Crossed signals from alcohol-impaired perception do not cause unwanted come-ons, new research suggests. Instead, aggressors simply target women who appear inebriated
Mar 7, 2014 |By Roni Jacobson

When alcohol is involved, people are more inclined to view sexual aggression as morally ambiguous. New research, however, suggests that men who harass women in bars and clubs aren’t misinterpreting women’s signals because they are drunk. Rather, they may be singling out women who appear intoxicated as easy targets.

In a study of sexual aggression in bars researchers have found that the invasiveness and persistence of unwanted come-ons is not correlated with how much the perpetrator has had to drink, but is instead related to how drunk the person on the receiving end seems to be. The paper, aptly titled “Blurred Lines? Sexual Aggression and Barroom Culture,” after the summer hit by Robin Thicke, was published earlier this week in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. “Its not a blurred line, its a pretty easy line,” says Kathryn Graham, senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and co-author of the paper. “The whole culture that thinks blurred lines is some kind of truth or inevitability, from our data, is a little bit astray.”

The researchers hired and trained pairs of observers to go into bars and record every incident of sexual aggression that they witnessed. In about 90 percent of the 258 cases they documented the person on the receiving end of the sexual aggression was a woman and the aggressor was a man. The other 10 percent of incidents split about evenly between female on male, male on male and female on female aggressions. Because these situations occurred infrequently, the researchers decided to analyze only the interactions between heterosexual couples in which the male was the perpetrator.

Sexually aggressive behaviors ranged in terms of invasiveness from suggestive and harassing remarks to groping and grinding up against strangers. “Invasiveness in particular was related to how intoxicated the woman was, not how intoxicated the man was. That provided further evidence that it probably wasn’t misperception,” Graham says. “There isn’t much question if someone comes by and anonymously grabs a woman’s breast and then disappears into the crowd that he really thought she wanted it. I mean that’s just for his own gratification,” she adds.