Content area
Full text
We investigated whether female alcohol consumption predicts perceptions of date rape based on two personality measures, the Token Resistance to Sex Scale and the Sex Role Stereotyping Scale. Participants were 290 undergraduate students. Stronger belief in token resistance to sex was related to weaker perceptions of rape, but perceptions were not affected by type of beverage consumed. As hypothesized, participants scoring higher on sex-role stereotyping perceived fewer rapes than those scoring lower, but only in the nonalcoholic-drink condition.
Alcohol consumption has been implicated as one of the most prevalent risk factors in studies of sexual aggression and rape on college campuses (Berkowitz, 1992; Bernat, Calhoun, & Stolp, 1998; Canterbury, Grossman, & Lloyd, 1993; Finley & Corty, 1993; Gray, Lesser, Rebach, Hooks, & Bounds, 1988; Kalof, 1993; Miller & Marshall, 1987; Muehlenhard & Linton, 1987). For example, in a sample of 925 undergraduate women, Fritner and Rubinson (1993) found that greater alcohol use was associated with more experiences of male sexual aggression. Miller and Marshall also found that 60% of the women in a sample of female victims of coerced intercourse reported that this experience occurred while they were under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Thus, female sexual victimization appears to be linked to female alcohol consumption. In this study our goal was to understand further how female alcohol consumption is perceived in sexual situations. Our purpose in this study was twofold. We investigated two personality characteristics to test how each was associated with perceptions of rape when female alcohol consumption was involved: belief in token resistance to sex and traditional attitudes towards women.
In the larger date rape literature, support exists for the notion that many date rape situations can be attributed to a belief in token resistance to sex, which is a belief that women say no to sex when they really mean yes (Muehlenhard & Hollabaugh, 1988; Osman, 1998). Men who believe that women use this type of resistance appear to be convinced that the women say no because they do not want to defy traditional feminine sexual scripts and do not want to seem eager to engage in coitus (Check & Malamuth, 1983). In fact, one personality characteristic that has been linked to belief in token resistance to sex...