Page 101 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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