Dr. Phil Asks If ‘It’s Ok To Have Sex With A Drunk Girl?’ On Twitter And Gets Schooled

What did everyone spend a lot of time talking about during the Steubenville trial? I think a lot of us thunked our heads against walls and repeated over and over and over and over again :

A Drunk Person (*In this case a girl) Cannot Consent To Sex. 

Remember that? I think the majority of people know this, and I think the majority of us remind our teenagers of this fact. Dr. Phil even did a show on Steubenville, where this very topic was discussed.

[youtube_iframe id=”lafturdgaO8″]

Yesterday Dr. Phil (Or his social media manager, or an intern or someone affiliated with the Dr. Phil show)  took to Twitter to ask this question:

The issue with asking a question like this, on the Twitter (I like calling it THE TWITTER because it jives with my old lady ways) is that there are a whole mess of people on The Twitter who care a lot about the perpetuation of rape culture and the sort of victim blaming mentality that arises from asking the question “If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her.”

We all hear this sort of thing in rape cases all the time.

The alleged victim had been drinking…

The victim was raped at a party, alcohol may have been involved..

And it basically translates to “If a rape victim was drunk, she was asking for it.”

Dr. Phil may have been trying to gauge how ‘Mericuh would reply to this question, but I’m not sure he bargained for the sorts of replies he would get:

And then Dr. Phil deleted the tweet:

 

But not before a whole mess of people posted screenshots and continued playing on his stupid question, and a mess of media outlets wrote about it, including Buzzfeed where one of my tweets was included.

Dr. Phil may have been trying to spark a discussion about consent on the Twitter, but it wasn’t phrased that way, and it just came across as victim blaming which we are all too familiar with. There is now a petition circulating to have Dr. Phil have an actual show about consent featuring experts on rape culture and victims of rape discussing sexual assault and what people can do to prevent it.

*I should have clarified this a bit because people think I am telling them they can’t have drunken consensual sex, which I am all for, as long as you are CONSENTING.

(Image: Muppetswiki)