From Sunday, workers at the main United States base in Antarctica will no longer be able to walk into a bar and order a beer, after the U.S. federal agency that oversees the research program decided to stop serving alcohol.
McMurdo Station will not be going entirely dry, the National Science Foundation confirmed. Researchers and support staff will still be able to buy a weekly ration of alcohol from the station store. But the policy shift could prove significant because the bars have been central to social life in the isolated environment.
The changes come as concerns grow that sexual misconduct has been allowed to flourish at McMurdo. An investigation by The Associated Press last month uncovered a pattern of women who said their claims of harassment or assault were minimized by their employers, often leading to them or others being put in further danger.
This almost seems to be retaliatory. The solution to unaddressed harassment and assault is punishing the wrongdoers and those who ignored them, not punishing everyone with the implication that alcohol caused the assault (or caused “blurred lines of consent”).
The NSF said it’s also instituting several new measures during the current southern hemisphere spring and upcoming summer that are aimed at preventing sexual harassment and assault at the base, where typically around 70% of workers are men. These include enhanced training, a new survey to collect data and monitor trends, and visits to the ice from experts.
Ah, the long-proven solution to workplace harassment, training videos! Sure to be paired with no-fail quizzes with tough questions like “is it ok to send an unsolicited dick-pic to a coworker? y/n”.
TIL there are bars in Antarctica
