Joey Salads makes YouTube videos that seem like PSAs from your worst nightmare. Last month, he posted a “stranger danger” video in which he charmed a child into leaving a playground with him. He's back with another piece of service vlogging, and this time, it's to show everyone how easy it is to roofie someone's drink.
In the video, Salads says he wants to “figure out how easy it is to drug a girl.” He heads out into the real world, and lo, manages to slip something into several different women's drinks. (Not actual drugs, but still.) Each time, he’s there to offer condescending advice — “Always hold onto your drink, put a lid on your drink, or never let it out of your sight.” — to the woman he just joke-drugged.
His intentions are likely good. He claims to care about women, and believes he's offering practical advice that could keep them safer. But, the message his video sends is terrible. Telling women to remain constantly vigilant and suspicious takes responsibility for preventing rape away from the people who might commit the crime — and puts it on regular women who are just trying to have a drink.
This garbage bit of social science also creates a distorted picture of how drugs or alcohol are actually used in instances of sexual assault. Joey Salads is a random stranger in a bar, but 82% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victim knows. According to RAINN, approximately one in three sexual assaults involve alcohol or drugs, and it’s much more common for rapists to use alcohol to incapacitate their victims than to drug them.
There are real issues that need to be considered when it comes to alcohol, consent, and sexual assault, as debates this year over "affirmative consent" policies on college campuses have shown. There are real problems with the way law enforcement investigates — or ignores — allegations of sexual assault that need to be addressed. There are men who just don't believe rape allegations are ever true. Joey Salads' hidden camera stunt is not helping.
The idea that a woman is (at least partly) responsible for her own sexual assault if she has been drinking, or if she's not careful enough with her glass, has been at the center of arguments about rape for decades. But here's the thing: Scaremongering over “not keeping an eye on your drink,” as he says, won’t teach anyone about bystander intervention, or teach men to change the kind of thinking that might lead them to get someone drunk in order to get them in bed.