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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.

Indeed, the topic of women and alcohol, especially if sex is involved, is a recurring source of horseshoe compass unity between libleft and authright when it comes to women's (lack of) agency and accountability:

"He got me blackout drunk on Midori Sours (on the company dime).

“He got me,” not “we got” or “I got.” As if Chris beamed the Midori Sours into her stomach using a Star Trek transporter, with her having no role in the part. What happened to being passionate about the agency of women? Schrödinger’s feminism: Strong, independent #GamerGirls one moment and damsels in distress the next.

Even when a woman is ascribed some semblance of agency and culpability, double standards and Russell conjugations arrive to provide mitigating and inverting factors.

You, @Walterodim, got drunk and became an embarrassing oaf and burden to deal with. What kind of man-child husband has to lie in the shade to sleep off his inebriation? In similar but reversed circumstances, your wife would had just had a bit too much to drink and it was beyond time for you two to retire for the night anyway. What kind of man-child husband would leave his wife in the shade to sleep off her inebriation?

Not sure I agree. I can imagine a scenario where it would be sensible to describe A as having gotten B drunk, or drugged them with alcohol. An obvious example would be A adding some more potent alcohol to B's drink without B's knowledge or consent.

North by Northwest features a good example of what I would describe as the minimum necessary for me to say A(really A1, A2, and A3) has gotten B drunk. I would not describe someone making strong cocktails as having gotten the other party drunk. Not when martinis are often made with often far less less than a splash of Vermouth everywhere.

I don't agree. To more fully lay out a theory of when I think it's appropriate to say something like "A got B drunk" I think of A taking some action that overcomes B's own intentions about how drunk to get to cause B to become much more intoxicated than they intended. The scene in North by Northwest you link obviously involves overcoming someone's intentions by force but I think it can also be done by fraud. Sure, if your martini has an extra shot worth of Vermouth in it or whatever I wouldn't call that enough by itself. But I think spiking an otherwise non-alcoholic drink or mixing less alcoholic drinks (like beer) with more alcoholic ones (like whiskey) without the knowledge or consent of the subject can rise to a similar level.

That may be true once you have experience with alcohol, but I think you overestimate the ability of people with less experience to notice. Also, with strong enough alcohol it can easily be too late by the time you've actually tasted it if you don't handle liquor well. I'm quite a bit bigger than the size of the median twelve year old and a single sip of 190-proof Everclear from a flask a friend handed me with no more explanation than "Try this." was more than enough to knock me out within ten minutes. Fortunately it was in company that proved trustworthy (at least, I have no reason to suspect anything untoward happened after I passed out on the couch), but that experience was a bit of a wakeup call for the risks involved.

and a single sip of 190-proof Everclear from a flask a friend handed me with no more explanation than "Try this." was more than enough to knock me out within ten minutes.

So you didn't notice the extreme dryness and burning as it touched your lips, nor the extremely uncomfortable warming/drying feeling on your tongue and mouth and throat, and you managed to swallow it not expecting these things, and somehow it was enough to knock you out when a "sip" is certainly less than an ounce and an ounce of Everclear is about 1.6 standard drinks (a standard drink being e.g. a 12oz can of 5% beer)?

I did notice those symptoms but as it was my second drink of alcohol ever, I didn't recognize what those symptoms meant.

somehow it was enough to knock you out

We are probably using "knock out" differently in this case. It's not that I fell unconscious due to alcohol poisoning, but just that alcohol (and other depressants) makes me very sleepy and in this case I sipped it, then started feeling extremely tired, laid down and fell asleep.

Most people without experience in alcohol get repulsed by a sip of beer or wine when they are tricked into trying the "stuff adults are drinking" by a cheeky aunt/uncle/cousin. Almost no one, particularly in college or late HS, gets drunk on accident. They get more drunk than they intended because that is just how humans work. They eat more than they intend at Fogo de Chao as well. If a single sip of everclear (which is almost impossible to sip by the way) makes you pass out, even if you are 95 lbs, that is a metabolic problem. That is still less than 2 shots of vodka, which any 12 year old would just end up going crazy and running around like a wildman if they drank. Dogs have weaker livers than humans WRT alcohol and 40 lb rescues can drink whole cans of beer without passing out.

This comment was a hell of a ride. Now I'm just imaging 12 year old vikings running around drunk on vodka.

Dogs have weaker livers than humans WRT alcohol and 40 lb rescues can drink whole cans of beer without passing out.

Why do you know this???? lol

That dog livers are less tolerant of alcohol? I learned that in a neurochemistry class in college where we were discussing which animals were best bio-equivalents for drug testing.

The other part is the result of drunk college kids feeding beer to dogs, which I was not a part of, but certainly saw the after affects of.

"He gave her an alcoholic beverage and she, knowing it was an alcoholic beverage, took it and drank it" is not "he got her drunk. She's responsible for her own decisions.

More comments

Sure, if your martini has an extra shot worth of Vermouth in it or whatever I wouldn't call that enough by itself. But I think spiking an otherwise non-alcoholic drink or mixing less alcoholic drinks (like beer) with more alcoholic ones (like whiskey) without the knowledge or consent of the subject can rise to a similar level.

Not to condescend, but are you familiar with the beverages in question from firsthand experience? I ask because these couple sentences include three things that seem very odd to me:

  • That's not how martinis work, no one would ever add an extra shot of vermouth.
  • Getting drunk on beverages that are ostensibly non-alcoholic would only be possible for someone that simultaneously has almost zero alcohol tolerance and doesn't notice the taste of booze, which is an uncommon combination.
  • Boilermakers are very obvious beverages. No one expecting a PBR is going to fail to notice that it has a shot of Wild Turkey in it.

Yes, I drink quite frequently myself. I intend them as a kind of illustrative example, not necessarily to be taken literally. They are the pointing finger, not the moon.

I have to imagine that all but the least experienced drinker could tell a boilermaker (beer with whisky) from a beer by taste alone.

I can imagine edge cases where this is true, but to say that they're noncentral is putting it lightly. If we're talking about someone that's coerced in some fashion or has so little experience with alcohol that they don't know what to expect, OK, I get it, that's not literally impossible. More broadly though, I think adults can pretty well tell if a cocktail is pretty stiff and if they make a mistake and wind up drunker than they were expecting, they should take some degree of responsibility for monitoring their own intake. If someone hands you an old fashioned, you can pretty well guess that there are roughly two standard drinks worth of bourbon in there. If you get a gin and tonic, you can take a sip and have a reasonable guess at how strong you think it is. If you're at a party where you really don't know people that well, sticking with things that you can count is probably a good idea in general.

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