LJ Idol Presents:

You? Devil's advocate? Surely you jest!

A'ight, the way I see it, there are two separate issues here - one is the rape aspect, and the other is the "dumbass high school kids having a crazy underage drunken party" aspect, and they're two entirely different things. But since quite a few people will agree that Issue 2 is, in its own right, just flat-out bad decision making, people who want to blame the victim for her own assault have better luck doing so by piggybacking Issue Number 2.

Looking at that second issue alone - not gonna argue with you for five damn seconds on that one. If you go out and get drunk as a skunk, and the next morning you're hungover as hell and spend the day praying to the porcelain god and desperately wishing the invisible elephants would quit tapdancing on your skull...that's a direct result of shit you did to your own big bad self, and hey, lesson learned. Don't drink like a dumbfuck, because alcohol causes puking and hangovers.

Alcohol doesn't cause rape though. Rapists cause rape. And that's where the "she brought this on herself" argument falls completely apart. Rape isn't a natural phenomenon or some involuntary physical reaction. It's not the same as saying "she was drunkenly dancing on a bar stool, so it's her own fault she fell off and got hurt" or "she got wasted as fuck, so it's her own fault she got hung over." Physical assault is something that one person chooses to inflict upon another, because *they* made the bad decision to violate another human being. It's not some immutable force of nature like gravity (drunken barstool dancing = kaboom) or the body's natural reaction to ingesting poison (you barf and feel like shit, even if it's a really *fun* poison at the time), so it doesn't make sense to classify it the same way at all. But...people sure as hell try, and IMHO they intentionally blur those lines because it makes it easier to blame the victim.

*Everyone* who's at a crazy drunken underage booze festival getting wasted as hell is making a dumb decision, or at the very least, making a decision that could put them in danger of dealing with Unpleasant Shit - they might get hangovers, alcohol poisoning, busted by the cops, busted by their parents, whatever. So sure, our Jane Doe did make *that* bad decision, as did everyone else at the party, and everyone at any of the zillions of parties like it. But the whole internet isn't up in arms every time a teenager gets stupid with a liquor bottle (it's usually just dismissed as silly teenage shenanigans), so this self-righteous chorus of "Well SHE got drunk, it's her fault!" just comes off as a pathetically flimsy excuse to victim blame. Just because more bad shit happened to this girl than normally happens to teenagers who go to crazy drunken underage parties doesn't mean she's any more guilty of bad decision making than any other kid her age who went to a crazy drunken underage party, ya know? So it's ridiculous to say that she had anything coming to her other than a hangover and perhaps an MIP - yet people want to crucify her for it, which is bullshit, because the bad shit that happened to her was a result of other people choosing to rape her, not a result of her drinking underage.

(Also - it's unclear whether or not the victim in this case had actually been drugged, but it's a definite possibility that was alleged at one point. If that's the case, then it removes the "well she chose to get blackout drunk" smokescreen from the equation entirely, unless people wanna say she chose to get roofied too. Not that her being drunk is any excuse for assaulting her, but the people who are trying to use it as one might not even have *that* to fall back on for a convenient source of misdirection.)