it, mistaking the bruises and scratches I left for passion instead of self-defense.
.
Fuck anyone who says this was my fault or partially my fault or that I was responsible. They’re no better than the man in the next cabin over from my rapist who heard what was going on and told him the next day to “keep it down next time.” They are aiding rapists.
^ That, with bells on.
I’m glad you banned Vincent, but I’m going to reply to the ghost of his commentary…Vincent, you made two crucial errors.
(1) That people are always responsible for their own drunkenness. We all agree that people can be the agents of their own inebriation, but there are many ways to make people drink more than they mean to, some of which have already been mentioned in thread, but can also include topping up orange juice with vodka so that the person doesn’t even know they’re having alcohol, or giving people who are alcohol-naive much larger doses of alcohol than they can handle when they are not experienced enough to know their own physiological limits.
(2) Even more important, when a person is 100% responsible for their own drunkenness, if someone has sex with them when they are too inebriated to consent then that is rape. It does not matter how they got drunk, rape is implicit in having sex without consent. I bet you’d call it theft if you got drunk and the person you were with went through your clothes and stole your credit cards, and I’d bet you’d consider that person a thief who had taken advantage of you when you were vulnerable. So why the defence of rapists?
More and more it seems to me that the ‘personal responsibility for getting drunk’ crowd/side are viewing the situations that we’d call (date) rape quite differently. They seem stuck on the idea that the victim just chose to have sex, or agreed to it, while drunk and so it’s not rape. Then just regretting that decision in the morning as if it were any other bad decision.
I’m basically a teetotaler. But I do have the impression that people do have sex they wouldn’t have wanted to do while sober, and regretted it. There are, for instance, plenty of (usually sexist) jokes about men waking up with women they find unattractive.
But the stories I keep seeing of actual claims of rape are like Smith’s, or Anne Marie’s above, or Stubenville. Those seem like clear-cut cases of people taking advantage of people who are intoxicated/drugged. I don’t see what’s so hard to get about it. I don’t see all this fuss when people commit other kinds of crimes against the intoxicated or otherwise helpless.
I suppose this sort of thing is a big part of why I don’t drink. I’m a worrier too easily scared off by the horror stories.
Also, I want to chime in on the insurance thing. I work in the IT department of an insurance company. Probably not quite the expertise of noxiousnan as an agent.
But I’m pretty certain it would be outright illegal for the insurance company to refuse to pay in that situation, for the reason noxiousnan gave.
Now, there are other things insurance companies can do to encourage loss mitigation practices like locking your doors. Enough theft claims and they might stop insuring you. A big one is the deductible which discourages small claims. (As it’s explained to me, insurance is still mostly designed around major catastrophes like the house burning down.) Mostly it’s just about the discounts and surcharges relating to your risk – and solidly locked doors are a lower risk.
But in the end, burglary is burglary however hard you did or did not try to prevent it.
False beliefs are not delusions, genes are molecules and don’t have character traits, famous writers understand how language works.
I mean really, it’s hilarious how Vincent tries to defend Dawkins using his own ignorance of psychology and Dawkins’s presumed inability to understand the use of words.
I’M A SKEPTIC AND WHAT IS THIS
@Masked Avenger
Thanks, it was really the violent imagery that put me off – apart from that, curse as much as you like as far as I’m concerned.
I think the expectation should be that if *anyone* gets shitfaced drunk at a bar/party: the other people at the bar/party make sure that person gets home safely (call a taxi, find/call/write their friends, if they have problems walking, get in the taxi with them and take them home, or walk them home if they live close by).
I’ve done this several times, it wasn’t much effort at all. Apart from that: getting shitfaced drunk is perhaps irresponsible in and of itself, but vastly incomparable to sexual violence.
@John-Henry: The thing that gets me is that I’ve had regrettable drunk sex and days where I was hungover and felt stupid for the decisions I made but I’ve never even considered calling those rape. This was a guy who took advantage of my inability to consent (and ignored my obvious non-consent) to do what he wanted. I never reported my rape for various reasons but I cannot figure out why people think a woman would have an easier time reporting rape than saying, “Shit, I wouldn’t have done that sober. I won’t do THAT again.” If dudes are so worried about being accused of rape for having consensual sex with a drunk woman, then don’t have sex with a drunk woman!
A substantial body of people do NOT have the capacity to monitor and control their alcohol intake. Drunk driving would be impossible after a first offence unless this were so. Anyone can read the charts for bodyweight-time-alcohol and ‘choose’ not to go over the line.
Except in reality their are millions of people who can’t. Repeat offenders are NOT ABLE to act on that kind of knowledge once they have alcohol in their bloodstream. When such a person is given alcohol, the ‘giver’—if they know what they are doing—is as responsible as they would be for giving the victim rohypnol. Ms Smith demonstrated a vulnerability to alcohol that the majority of people will never experience. While it is conceivable (though chilling to think about) that she MIGHT have actually initiated sex with Shermer, she was in no fit condition to make such a decision, any more than she was fit to decide whether to drive or not.
Around the edges of the account, it seems clear that Shermer is quite aware of the effect of alcohol. That he targeted Smith because her perceived her vulnerability. That he manipulated Smith’s intake makes him a rapist.
Crimson@50:
Also make sure they’re lying on their side, facing into the room, and bolstered so they cannot roll onto their backs. This will help them not inhale their vomit if (and probably when) they throw up. If you can, tie back long hair, put a basin/bucket beneath their mouths, and try to stay with them.