A guy walks into a bar, slips a pill into a woman’s drink. But it’s okay you see, because he’s set up cameras. Surprise! This is a public service announcement. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” he tells the women when their gaze reorientates to their drinks. “I just slipped a pill into your beverage. I’m doing this to show how easy it is to get date raped.”
The women are sobered. This guy offers to buy them another drink. The first woman feels so bad about leaving her drink unattended that she says he doesn’t have to.
What would you do if a guy performed this trick on you in a bar? Would you feel bad? Guilty? Like you’d only just avoided disaster? For averting your eyes for a moment, or for trusting that your male companion is going to keep an eye on your drink for you?
I am so sick of this kind of public service announcement. Another recent example is Australian women being told to keep out of public parks. I kind of don’t even want to share this video, because the main thing it does is reassure potential and existing drink spikers how easy it is to do.
What is the take home message? That women should keep our eyes on our drinks the entire time? If this video is at all useful, it’s because it shows just how impossible it is to foil a person with terrible intentions. This little experiment also shows that:
- Women are prone to feeling guilty no matter what a random guy in a bar does to them.
- Women are still being told to ‘take responsibility’, once again, for avoiding their own rapes.
If one person wants to spike another person’s drink, the drinker might well keep their gaze on their sip-hole all evening, staring at it like a madperson, or they might not drink at all, or they might not go to bars, ever, because we all know how much less likely it is to get raped (and murdered) in one’s own home.
If that guy had slipped a pill into my drink to illustrate a point, I like to think I would have told him to fuck the fuck off.
Where are the public service announcements by young men encouraging basic human empathy in their potential rapists? A video outlining what it’s like to suffer from PTSD, or from unwanted pregnancy, for instance?
