How Men React to a Drunk Girl in Public Is Pretty Depressing
Hot on the heels of the viral “Catcalling” video in which a young woman walked around New York City, the way people do, and men said all manners of things to her, the way men do, there’s now another social experiment sparking a similar conversation about how vulnerable women are treated in public. “Drunk Girl in Public” features a girl pretending to be drunk on the streets of Hollywood trying to find her way home and instead, finding that a bunch of men want to take her to their place.
In some cases she goes up to a guy to ask for help, but most of them seem to be able to sense her helplessness from a mile away and by the time they say “hello” to her, the whole thing is so creepy and cringeworthy that you start to consider whether or not you truly ever need to leave your house again. The girl asks them how to get to the nearest bus, and the men offer to take her to their own homes where they plan to ply her with more beer. The worst part is how transparent these men are in their skeevy aggressiveness and how immediately they seem to be able to drop whatever they were doing the rest of the day because they now have a helpless drunk woman standing in front of them.
While this video may or may not be staged the truth is it doesn’t really matter. As probably most women can attest to, when you see a title along the lines of “woman pretends to be drunk on the street asking for help: you’ll never believe what happened next,” most would actually know what happens next — and maybe some of them even lived it. As more of these “experiments” come to light, one has to ask: What is the point? Women already know what happens when you walk down the street in the daytime or what happens when you’re alone at night; it all seems so obvious! But then you get to the comments section and realize that there is a world of people out there who still believe that women’s bodies belong to anyone but themselves, and anything that happens to them, they need to be held responsible for it.
It’s upsetting that a majority of people still seem to subscribe to the “asking for it” school of thought, which I thought had gone away with the horse and buggy. My favorite comment, though, comes from the gentleman trying to equate a person’s inability to give consent while drunk, to DUI’s, asking “why do people with DUI’s go to jail. They couldn’t have been able to consent to get in the car and start driving so why hold them accountable for these decisions that couldn’t have rationally made because they were drunk?”
No matter how frustrating it is to watch these videos, it’s even more infuriating to read the comments and gauge people’s reactions. And it is these very same reactions, the ones that blame the victim or tell women they should just “deal with it” why we unfortunately still need these videos and social experiments. To open up the conversation and finally be able to change the way we all act towards one another — it would be nice to think that one day, this could really be achieved.
