Grown up girls take responsibility

At the Drum on Monday February 28 there's another piece by Melinda Tankard Reist on the corrupting influences of pop music

This time it's a song by Brian McFadden written for fiancée songstress Delta Goodrem, titled Just The Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar).

One of the offending lines is:I like you just the way you are, drunk and dancing at the bar, I can't wait to take you home so I can do some damage

Not everybody's idea of a love song, but no doubt it has some personal triggers for the couple involved.

MTR and fellow campaigner, journalist Nina Funnell, take the opportunity to unleash a tirade against McFadden for encouraging a culture apparently known as "passed out p*ssies", in which a woman drunk beyond the capacity to consent isn't taken home in a cab, but instead taken to somebody's place and passed around for sex.

A vile practice, and abusing a comatose woman who can't give consent is sexual assault, no question.

But there is a difference between drunk, and passed out, and having sex when drunk isn't the same thing as raping an unconscious woman. I don't think McFadden is singing about the latter.

What is nowhere mentioned in the article is that women are responsible for their drinking behaviours, and a culture in which women believe that getting insensible on drink is a normal part of a good night out is also a vile one.

A woman has a responsibility to take care of herself. Nobody else can do that for her. It is a nasty world at times, particularly if you are of the drink and vomit, vomit and drink culture.

Years of feminist rage against men seems to have achieved very little, as MTR admits, at least in the world of pop culture inhabited by millions of young women. It might be time to consider turning our attention to educating those women instead of wasting our energies blaming men. This is much harder, of course, but it might have a more successful outcome.

The first thing we should be educating girls and young women about is taking responsibility for their own choices and decisions. If you're going to drink yourself senseless, bear in mind that you might get gang raped while you're unconscious.

We apparently can't stop some Neanderthals doing this, but maybe we can do our best to stop young women putting themselves into the situation in the first place. This will involve the whole village, of course, including the pubs and the parents, and not just some hapless male writer of horrible pop music.