Page 103 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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