A few more developments on the issue of women getting drugged at local bars. (Read original column here).

One of the sources in that column, Avenue and Gaslight bar owner (and Anchorage CHARR head) John Pattee, was arrested over the weekend for second degree sexual assault after fondling women at the Avenue.

That raises some questions for me about what's going on at his bar, where several reports from women about being drugged came from. It will be interesting to have some context for that story to find out what was really going on.

Responses to my column about women being drugged in bars are still trickling in. The main discussion has been about whether saying women need to watch alcohol intake is blaming the victim when it comes to sexual assault. My position is that women have the power to protect their safety in a late-night bar scene. I don't see that as victim blaming, but others do. Here's a message that came in this morning:

Julia, how about you blame the rapists for rape instead of drunk women? Oh, yeah, that's right, it'd be too haaarrrrrd for teh menz to, you know, treat women like human beings, instead of like machines out of which they "get" sex. (Because sex isn't something that two people do enthusiastically with one another; it's a commodity that women supply to men, dontcha know.) And you yourself wouldn't be able to couch your sense of superiority to rape victims in that smarmy ***concern*** you display.

One reader who I exchanged emails with sent me an interesting link to a recent New York Times blog post
on exaggerated reports of women being drugged.

There was also an interesting a discussion on the national feminist Web site feministing.org last week, which linked to the column under this headline: "Apparently Palin isn't the only Alaskan woman who is into victim-blaming."

After we put out the call two weeks ago for people to contact APD, Lt. Dave Parker said he's heard from several women who said they were drugged in downtown bars. He's putting their stories together into a report for detectives, he said. He's also working to adjust the procedure for reporting a suspected drugging incedent, because some of the women who contacted him said they had a hard time making a report. Police still need hard evidence that women are being drugged, he said.

"We need to get at least one person who can give us a urine sample," he said.