In a 2025 email to Cornell’s Title IX office in February 2025, Matthew Ingalls, one of the seven men accused of raping a female student “Jane Doe” in a fraternity house the year before, asked why he had not been advised of his rights “as a survivor of this assault.”
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No one at Cornell seemed to take Ingalls seriously — so far as we know, the district attorney never weighed filing charges against Jane Doe, and neither has any representative of law enforcement or the media suggested this should occur.
But why? There’s no doubt that the men involved were high or drunk or both, and that they were participating in sexual activity. Do we not care about their ability to “consent” as much as hers?
The answer, though few on the left want to acknowledge it, is that there are fundamental differences between men and women. And those differences are not just in how they experience sex and how others view their activities. (Some seem amazed that members of Jane Doe’s sorority frowned upon her behavior.) It is also that drugs and alcohol have different impacts on men and women.
In part, these differences are biological in origin. Women’s bodies are simply different: They are generally smaller and weaker. Women process alcohol and drugs differently than men. Women are more prone to blackouts, and blackouts are not the same as passing out. They occur when a person seems to be completely conscious and not at all drunk, but later cannot remember hours of time that have gone by. The experience is more like sleepwalking. And it’s particularly dangerous because people experiencing blackouts can seem fully there, act like they are having a great time and even consent to sex.
In her book “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget,” Sarah Hepola notes that historically “blackouts were thought to be a guy thing.” But then “for a long time, drinking problems were thought to be a guy thing,” too.
Researchers have come to understand that women’s bodies metabolize alcohol differently. Hormones can also affect how alcohol affects women. Even men and women who are the same size experience intoxication differently. Hepola writes: “Nature, as it turns out, insists on a few double standards.”
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Like boys, girls may use drugs and alcohol to cope with bad things that have happened to them or bad feelings they may have about themselves, but drugs and alcohol are also used as a vehicle for degrading and abusing girls. They render girls powerless. When men get drunk, they sometimes do bad things. When women are drunk, bad things can happen to them.
Unfortunately, it’s not just our cultural messaging that women and men are basically the same that have influenced women’s dangerous behavior when it comes to substance use. It’s also the marketing of alcohol and drugs. Women’s increased alcohol consumption relative to men began to appear in the 1990s. In a New York Times op-ed, Ericka Andersen speculated that this was in part the result of marketing. “Alcohol producers saw a lucrative target,” she wrote. “Since up to 85 percent of consumer purchases are made by women, women-focused marketing was a smart move.”
Indeed, “a 2018 study found that women paid up to 13 percent more for the same products as men if they were rebranded as feminine,” Andersen noted. And just as toy companies began to produce pink products to increase their appeal to girls, liquor companies created merchandise specifically for women’s consumption. There’s Skinnygirl Margarita, birthday-cake-flavored Smirnoff vodka, and all sorts of other fruit-flavored, low-calorie hard seltzers.
Cannabis companies are following the same playbook. In The New York Times, Erin Somers describes her decision to cut down on her alcohol consumption after a particularly “boozy vacation.” So she bought some cannabis soda online. Rose Los Angeles produces a “lychee-martini gummy with ‘Italian nipple lemon,’” she writes. Other products “came in flavors like blackcurrant, watermelon marjoram and yuzu.”
To be clear, these are not flavors made to encourage male consumption.
As a society, we should be sending messages to both men and women about the problems of making decisions — especially about something as consequential as sex — while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Of course, it is degrading to men when they engage in these kinds of behaviors, regardless of their legality. But the danger to women is immediate and visceral. That women aspire to use drugs and alcohol in the same ways that men do is cause for despair.
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