makes sense of the world around them very differently. Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them. And that is exactly what the myopia that comes with drunkenness makes it so hard to do.
The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk. And if they are blind drunk, and therefore at the mercy of their environment, the worst possible place to be is an environment where men and women are grinding on the dance floor and jumping on the tables. A Kappa Alpha fraternity party is not a Camban drinking circle.
“Persons learn about drunkenness what their societies import to them, and comporting themselves in consonance with these understandings, they become living confirmations of their society’s teachings,” Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton conclude in their classic 1969 work Drunken Comportment. “Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.”
8.
So: At the Kappa Alpha party at Stanford, sometime just after midnight, Emily Doe suffered a blackout. That’s what happens when you begin your evening with a light dinner and four quick shots of whiskey and a glass of champagne—followed by three or four shots of vodka in a red Solo cup.
P: And at some point, do you recall your sister leaving the party?
Doe: I do not.
P: What is your next memory after going to the bathroom outside, coming back to the patio, having the beers, and seeing some of the guys shotgun some beers?
Doe: I woke up in the hospital.
Emily Doe has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, no memory of whether she did or didn’t dance with him, no memory of whether she did or didn’t kiss him, did or didn’t agree to go back to his dorm, and no memory of whether she was a willing or unwilling participant in their sexual activity. Did she resist when they left the party? Did she struggle? Did she flirt with him? Did she just stumble, blindly, after him? We’ll never know. After the fact, when she was sober, Doe was adamant that she would never have willingly left the party with another man. She was in a committed relationship. But it wasn’t the real Emily Doe who met Brock Turner. It was drunk and blacked-out Emily Doe, and our drunken, blacked-out selves are not the same as our sober selves.
Brock Turner claimed to remember what happened that night, and that at every step of the way Emily Doe was a willing participant. But that is the story he told at his trial, after months of prepping and strategizing with his lawyers. On the night of his arrest, as he sat in shock in the interview room of the local police station, he had none of that certainty about Emily Doe.
Q: Were you guys hooking up there before or—before you even moved over?
Turner: I think so. But I’m not sure when we started kissing, honestly.
Then the police officer asks him why he ran when the two graduate students discovered him and Emily Doe on the ground.
Turner: I don’t think I ran.
Q: You don’t remember running?
Turner: No.
Keep in mind that the event in question just happened earlier that night, and that even as he is speaking, Turner is nursing an injured wrist from when he was tackled as he tried to escape. But it’s all gone.
Q: Did you get a look at her while she—this was going on, while the guys were approaching you and talking to you?
Turner: No.
Q: Is it possible she was unresponsive at that point?
Turner: Honestly, I don’t know, because I—like, I really don’t remember. Like, I—I think I was kind of blacked out after, uh, like, from the point of me going—like, hooking up to her, to, like, me being on the ground with the other guys. Like, I really don’t remember how that happened.
I think I was kind of blacked out. So the whole story about flirting and kissing and Emily Doe agreeing to go back to his dorm was a fiction: it was what he hoped had happened. What actually happened will be forever a mystery. Maybe Turner and Emily Doe just stood there on the dance floor, repeating the same things to each