Yoffe’s seemingly flawless reasoning first stumbles when she tries to establish the causality between binge drinking and sexual assaults. The high correlation between alcohol consumption and sexual assaults is indeed indisputable. More than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol, one study cited in Yoffe’s article states. But correlation and causality are not the same, and confusing one with another sometimes leads to absurd conclusions. For example, a website called “Spurious Correlations” points out that per capita US consumption of cheese and number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets for the past decade have a perfect correlation. One can hardly agree that one causes another. By the same token, it would be a risky jump to conclude that alcohol causes sexual assault. National Crime Victimization Survey shows that while rape has declined since 1979, female binge drinking is rising during the same period. If we follow Yoffe’s reasoning, we would conclude that binge drinking helps reduce rape. That’s obviously not the case. Furthermore, if Yoffe’s description of the charming, well liked serial offenders is true, then alcohol is simply a tool and an excuse for their crimes. Banning binge drinking won’t necessarily prevent sexual assaults, because sexual predators are still there. Their intentions to rape and inflict pain are still there. If they want, they can simply switch to another tool at their disposal.

If a philosophy titan like Kant had trouble understanding that it’s not the victim’s fault to be raped, then it’s not a surprise that society today is still having the same struggle. A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill college counselor told a sexual assault victim, “Rape is like football, and you’re the quarterback; when you look back on a game, Annie, how would you have done things differently?” A student from University of Connecticut claimed that a school police officer told her, “Women need to stop spreading their legs like peanut butter or rape is going to keep on happening ‘til the cows come home.” Then we saw Forbes ran a piece written by a former MIT fraternity president, titled “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities.”

To stop the shit show, and to retain college women’s ability to protect themselves, Yoffe implores them to stop getting drunk. Her rationale is rather straightforward. If a person often walks across the street on a red light, there’s a higher chance that s/he’ll get hit. If a person likes to play with fire, it’s more likely for him/her to get burnt. As concerned bystanders, we show them that what they do is dangerous and educate them about protecting themselves. Likewise, if we already know that binge drinking renders women defenseless and can be linked with sexual assaults, we bring this message to as many college women as possible. “Yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it,” she observes indignantly. Fear remains that by telling women to not get drunk, we’re also telling the victims that they shouldn’t have gotten drunk in the first place. That’s not true, according to Yoffe, because the purpose of this message is to protect more women, and silence only leads to more harm. By refusing to draw the link between alcohol and sexual assaults, the society indulges women to not take responsibility for themselves and “infantilizes” them. Colleges will always do a bad job of catching and punishing the criminals, because it’s simply not their main mission. Convicting a suspect will always be challenging, because reconstructing what happened to drunk victims is very difficult. In the end, the uninformed will be the ones to bear the consequences.