“You kind of blame it on the alcohol, but. . .”: A discourse analysis of alcohol use and sexual consent among young men in Vancouver, Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is growing awareness about issues of sexual consent, especially in autonomy-compromising or “non-ideal” contexts, including sex involving alcohol. Understanding the conditions needed for consensual sex to occur in this emergent milieu is critically important, especially for young men (ages 18–30 years) who normatively combine drinking alcohol with sex and are most often perpetrators of sexual violence. This study offers a discourse analysis of young men’s alcohol use and sexual consent. Data are drawn from qualitative interviews with 76 young men (including gay, bisexual, queer, and straight men) in Vancouver, Canada, from 2018 to 2021. Informed by Kukla’s non-ideal theory of sexual consent and critical and inclusive masculinities, this analysis identified three discursive frames: careful connections, watering it down, and blurred lines. In careful connections young men discussed their efforts to actively promote sexual and decisional autonomy for themselves and their sexual partners when drinking. Yet, in watering it down young men invoked discourses of disinhibition, deflection, and denial to normalize alcohol use as being somewhat excusatory for sexual violence, downplaying the role and responsibility of men. Lastly, men operationalized blurred lines through a continuum of consent and of “meeting (masculine) expectations” when discussing sexual violence and victimization while intoxicated. Together, these discursive frames provide insights into the gendered nature of sexual violence and the extent to which idealized notions of sexual consent play out in the everyday lives of young men who use alcohol with sex. Findings hold philosophical and pragmatic implications for contemporary efforts to scaffold sexual consent.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it