Says Samelson, "The posters on the walls in my all-female freshman dorm at Tufts offered information about eating disorders, what to do if you think you have been sexually assaulted, and suicide and depression hotlines. The Hillsdale walls that I saw were covered with advertisements for quilting clubs, charity opportunities and a listing of local churches." This can't be because Hillsdale's environment discourages open discussion of assault and mental illness. No, Hillsdale girls just don't get raped, because they are ladies.

Just ask the male friend Samelson quotes in her piece, an alumnus of that fleshpot, the University of Michigan:

I, perhaps unconsciously, observe women to try and determine how they want to be treated. When I see girls at a party who seemingly have no self-control, I'll admit that it's really tough to visualize them as 'ladies.' It's as if they, solely through their own actions, have lowered my expectations, lowered my standards of behavior.

See, when girls drink or have sex, they make men treat them badly. The guys can't help it; it's unconscious. Girls need a nice, safe environment of quilting clubs and church services, rather than the constant parade of lingerie parties and other degradation opportunities they apparently find at mainstream colleges. Because conservative societies never pressure women to do things they don't want to do.

Of course, some college students — male and female — are influenced to drink more than they want or act in ways they later regret. But not everyone who drinks or has sex is somehow pressured into it, and women who engage in those behaviors don't deserve to lose respect. Frankly, I'd rather hang out with a bunch of drunk Tuftsies than with someone who complains about how badly college girls treat each other while simultaneously painting them in the worst possible light.

Lipstick Jungle [WSJ]

And yet Connolly (who doesn't know what a gimlet is, poor thing) heads behind the bar to work with Andrew for one night. He learns earth-shattering stuff, like:

When a guy goes out with a bunch of women, it signals other women that he's not some kind of knucklehead. When a guy goes out with a group of guys, it means he's on the prowl.

Other tips! Men should try the "romantic return," in which they eye a woman, leave, and then come back. "Leaving the scene and then returning because you 'just couldn't let this opportunity go by' takes you out of the Lecherous category and puts you in the Romantic Fool category. It has a Hugh Grant quality that the ladies go for," Andrew explains. (Or makes you look wishy-washy! Or makes it look like asking for my number was something you had to talk yourself into!) Tip #4 is "Don't Dance (unless it's with a woman)", Tip #5 is "Have Good Follow-Up Lines." Andrew says: "Guys get too caught up in opening lines, when it's the next few things you say that make or break you." Actually, pretty much everything you say can make or break you. When you're approaching a woman, you're being judged, period. Act normal and you're gonna get a normal reaction! Act like a cheeseball or a sleaze and you're going to be dismissed. Possibly pointed at, definitely laughed at.

Last, but not least, Tip #6: Beware Of Overfriending." Quote Andrew: "If you pretend you're just a friendly guy, she'll think of you that way. Don't be afraid to get a little sexual when you're talking to women. And don't hide your intentions. It's dishonest, and they can see right through it." Hmm. Maybe. Women are not some exotic and elusive prey that you need to deconstruct the thought patterns of. I've been in plenty of bars and talked to plenty of dudes. The best pick-up line? The one that works every time? When a guy smiles and says, "Hey." But, you know, that's just me.

Find the Right Line [Men's Health]

• Not to in any way indicate that we have anything less than the utmost horror and offense for torture, but Lt. Col. Diane Beaver who once urged our armed forces to conduct more brutal interrogations at Gitmo, testified today before the Senate Armed Services Committee about her role in torturing various people. Even when the jokes aren't appropriate, we still have to make them. [Washington Independent]
• Really, it was the fault of this video, which you should not listen to at your office without earphones, that explores in great depth why the news media didn't cover the "John McCain called his wife a cunt" story. [Erica Saves the Day, Glamocracy]
• Also, studies show you're drinking more than you think you're drinking, so tip your bartender well! [LA Times]
• Oh, what you wanted real news? Fine. Check in with me after the jump.

• John McCain and George W Bush have more in common than just their Iraq, tax and environmental policies. They also both got ahead in life because they had powerful daddies. [NY Times, HuffPo]
• Obama says that Osama bin Laden is free because of the Republicans' focus on Iraq. This will likely be really unpopular among people that still believe that Saddam had WMDs and the Iraq War was necessary to stop him from nuking us.[HuffPo]
• Kansas anti-abortion protesters have decided that if they can't win hearts, minds or good legal cases, they'll just use a century-old law to harass an abortion provider. [NY Times]
• Their brothers- and sisters-in-ideological-fundie-arms are busy trying to get people not to enforce other laws though. Mostly the ones that require that California marry gay people. Assholes. [iReport]
• But there is some good stuff in the world and this country today, like the International Violence Against Women Act that Betty Makoni came here from Zimbabwe to lobby for. See? Not all lobbying is bad, people. [Washington Post]

Methanol is the extra stuff in whiskey and wine and beer, which are, IMHO, the only alcoholic beverages really worth drinking. Breaking it down is the most painful part of the hangover process. If you give your liver other things to work on — eggs, grease — you can assuage the pain. But then there's the matter of assuaging the guilt.

See, Kingsley Amis knows what I'm talking about:

Feeling bad isn't such a bad thing, from Amis's point of view. With its "vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure" of guilt and shame, the hangover provides a "unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization." In his book "On Drink," Amis recommends a raft of remedies for the Physical Hangover and then gets on to the Metaphysical Hangover, a combination of "anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future" that may or may not be the result of alcoholic overindulgence. Dealing with the Metaphysical part of the equation entails reading Solzhenitsyn, which "will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have."

The last time I was truly hungover, so many, many beverages ago — which is to say, last Saturday morning — I managed to get to a bookstore before the methanol began breaking down, leaving me unable to stand. So I picked up the first book I noticed — The Idiot, great title, and sat in the corner on the floor. I stood up sometime after coming to a passage wherein the protagonist, a Christ-y figure, passionately inveighs against the notion that the guillotine, rendering decapitation swift and painless, represents the most humane method of executing someone:

If there were torture, for instance, there would be suffering and wounds, bodily agony, and so all that would distract the mind from spiritual suffering, so that one would only be tortured by wounds till one died.

And I read that and I began to feel guilty for needing, like Amis, that physical suffering to stir up and reestablish my own spiritual suffering, the limited faculties that accompany a Morning After to truly hone in on Why Get Up At All, when…

Yeah, we are all just way too fucking Catholic. No wonder my people all evolved into drunks.

I would like to say "And then I hurled," but I can't hurl; that's probably a Catholic thing too.

The Hangover Artist
A Few Too Many? [New Yorker]

Can you go out to get drunk for the purpose of getting laid and then regret it? Sure. Maybe you end up sexually assaulted (a consequence not addressed by the study). Maybe the guy sucks in bed and you regret leaving the other guy behind at the bar. Maybe you're drunk enough you forgo the use of birth control (a risk cited by the study) and end up with an STI or pregnant. Maybe you drink to repress the acknowledgment of your own ethics about having drunken one-night stands, in which case you should probably stop drinking and having one-night stands and get thee to a good therapist. Regret comes in a myriad of forms, but the report on this study makes it sound as though most people (or, the implication is, most women) regret having a drunken one-night stand despite the actual results of the study:

Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.

Europeans Get Drunk 'To Have Sex' [BBC]

"One word I heard again and again, oddly, was 'confidence,'" writes Daum."'If I can be considered hot here, I'll be hot anywhere,' a rather morose woman sitting on a bar stool in a bikini and high heels told me. 'I'm here to get confident.'"

As they psyched themselves up for wet T-shirt contests or debated whether a given guy was worth flirting with, a lot of women told me that they saw spring break as the proving ground for their attractiveness.

Confidence has become an easy catchall-excuse for everything from dyeing hair blonde to nose jobs and breast implants. We're living in a world with so much pop psychology and issues related to self esteem that it's almost as if, as long as you feel better, whatever you're doing to get there is okay! But what of confidence gained through intelligence, talent, skill or bravery? Isn't there intense pride in working with what you've got (small nose, obesity gene, flat chest, mousy brown hair)?

And, seeing as how most of these women are working with liquid courage, aka alcohol: What's the difference between being "confident" on Spring Break and being plain-old drunk and promiscuous?

Raunch Is Rebranded As 'Confidence' [LA Times]

Interestingly, MacDonald doesn't fully parse the 20-25% statistic (Side note: It's been twenty years: Doesn't a new study seem to be in order? And does 20-25% sound like an over or under-estimation?) but instead descends into a Laura Sessions Stepp-like rant against drunk sluts. "In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus 'rape' cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally." Ah yes, the old "gray rape" defense! MacDonald ends on an even more damning note: "Young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: College is for learning. Fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge." If only young women were at the library studying on Saturday nights, MacDonald seems to be saying, then this rape nonsense wouldn't be such a problem!

[Image via The Daily Dose Book Nook.]

What Campus Rape Crisis? Promiscuity And Hype Have Created A Phony Epidemic At Colleges. [Los Angeles Times]

Earlier: Cosmopolitan's Date Rape Panel: There Are No Shades Of "Gray" When Vomit Is Involved
'Cosmo' Wonders: Is It Rape If You Had Too Many Jaeger Shots To Remember It Anyway?

According to Science Daily, Buffalo researchers speculate that "The physically disinhibiting effects of alcohol for new drinkers may cause them to be more reactive, possibly verbally aggressive, or more likely to call attention to themselves, thereby putting themselves at risk for physical aggression in social drinking situations." And then there's the news that young women are out-drinking boys. James Garbarino, a member of the humanistic psychology department at Loyola University, tells the Washington Post, "When you take off the shackles, you release all kind of energy — negative and positive...By letting girls loose to experience America more fully, it's not surprising that they would absorb some of its toxic environment." We need those shackles to save us from ourselves, apparently! But Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a professor of public health at Harvard, asks the question that's also on our lips: "'Why wouldn't you expect girls to behave [like boys]?' Girls and women are closing all the other gaps." Should this necessarily be a cause for alarm? Not that alcohol abuse is ideal or should be encouraged in young women, but why should women be expected to have fewer vices than men do?

Drinking And Abuse: Dangerous Transition From High School To College For Women [Science Daily]
Catching Up To The Boys, In The Good And The Bad [Washington Post]
Sex, Drugs And Alcohol: Parents Still Influence College Kids' Risky Behavior, Study Shows [Science Daily]

If a woman lives to be 75, she should be able to chug her beer in a dining room. She should chug her beer in a boat, she should chug her beer with a goat, she should chug her beer here and there; she should chug her beer anywhere. And this is coming from a person who is a stickler about manners! But when it comes to booze and old broads, propriety simply flies out the window. Hasn't this lady earned the right to chug when and where she wants? Anyway, I'm off to go enjoy a beer.

Message In A Beer Bottle [Washington Post]

Anyway, the recommended weekly maximum "units" for a woman is 14. Which means we should have one glass of wine every day. Just one! In the new big glasses, though.

Here's the thing: We've got higher life expectancies these days but we're in a fast-paced, globally-warmed, been-there-done-that, terrorism-threat-level-permanently-orangeish world where there are few legal ways to soothe the soul; and sometimes chocolate and pictures of kittens just aren't enough. Many of us emerge from our square-ish homes, travel in boxy vehicles to spend the day in a cube of a workspace. Why not hit the bar for some actual social human interaction? The ancient Greeks had Dionysus; we have happy hour. The government thinks you drink too much? So what?! And if you're successful, working hard, isn't there something civilized about an after-work cocktail? Does anyone else want to raise a glass and toast the invention of alcohol?

Millions Of Middle-Class Women Drinking More Than They Realise Because Of Larger Wine Glasses [Daily Mail]
The More Successful You Are, The More You Drink, Research Finds [Independent]
One In Three Men Drink At 'Hazardous Levels' [Telegraph]
Underage Drinking - The Facts [Guardian]

Doctors Blame Unwanted Pregnancies And STDs On Booze [Daily Mail]
Teenage Risks, And How to Avoid Them [NY Times]

Related: Girls 'Sell Themselves For beer' [News.com.au]

Anyone remember Heather? Our guest blogger from July with the iPhone and Red Sox-obsessed boyfriend? Well, she's still alive and kicking... and drinking her sorrows away as her beau continues to tap away at his favorite gadget and follow the off-season administrations of his favorite team. Below, she checks in to tell us how her winter is shaping up. Or, rather, passing out.

The problem always sets in once the weather cools off. When flip-flop season ends, red-wine drinking begins, and I spend the ensuing fall and winter months guzzling grenache or anything else I can get my hands on. I wish I could say I drink lightly or sip with maturity, but if that were the case I'd not be writing for this website. Frankly, it's rare that I'll have less than three glasses in a given evening (which perhaps is an issue best explored in another column) and thus it's guaranteed that, within a short matter of time, the inside of my lips will adopt an unfortunate purplish hue, and my teeth will be left crying out for a late-night heart-to-heart with some White Strips.

In the most innocent and nascent stages, Red-Wine Mouth doesn't have to be a big deal: the slurry mulberry mouth is more or less unavoidable, unless you're one of those self-righteous assholes who laps at a glass of water with each sip of wine. But true angst lies in the advanced stages of Red-Wine Mouth, when the wine begins to stain the outside of your lips. Normally you'd wipe your mouth every once in awhile to avoid that filmy buildup that invariably appears either on or around your mouth, but you're enjoying yourself too much to remember to stay on top of such matters. What happens next is when things turn tragic: you go to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and rub your lips to get the shit off. Upon a second trip to the bathroom, however, you will note that, despite your efforts to wipe your mouth every few minutes so as to avoid another black-gunk incident, your red-wine mouth has now become a dark stain. In fact, by inadvertently rubbing the skin off your lips, you've left your kisser with nothing but raw skin standing between it and your drink, and now the wine has stained your skin. There's no rubbing you can do — but on the bright side, your raw, stained lips mean that you won't have much gunk to contend with for the rest of the night!

But oh, what you will wake up to. You may have managed to brush your teeth before bed, but that doesn't matter. Last night's purple lips are this morning's brown spots, and you look like you've got some sort of advanced retrovirus all over your mouth. Alas, by wiping off the red-wine-mouth film and more or less rubbing the skin off of your lips, you created a raw, chappy situation that allowed any later sips of red wine to actually seep into your skin. Your poor mouth then spent all of your sleeping hours trying to heal its chapped-ness, and new skin has started to grow in the spots where you so desperately wiped it away. But underneath that new skin still lies last night's red-wine, and the stain has essentially been tattooed into you. Like you're going to go to work with scabby skin on your mouth! So you put even MORE elbow grease into it and rub that deep tattoo stain off of your mouth again, removing with it whatever new layers of skin you'd started to grow and now you've re-chapped your lips. Then you have more wine that night, and so the vicious cycle begins.

Science has yet to address this issue, but my theories about the devastating aesthetic effects of Red-Wine Mouth have been tested no less than four nights a week for the past six years. So what are we supposed to do? Apply chapstick before every glass? (Doesn't work, I tried.) Go through the winter months with perpetually chapped lips? (Not pleasant, I tried.) Embrace our merlot mouths every time we go out? (Won't get you laid, I tried.) In a life where drinking is often the only solution, I'm still looking for some real answers.

Speaking of China, they're resurrecting the space race and all interested in the moon and shit now, as are India and, for some reason, Japan, but it's all peaceful, everyone says, unlike that time we dropped the bomb on Japan and, hey! The guy who dropped it just died, but he didn't want a headstone because he doesn't want people protesting on his grave which, don't people have better things to do than protest on some old guy's grave? Especially now that a fossil is being resurrected and getting back on the air? Speaking of resurrections, I gave a little "squee!" that there's going to be an X-Files sequel next summer, even though the last season sucked I still remember once making a date in college take me immediately home from our dinner date so we could watch the all-new episode and then wondered why he didn't want to go out again.

But, it'll only be a temporary resurrection for the Democrat's Children's Health Insurance bill, because neither the House or the Senate passed it with a veto-proof majority and is everyone really just posturing these days instead of trying to do anything because I thought that's what happened in an election year and that's not until 2008, right? In other election news, the South Carolina Democratic Party, which either has no sense of humor or takes itself far too seriously, killed Colbert's ballot application because he's not a serious candidate- which, how does Gravel or even Kucinich qualify as a "serious" candidate these days anyway?

The Dow is sliding toward potential oblivion despite the Fed rate cuts because everyone is starting to believe our economy is fucked and nobody is buying anything, least of all the 11,000 people at Chrysler that are set to lose their jobs, but Chrysler is going to start making 2 hyrbrids and Exxon profits failed to meet expectations so maybe our environment isn't going to hell as fast as we were thinking? That, at least would be some good news today.

Where are the studies on the effects of, I dunno, six drinks a night? And what about the studies about the difference between only drinking six drinks, and drinking four drinks plus a half-pack of cigarettes, a few milligrams of Ritalin and a line or two of coke with a Kombucha chicken nugget chaser? Because you're, you know, trying to cut back? Where are the studies about the effects of a COLLEGE EDUCATION?

Three Drinks A Day Ups Breast Cancer [Reuters]

• Three cheers for 76-year old Ora Doris Anderson; the senior was thought to be dead after she went missing in the Oregonian mountains for two weeks but rescuers found her alive yesterday. Way to go, Grandma! [CNN]
  
• A Daily Mail writer has her panties in a wad over usually demure women being fond of topless sunbathing. We were laying out topless yesterday not because it was a way of letting out our inner whore but because white boobs look stupid. Besides, Sienna Miller does it and she's a trendsetter. [Daily Mail]
  
• Is breast-feeding the word of the day? Lactivists (heh) took their "nurse-out" national as protesters demonstrated at Applebee's restaurants in 30 states. It would be so much easier to just refuse to eat at Applebee's from here on out — their food is nasty anyway. [Kentucky.com]

• The UN has been meeting with women's rights activists from Iran. Um, they give us oil right? Okay, who gives a shit then. [Ms.]
• This news story is all in French but a reader translated it for us — seven French riot police are accused of raping prostitutes, blackmailing them into having sex for free. But seriously, they were just kidding! It was all a joke! That really is what one of the officers is using as his excuse. [France2.fr]
• A British police chief says the legal drinking age should be raised to 21 because of the rising booze-fueled rape occurences. Um, yeah, it's really worked for us here in the States. Now, where did we put our pepper spray? [Daily Mail]
• Side effects like muscle aches and hot flashes are causing women to stop taking cancer pills that prevent the disease from returning. Unfortunately, the possibility of death increases if the women don't take the pills for the recommended five years. [MSNBC]
• The Senate voted to lift restrictions on family planning aid to overseas organizations that performs abortions (Bush is expected to veto it anyway). Will the FBI come running into our home office if we dare say we wish he had been an abortion? [Let's find out! - Ed.] [LA Times]