Page 100 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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.
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