Humans are knee-jerk creatures, and even when given time to think things through, they will still often pick a solution to a problem that is both retrograde and not likely to actually rectify any shit.
It’s kind of amazing, honestly.
Take Stanford for instance. This summer they were in the news when a student of theirs sexually assaulted an unconscious woman.
After thinking it over, their response to this was the most inane thing possible.
They banned bottles of liquor on-campus. Not liquor. Not alcohol. Just bottles of liquor.
In an effort to reduce the availability and accessibility of hard alcohol, Stanford University has updated its student alcohol policy to prohibit high-volume distilled liquor containers for all undergraduate and coterminal students living in undergraduate housing. It also prohibits hard alcohol at all categories of on-campus parties, with the exception of parties hosted by student organizations and residences whose membership is 100 percent graduate students. That exemption applies to alcohol in the form of mixed drinks. Straight shots of hard alcohol are never allowed at any party. Beer and wine are the only alcoholic beverages that can be present at all on-campus undergraduate student parties.
Woooooooo HOOOORAAAY no one has ever committed a crime under the influence of beer and wine or by drinking whiskey out of a flask. Whooop whooop whooop.
Here was the rationale given.
Our focus is on the high risk of the rapid consumption of hard alcohol. Our intention is not a total prohibition of a substance, but rather a targeted approach that limits high-risk behavior and has the backing of empirical studies on restricting the availability of and access to alcohol.
Awww yea, science.
The issue is not alcohol. The real issue is that terrible people are going to do awful shit no matter what, and simply trying to keep them less drunk is an ass backward attempt at somehow stopping them. Focus on teaching, educating, that shit. Start discussions of consent when kids immediately get on campus.
Also, people are still going to bring bottles of liquor onto campus. Brock Turner was 20 at the time of his conviction. Perhaps what we need is a federal law that bans people under the age of 21 from consuming alcohol?
If only. If only.
And if this was all they did, that’d be profoundly dumb. But they got dumber. Alongside the bottles of alcohol initiative, they launched a new website called “Female Bodies And Alcohol,” designed to educate woman about their drinking.
It’s bad.
Because, imagine, just for a second (and allow me my extreme Matthew McConaughey in A Time To Kill voice), a woman on campus raped a man, and the school’s response was to lecture dudes about how alcohol effects their body.
Would you feel insulted? Spoken down to? Infantilized?
I bet you would.
[H/T Think Progress]