With Freedom Comes Responsibility:

A Conversation About Modern Feminism

There are some conversations we seem increasingly unwilling to have, particularly when they involve women, feminism, sexual freedom and personal responsibility.

And this is one of them.

I believe wholeheartedly in women’s rights. I also believe, especially given my own life experiences, that women should be free to travel the world, wear whatever they choose, enjoy their sexuality, drink alcohol, dance until dawn and live their lives without fearing violence or sexual assault. But believing we should be able to do something doesn’t mean we can do it without risk.

Somewhere along the way, I believe a particular strand of modern feminism, or at least its loudest online expression, has confused the right to freedom with the expectation that exercising that freedom should come without consequences. I’m not talking about the consequences of somebody else’s criminal behaviour. The person who commits rape is responsible for rape. That should not need explaining, although apparently, in some quarters, it still does.

I’m talking about something much more fundamental: Our judgement, behaviours, our consideration for others, and our ability to recognise danger and make decisions that reflect the world we actually inhabit, rather than the utopian world we would like to believe exists.

And I’m questioning why raising those subjects, particularly when discussing women and sexual violence, so often becomes an accusation of victim-blaming. Surely we have reached a point where we can distinguish between acknowledging risk and excusing criminal behaviour?

Or have we become so determined to defend our freedoms that we’ve forgotten that freedom comes with responsibility?

This article makes two arguments. The first is cultural: that talking about risk is not the same as blaming victims. The second is legal: that the way the law in England and Wales treats intoxication and consent deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. Several of the sources I rely on come from feminist organisations and legal scholars who have been making versions of these arguments for years. And I want to be clear from the start about what I am not saying. Clothing does not cause rape. Drinking does not cause rape. Rapists cause rape.

And yes, I am using the correct word, not substituting it for any of the many minimising words now being favoured to outsmart the algorithms. These words do not help in the slightest.

Now, back to the article.

The difference between having a right and being protected by that right shouldn’t need explaining to us, especially when we consider the following:

• We have the right not to be robbed. Yet we lock our doors.
• We have the right to drive safely through our communities. Yet we wear seatbelts and abide by traffic rules to avoid collisions.
• We have the right to travel freely, but we still research the places we’re visiting, consider local customs and assess potential dangers.

Nobody sensible would suggest that locking our doors means accepting burglary as inevitable or excusing the burglar. Yet when we discuss the risks women face in certain social environments, particularly where excessive alcohol consumption and sexual behaviour are involved, the conversation can become remarkably hostile.

Apparently, acknowledging that a woman may be more vulnerable when she is blind drunk is tantamount to suggesting she deserves whatever happens to her.

It isn’t.

There is a considerable difference between being responsible for our own decisions and being responsible for somebody else’s decision to harm us, and I believe we need to become much more comfortable discussing that difference.

We can demand a society where women are safe while recognising that we do not yet live in one. We can also challenge the behaviour of men who exploit vulnerable women while encouraging women to recognise situations in which their judgement, physical coordination and ability to protect themselves may be compromised. We can also be horrified by the judicial rulings that allow sexual violence to continue because they offer no real deterrent. These positions are not contradictory. They are part of understanding cause and effect, personal responsibility and the realities of human behaviour.

So, when and why did empowerment become synonymous with doing whatever we please?

This has bothered me for quite some time and made me hesitate in joining certain conversations. I believe we have become increasingly shortsighted and muddled in discussions about women’s empowerment. The assumption is that because a woman has the right to behave in a particular way, questioning the wisdom of that behaviour is somehow an attack on her freedom. A woman can wear a revealing dress. She can dance suggestively, flirt with several men, make sexually suggestive comments, drink alcohol and enjoy the attention she receives. She has every right to do those things.

• But does having the right to do something automatically make it a sensible decision? And does every expression of sexual freedom represent empowerment?
• Are we no longer permitted to question whether certain behaviours demonstrate good judgement or consideration for other people?

I don’t believe we should be afraid of those questions, or any question for that matter.

Why? Because we already recognise that clothing and behaviour are contextual.

Consider the communities I encountered along the River Amazon and Rio Negro, in the Brazilian Rainforest, notably the Yanomami, who live in the Amazon rainforest area of both Brazil and Venezuela. Traditionally, Yanomami men and women wear very little: strings, beads, body paint, perhaps a minimal covering, rather than anything resembling Western garments, although during my time in the rainforests, the presence of Western clothing was visible… especially when it came to football shirts from Manchester. Given this Indigenous context, minimal dress is ordinary, not an invitation.[1]

When we place that same degree of nudity within a different society, the interpretation changes considerably. We know the body hasn’t changed, but the cultural meaning attached to it has.

This is precisely why clothing cannot be treated as evidence of availability, invitation or consent. If the same body carries entirely different meanings in different places, then the meaning lives in the eye of the observer, not in the woman. Nor does minimal clothing explain sexual violence. Reports from the Hutukara Yanomami Association describe illegal gold miners invading Yanomami land, giving women and girls alcohol and drugs, demanding sex in exchange for food, and sexually abusing and raping them.[2] What explains that violence isn’t what the women were wearing. It’s who arrived on their land and what those men believed they could get away with… especially after intoxicating them with alcohol and drugs. Rapists are not stupid.

We understand this in other settings, too.

The way someone dresses and behaves in a nightclub is generally different from how they present themselves in a corporate boardroom or a classroom. This isn’t because the human body is inherently shameful, but because societies develop expectations about appropriate behaviour in different environments. To give a further example of how appropriate it is for women to dress, it is highly unlikely to see a female wedding guest dressed in white to match the bride. Hugely inappropriate.

To be clear, I’m talking here about social context and consideration for others, not about risk. Nothing in this section suggests that what a woman wears, or how she flirts or dances, makes rape more likely or any less the perpetrator’s responsibility.

Clothing is only one element of the conversation.

Sexual interest can be communicated through words, eye contact, smiles, body language and physical movement. It can be subtle or explicit. Anyone who enjoys a well-written erotica novel understands that sexual attraction doesn’t require nudity or even physical contact. We communicate interest through countless signals. Some are intentional. Others are misunderstood – and alcohol can make those distinctions considerably harder to recognise.

I’m not suggesting that flirtation constitutes consent. It doesn’t. Nor am I suggesting that a woman who deliberately attracts sexual attention is obliged to follow through. She isn’t. I am asking whether we should be more willing to discuss the consequences of our behaviour, particularly when we know that other people may interpret our intentions differently; and whether the celebration of sexual freedom has sometimes overshadowed the importance of emotional maturity, good judgement and self-respect.

For me, getting so intoxicated that I cannot think clearly, communicate effectively or remain aware of my surroundings isn’t an expression of empowerment. It’s a loss of control. Others may disagree with that assessment. They’re entitled to. But surely I’m equally entitled to question why losing control should be celebrated as liberation.

Now I want to highlight ‘Absolute freedom ’, which is a contradiction we rarely examine. And the word absolute is important here.

If we argue that women should have absolute freedom to behave however they choose, whenever they choose, what happens when their behaviour affects somebody else? And are we prepared to extend that same understanding of absolute freedom to men?

Almost nobody states it in those words, and I don’t want to put them into anyone’s mouth. But the idea is implied whenever any mention of risk is treated as an attack on freedom, and that is the version I’m questioning.

I would suggest that absolute freedom is neither realistic nor desirable in any functioning society. Our freedoms coexist with the freedoms of others, and our actions can have consequences for people whose experiences, emotional vulnerabilities and personal circumstances we know nothing about.

Consider the social environment of a nightclub: Men and women are drinking, dancing, flirting and pursuing sexual encounters. Nightclubs are often referred to as a ‘meat market’, signifying how little women are already valued based on what they are wearing or how they behave. Now, a woman may deliberately encourage a man’s attention, dance intimately with him, engage in sexually suggestive conversation and then decide she has no further interest. She has every right to change her mind.

Even during consensual sexual activity, either person can withdraw consent. No explanation is required.

I include this next section because the same principle runs through both halves of this article. Freedom and accountability apply to everyone, and none of it changes the central fact that sexual violence is the responsibility of the person who commits it.

• But what if the interaction also involves deliberate humiliation? What if somebody knowingly manipulates another person’s feelings, mocks their vulnerability or treats them as an object of amusement?
• Are we willing to acknowledge that women can behave cruelly towards men, just as men can behave cruelly towards women?
• Or does our commitment to women’s empowerment make us reluctant to examine women’s capacity to cause emotional harm?

There is an important distinction between rejection and mistreatment, one which is often overlooked.

Being rejected does not mean someone has been abused. Disappointment, sexual frustration and wounded pride do not create an entitlement to another person’s body, regardless of how many men would like to think otherwise. But deliberate psychological cruelty is not automatically harmless because the person engaging in it is female.

We shouldn’t dismiss men’s emotional wellbeing, either, simply because men have historically occupied positions of greater social power.

In many areas of society, we recognise emotional abuse and coercive control as serious issues, although coercive control involves patterns of behaviour far beyond ordinary rejection or unkindness. So why would we pretend that women are incapable of emotional manipulation, good or bad?

They aren’t, and we know that. It is why so many women use ‘their weapons’, as my ex-mother-in-law called them, to get their own way. The elevated breasts of the Wonderbra and the provocative high-heels and fishnet tights, the bold lipstick, heavily smoked eyes, and a wink over the shoulder will have most men stand to attention. There is a reason Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boo were drawn the way they were.

Acknowledging this doesn’t diminish the seriousness of violence against women. It simply recognises that human beings, regardless of sex, are capable of behaving badly. Equality cannot mean demanding accountability from men while treating criticism of women’s behaviour as inherently unacceptable. Of course, this responsibility works both ways.

A man who experiences repeated rejection, humiliation or frustration remains responsible for how he responds. His emotions may deserve understanding, but they do not excuse aggression, coercion or sexual violence. Nobody has an obligation to satisfy somebody else’s sexual expectations, and this is where personal freedom meets personal responsibility – a distinction we should be teaching and discussing without hostility.

Personal responsibility is not victim-blaming.

I have a particular reason for refusing to accept that discussions about personal safety should be silenced. I was an MMA fighter. I know how to defend myself, and how to immobilise someone else in an instant. I understand physical vulnerability, situational awareness and the importance of recognising danger. And yet I was still drugged and raped. I hadn’t been out drinking excessively. I’d actually been at a school governors’ meeting and gone out for dinner afterwards, with someone I’d previously been in a relationship with. There was no reason to anticipate what would happen, and yet I was spiked, transported to two different locations and raped. The man involved denied what had happened, despite describing me as being so disoriented that I didn’t know where I lived, and was without shoes or a coat in the middle of October.

He was recognised by the police from my description alone and subsequently formally identified. His DNA was already on file. I may not have known him before that night. But the police recognised him from my description before his DNA was matched to the forensic evidence harvested from my body over several hours.

I share this because there is a dangerous simplicity in the belief that women can protect themselves from sexual violence merely by making sensible choices.

We cannot.

Yes, we can reduce certain risks. We can develop awareness, learn self-defence, and more importantly, we can avoid becoming dangerously intoxicated and make decisions about the people and environments we trust. And still, sexual violence can occur.

There is evidence for some of this in a randomised trial of 893 first-year university women at three Canadian universities: a twelve-hour sexual assault resistance programme reduced completed rapes by 46 per cent over a year compared with a control group.[3] It didn’t tell women what to wear or how much to drink. It taught them to recognise coercion early and to resist it, and its lead researcher reports that it also reduced woman-blaming. The authors noted that women cannot control men’s behaviour.

But none of those precautions guarantees safety. None of them removes the responsibility of the person who chooses to commit sexual violence. My experience demonstrates that, painfully, whilst also raising another question:

If a woman who has trained to defend herself, hasn’t been excessively drinking and is spending time with someone she believes she can trust can still be rendered helpless, what protection does a woman have when her ability to assess danger has been compromised by alcohol or drugs?

That is not an argument for blaming women who drink. It’s an argument for understanding vulnerability, including the vulnerability that perpetrators deliberately create or exploit.

Research suggests that exploitation isn’t incidental. Studies of men who commit sexual assault, including David Lisak and Paul Miller’s well-known work on undetected offenders (2002),[4] suggest that a small minority are responsible for a large share of assaults. Reviews of the alcohol research describe a pattern in which some men deliberately target women who are drinking because they expect them to be easier to control and exploit.[5] Their conduct is the crime. Understanding it is the opposite of blaming the women they choose.

Rape Crisis England & Wales is unequivocal that responsibility for sexual violence lies with the perpetrator, regardless of the survivor’s clothing, alcohol consumption or previous interactions.[6]

I agree; but I also believe that recognising the responsibility of perpetrators should not prevent us from having conversations about personal risk assessment.

We educate people about financial fraud and scam artists without suggesting that fraud victims deserve to lose their money. We’ve encouraged people to protect their belongings in populated areas, in cars, at universities, and to take out insurance, without excusing theft. Crossing roads safely has been taught without suggesting that someone who fails to look both ways deserves to be hit by a car.

Why, then, should we abandon discussions about alcohol, judgement and vulnerability because those discussions might be uncomfortable?

There is, however, an important reason to be precise. Research demonstrates that victim-blaming is not imaginary. In 2017, the Fawcett Society published a report, Sounds Familiar, based on a survey of more than 8,000 people. When respondents were asked whether a woman who went out late at night, wore a short skirt, got drunk and was then sexually assaulted was totally or partly to blame, 38% of men and 34% of women agreed.[7]

I find those figures disturbing as they demonstrate why women’s rights organisations are understandably sensitive to conversations about clothing, alcohol and sexual violence. The figures also demonstrate why we need to be more precise in our thinking. The fact that some people wrongly assign responsibility for rape to victims does not mean that every discussion of precautionary behaviour is an exercise in victim-blaming. In a mature, critically thinking society, we should be intellectually capable of discussing risk without confusing it with guilt. We should be able to challenge harmful behaviour without suggesting anyone deserves to be harmed, but herein lies the problem: Critical thinking isn’t widespread, and neither is intelligent, respectful discussion.

Recently, I have been reflecting on and challenging the ‘Too intoxicated to drive, but sober enough to consent’ idea because if I’m deemed too drunk to get behind the wheel of a car, then I should also be too drunk to give consent. We need to move beyond our current social attitudes and examine the law itself because the contradiction of intoxication treatment judicially deserves much greater public scrutiny.

In England and Wales, the legal drink-driving limit is 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood, or 35 micrograms per 100 millilitres of breath.[8]

In Scotland, the blood-alcohol limit is lower, at 50 milligrams per 100 millilitres.[9]

We accept that alcohol can compromise the abilities necessary to drive safely, and we don’t allow drivers to decide for themselves whether they’re sufficiently capable of operating a vehicle. We establish legal thresholds. Yet when it comes to sexual consent, we take a different approach.

Under section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a person consents when they agree by choice and have the freedom and capacity to make that choice.[10] On the face of it, it sounds perfectly reasonable, until we examine how the law interprets intoxication.

In R v Bree (2007), the Court of Appeal established that substantial voluntary intoxication does not automatically remove someone’s capacity to consent to sexual activity. The court also recognised that capacity could disappear before someone becomes unconscious. In other words, a person can be heavily intoxicated and still be considered capable of consenting.[11]

Read that again: substantial voluntary intoxication does not automatically remove someone’s capacity to consent to sexual activity.

If someone is considered to be intoxicated to make the decisions necessary to drive a car legally, why should we assume they retain sufficient capacity to make an informed decision about sexual activity? Of course I’m aware that driving and sexual intimacy are different activities. One involves operating a potentially dangerous machine in a public environment. The other involves bodily autonomy and private relationships…

…which could lead to lifelong mental health injuries and the potential production of another human life – two factors that seem to get overlooked entirely.

I understand why the law treats them differently, I do, but understanding the distinction doesn’t mean we should accept the existing approach without question.

I should also be clear about what the analogy is and isn’t. A drink-drive limit is a line drawn to manage risk to other people on the road. It doesn’t measure capacity, and people’s tolerance varies enormously. I use it to illustrate a principle that we sometimes set thresholds when individual judgement is unreliable, not as a ready-made test for consent.

The consequences of rape are lifelong for the person who has been raped. A rape conviction is also among the most serious a court can impose, which is a further reason to want rules clear enough that everyone knows where the line sits. Those consequences are not equivalent, and the perpetrator bears responsibility for the crime, not the aftermath that the victim/survivor has to live with long after rape has occurred.

Consequences should also warrant serious scrutiny of how we establish meaningful consent. So I bring you another scenario: Too drunk to shop sensibly, but sober enough to consent?

If the comparison with drink-driving seems too far removed from everyday life, let’s consider something rather more familiar: Drunken online shopping so many laugh about.

We’ve probably all heard stories about somebody waking up after a night of drinking to discover they’ve ordered something ridiculous online. A pair of shoes they don’t remember buying, an expensive gadget they don’t need, or something so utterly bizarre that even the delivery driver might raise an eyebrow, and yes, there’s a serious point behind my humour.

In 2019, a survey of readers of The Hustle found that 79% of respondents who consumed alcohol had shopped online while intoxicated. Their average annual spending on these purchases was $444.[12]

The survey’s authors extrapolated an estimated $48.4 billion in annual spending related to drunk online shopping in the United States. Magrizos and colleagues, whose research I come to below, cite a broadly similar estimate of around US$45 billion a year.[13]

Amazon accounted for 85% of the intoxicated shopping reported by respondents.

Now, these figures came from a relatively affluent, self-selected readership, rather than a nationally representative sample. So we shouldn’t mistake that $48.4 billion estimate for an independently verified measure of the entire American population. Nevertheless, the behaviour is familiar enough to have attracted serious academic attention. In 2026, Solon Magrizos and colleagues published Drunk Shopping Online: A Conceptual Framework of Impaired Consumer Decision-Making and Implications for Ethical Marketing in the Journal of Business Ethics.[14] Drawing on research into alcohol’s effects on cognition and behaviour, the authors explored how intoxication can weaken self-control, narrow attention and increase susceptibility to immediate rewards.

They also raised questions about the ethical responsibilities of businesses that profit from consumers whose decision-making abilities are temporarily impaired.

The paper is conceptual rather than empirical, but its logic is instructive. The authors suggest that platforms able to detect impairment should detect, disclose and defer the purchase, because it isn’t obvious why the burden of protection should fall on the impaired shopper rather than on the business profiting from them. In other words, responsibility shifts towards the party with the power to notice. That is closer to my argument about consent than it first appears.

Think about that for a moment.

We’re now having academic discussions about whether online retailers should bear some responsibility for taking advantage of intoxicated customers because alcohol can interfere with their ability to make considered purchasing decisions.

Yet when it comes to sexual consent, we continue to rely on an individual assessment of whether an intoxicated person retained the capacity to choose.

Of course, buying something ridiculous on Amazon isn’t comparable to being raped. Nor does making an impulsive purchase automatically mean somebody lacked the legal capacity to enter a transaction. But the underlying question about impaired judgement deserves consideration.

If alcohol can narrow our attention, reduce our inhibitions and compromise our ability to consider consequences when we’re spending money, what does that tell us about the decisions we make when sexual intimacy is involved? Particularly when we consider that sexual encounters involve another human being, whose intentions we may not fully understand and whose behaviour we cannot control.

The consequences of an ill-advised online purchase might be an expensive return, an embarrassing conversation or a dent in our bank balance. The consequences of rape can, and often does, alter the course of a person’s life permanently.

So why are we prepared to scrutinise impaired consumer decision-making while remaining so reluctant to reconsider the legal standards governing intoxication and sexual consent?

Surely our bodily autonomy deserves at least as much consideration as our bank balance.

The research into alcohol and sexual decision-making provides some important insights:

A 2025 scoping review, How Does Alcohol Use Relate to Sexual Consent?, published in The Journal of Sex Research, examined 57 studies published between 1999 and 2024.[15] The researchers found that alcohol influenced how people perceived and communicated consent. Higher levels of drinking were associated with more implicit or non-verbal consent communication, while alcohol could increase feelings of arousal and desire without necessarily increasing feelings of safety, comfort or genuinely wanting sexual activity. And those of us who have enjoyed alcohol will know these feelings of arousal and desire well, so let’s consider what that means.

A person may appear sexually interested without feeling entirely comfortable. They may communicate through gestures rather than words, with their bodies responding naturally, and against their will, even if they do not wish to consent. Someone’s ability to recognise another person’s intentions is affected by intoxication. We know this due to the number of miscommunications that occur whilst people are drunk when sex isn’t available, and how people involved may interpret the same interactions differently. That doesn’t establish that every intoxicated person lacks capacity to consent. But it does challenge any simplistic assumption that apparent sexual participation necessarily demonstrates meaningful agreement.

Other research points the same way. In one US study of drinkers at daytime tailgates, whose average breath alcohol concentration was close to the legal driving limit, over 90 per cent believed they could consent to sex and over 80 per cent believed their friends could.[16] That doesn’t show they were right. It shows how unreliable our judgement of impairment can be, in ourselves and in others. The research also highlights the importance of context, in particular where alcohol-related consent processes may begin in pubs, clubs and parties, where people make assumptions about attraction and availability long before sexual activity takes place.

This is precisely why I believe we need to examine the relationship between intoxication, personal responsibility and legal protection. Sexual consent should not depend on somebody successfully interpreting a collection of ambiguous signals from a person whose judgement may already be impaired. Expecting people to exercise greater caution, not less, when they recognise that another person’s ability to make decisions may have been compromised, is surely not asking for much in a civilised society.

Whilst examining the academic literature, I discover that concerns about R v Bree are not new. In 2008, legal scholars Philip Rumney and Rachel Fenton published Intoxicated Consent in Rape: Bree and Juror Decision-Making in The Modern Law Review.[17] Their analysis examined the Court of Appeal’s reasoning and the social attitudes that can influence juries in rape cases. They also considered the court’s concern that further legal intervention might amount to paternalistic interference in women’s lives.

Research into jury decision-making raises a related problem. In mock-trial studies funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Emily Finch and Vanessa Munro found that jurors were more willing to hold a defendant responsible where a woman had been given a drug such as Rohypnol than where she had drunk voluntarily, even when the effect on her was the same.[18] If the same impairment is treated so differently depending on how it came about, that is, from my viewpoint, most certainly a reason to ask for clearer rules.

Legal scholars have made related arguments for years. Sharon Cowan has called for greater legislative clarity on capacity and clearer guidance for judges and juries (2008),[19] and Wallerstein asked in 2009 whether a drunken consent is still consent.[20]

And there’s the contradiction I want us to consider.

Women have spent generations challenging laws created within societies that restricted their independence and treated their bodily autonomy as something to be regulated by others. But does that mean every proposal to strengthen legal protection must be dismissed as paternalism? Surely the answer depends on whether the reform genuinely protects autonomy or unnecessarily restricts it. We should be capable of examining both possibilities because the question isn’t whether women should be free to drink alcohol and enjoy consensual sexual relationships. Of course they should! The question is whether our legal system adequately recognises the point at which intoxication compromises the capacity to make a meaningful choice, and whether we should continue leaving that question almost entirely to retrospective assessments of individual circumstances.

I believe we should seriously further examine the possibility of introducing a clearer legal threshold for intoxication and sexual consent, especially as rapists know they are sure to get away with it when their victim’s memory is impaired due to intoxication – voluntary or not.

My starting proposition is straightforward: If someone is too intoxicated to drive legally, we should question whether they are capable of giving legally meaningful sexual consent. Proposing that principle is easier than translating it into workable legislation, especially when there are legitimate questions that cannot simply be brushed aside.

• What happens when two adults have both been drinking beyond the legal driving limit and mutually choose to have sex?
• Would both be legally incapable of consenting?
• How would criminal responsibility be established?
• Would a fixed threshold provide greater protection, or could it unnecessarily interfere with the autonomy of adults who retain the ability to make meaningful decisions?
• And how would we establish someone’s blood-alcohol concentration when sexual violence is reported days, weeks or months later?

These are serious questions, and ones we need to ask ourselves, our teenage children and each other. They are not reasons to abandon the discussion because they are ‘difficult’ to answer. They are reasons to investigate it properly, with care and fortitude.

One possible approach would be to examine whether a specified level of intoxication should create a legal presumption that capacity was absent, rather than automatically criminalising every sexual encounter involving alcohol. Was a blackout present? Was there a mix of drugs and alcohol? How far over the drink drive limit were they? Have they consumed alcohol before, and if so, in what quantities? Had they eaten that day, and if so, how much? Are they on prescribed medication which would impair judgement when mixed with other intoxicating substances? It is therefore vital to give careful consideration to the evidence, safeguards and the rights of everyone involved.

We already have statutory evidential presumptions relating to consent under section 75 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, including certain circumstances where substances have been administered without consent and are capable of overpowering or stupefying a person.[21] Voluntary intoxication does not have an equivalent automatic threshold.

Scotland has gone further than England and Wales in one respect. Under section 13(2)(a) of the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009, free agreement is absent where someone is incapable, because of the effect of alcohol or any other substance, of consenting. There is no blood-alcohol figure, just a statutory test of incapacity that names alcohol directly.[22] Section 74 of the English and Welsh Act refers to capacity but doesn’t mention alcohol. The Scottish approach hasn’t made these cases easy, but it shows the choice isn’t simply between the current law and a drink-drive number.

• Could that framework be reconsidered and built upon?
• Could the law provide clearer guidance on the level of impairment that should raise a presumption of incapacity?
• And could we establish stronger expectations around recognising and responding to intoxication before sexual activity takes place?

I am not suggesting that a drink-driving threshold automatically proves incapacity for every other decision… such as random shopping sprees on Amazon at 2 am in the morning. I am questioning whether the current legal distinction is sufficiently protective, particularly when we know that alcohol can compromise judgement before someone becomes unconscious. The fact that someone is capable of talking, walking and/or participating physically does not establish that they have the freedom and capacity required for meaningful consent. We should be willing to challenge the law when there are reasonable grounds to question whether it provides adequate protection.

Equality means holding ourselves to the standards we demand of others, meaning another part of this conversation deserves attention. If we want genuine equality, we have to be willing to examine the behaviour of women as well as men. That doesn’t mean pretending that men and women experience sexual violence in identical ways, or that historical inequalities have somehow disappeared. It means recognising that equality should not require us to suspend our judgement whenever a woman’s behaviour is questioned.

Women are capable of being manipulative, inconsiderate and emotionally abusive. Men are capable of being caring, respectful and deeply conscious of other people’s boundaries. Neither sex has a monopoly on virtue or cruelty.

Yet some contemporary discussions about gender seem to encourage us to view people primarily through categories of victimhood and power, rather than examining their individual conduct, which I find troubling. Particularly when we consider how quickly social media conversations can descend into collective condemnation, with little consideration for context, evidence or the complexity of human relationships.

We cannot demand that men take responsibility for their behaviour while suggesting that women should never be questioned about theirs. Nor should we confuse women’s historical struggles for equality with the idea that women are somehow incapable of wrongdoing today. There is a big difference between recognising structural inequality and removing individual agency,  and I believe that difference matters enormously.

But feminism itself is not one single argument. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that all feminists reject personal responsibility. They don’t. Feminist thinkers have spent decades examining sexual autonomy, consent, coercion and the social conditions influencing women’s choices. The Fawcett Society has documented the persistence of victim-blaming attitudes.[23] Rape Crisis England & Wales has consistently challenged the idea that clothing, alcohol or previous sexual behaviour establishes consent.[24] And feminist legal scholarship has examined how social expectations influence the way women’s sexual choices are interpreted, including within the justice system.

Much of the legal progress women have achieved would not have happened without people challenging established attitudes about women’s bodies, sexuality and credibility, but supporting those achievements doesn’t require us to agree with every argument made in the name of women’s liberation. Nor does it mean that particular interpretations of empowerment should be immune from criticism.

Being able to question whether the celebration of sexual excess, intoxication or deliberately provocative behaviour genuinely advances women’s wellbeing is necessary, as is being able to discuss self-respect without automatically equating it with modesty. We should also be able to recognise that a woman can make an unwise decision without suggesting that she deserves to suffer because of it. Those are not mutually exclusive positions. In fact, I would argue that the ability to hold apparently competing ideas in our minds, examine the evidence and reach considered conclusions is essential to meaningful social progress. Encouraging this kind of thinking amongst our peers and, once again, our children, rather than discouraging it, is essential. Avoiding it because someone might take offence is causing more harm than good.

We have to remember that freedom is not the absence of responsibility, and I want to live in a world where women can walk freely through every country, enjoy themselves without fear and exercise complete autonomy over their bodies.

I want men to experience those freedoms, too.

I want a society in which sexual consent is understood, respected and protected by laws that reflect what we know about human behaviour and impaired decision-making. And I also want us to recognise that the world we wish existed is not necessarily the world we inhabit.

Pretending otherwise doesn’t make us safer; it puts us at greater risk.

Our rights are fundamental, and our freedoms matter, but having the freedom to make choices does not guarantee those choices are wise.

Having the right to behave in a particular way doesn’t remove the need to consider how our actions affect ourselves and others. Asking women to examine their own behaviour doesn’t undermine feminism. With all the education we now have, we should be capable of examining ourselves with the same intellectual honesty we expect from the men whose behaviour we challenge. We should also be capable of recognising that sexual violence is the responsibility of the person who commits it, regardless of the decisions made by the person harmed. Both things can be true and we need to stop treating them as though they cannot coexist.

When it comes to intoxication and sexual consent, I believe we need to go further. We need to examine whether our existing laws adequately recognise the effects of alcohol and drugs on the capacity to make informed decisions. We need to question whether a legal framework developed within historical attitudes towards sexuality and gender still provides the protections society requires. And we need to be willing to consider reform, even when the answers are complicated because meaningful equality requires more than asserting our rights. It requires us to examine our responsibilities, question our assumptions and recognise that freedom exists within relationships with other human beings.

The question we should be asking isn’t simply whether women have the right to wear what they want, drink what they want and behave how they want, because of course they do, within the law. It is whether we are willing to examine the wisdom of our choices without interpreting every challenge as an attack on our personal freedoms.

I will leave you with two final questions:

• When did acknowledging the realities of the society we live in become confused with surrendering our right to challenge those realities?
• And when did personal responsibility become such an uncomfortable conversation?

For those open to having a respectful, thoughtful dialogue, seeking answers to all the questions raised, I look forward to dancing in conversation with you and seeking solutions, because only when we work together will we be able to make the world a safer place for us all.

[1]EBSCO Research Starters, ‘Yanomami’, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/yanomami

[2]Hutukara Yanomami Association (April 2022), Yanomami Under Attack, as reported by Al Jazeera/AFP (11 April 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/11/illegal-mining-abuses-surge-on-Indigenous-land-in-brazil-report , and OCCRP (27 April 2022), https://www.occrp.org/en/news/report-illegal-mining-threatens-brazils-yanomami-tribe

[3]Senn, C.Y. et al. (2015) ‘Efficacy of a Sexual Assault Resistance Program for University Women’, New England Journal of Medicine, 373, pp. 2326–2335.

[4]Lisak, D. and Miller, P.M. (2002) ‘Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists’, Violence and Victims, 17(1), pp. 73–84.

[5]Pegram, S.E. et al. (2018) ‘Men Who Sexually Assault Drinking Women: Similarities and Differences with Men Who Sexually Assault Sober Women and Nonperpetrators’.

[6]Rape Crisis England & Wales, ‘Sexual Consent’, https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/sexual-consent/

[7]Fawcett Society (2017) Sounds Familiar.

[8]UK Government, ‘Drink-driving law’, https://www.gov.uk/drink-driving-law

[9]UK Government, ‘Drink-driving law’, https://www.gov.uk/drink-driving-law (which sets out the lower Scottish limit).

[10]Sexual Offences Act 2003, s. 74 (Consent), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/74

[11]R v Bree [2007] EWCA Crim 804, https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2007/804.html. See also Crown Prosecution Service, Rape and Sexual Offences: Prosecution Guidance.

[12]The Hustle survey (2019), as reported by ScienceAlert (2019), ‘The Drunk Shopping Survey’. See also Salsify, ‘Drunk and Midnight Shopping Behaviours’.

[13]Magrizos, S., Kastanakis, M.N., Kampouri, K. and Christofi, M. (2026) ‘Drunk Shopping Online: A Conceptual Framework of Impaired Consumer Decision-Making and Implications for Ethical Marketing’, Journal of Business Ethics.

[14]Magrizos et al. (2026), above.

[15]Marcantonio, T. et al. (2025) ‘How Does Alcohol Use Relate to Sexual Consent? A Scoping Review’, The Journal of Sex Research.

[16]Jozkowski, K.N., Marcantonio, T., Willis, M. and Drouin, M. (2023) ‘Does Alcohol Consumption Influence People’s Perceptions of Their Own and a Drinking Partner’s Ability to Consent to Sexual Behavior in a Non-sexualized Drinking Context?’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38.

[17]Rumney, P. and Fenton, R. (2008) ‘Intoxicated Consent in Rape: Bree and Juror Decision-Making’, Modern Law Review, 71(2), pp. 279–290.

[18]Finch, E. and Munro, V. (2005) ‘Juror Stereotypes and Blame Attribution in Rape Cases Involving Intoxicants’, British Journal of Criminology, 45(1), pp. 25–38; and Finch and Munro’s ESRC-funded study, ‘From Sobriety to Stupefaction: Intoxication and Jury Decision-Making in Rape Trials’.

[19]Cowan, S. (2008) ‘The Trouble with Drink: Intoxication, Inebriation and the Legal Construction of Consent’, Akron Law Review, 41.

[20]Wallerstein, S. (2009) ‘A Drunken Consent is Still Consent – Or is it?’, Journal of Criminal Law, 73(4), pp. 318–344.

[21]Sexual Offences Act 2003, s. 75 (Evidential presumptions about consent), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/75

[22]Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009, s. 13, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2009/9/section/13

[23]Fawcett Society (2017), Sounds Familiar, above.

[24]Rape Crisis England & Wales, ‘Sexual Consent’, above.