Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard
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According to Anne, she had a great time that night. Temporarily released from the constraints of informal social control (i.e., her boyfriend), she went to a bar, drank “Girl Scout Cookie” shots, got drunk, and met some new friends:
Some guys scoped us out there and we were flirting and they invited us to come drink at the one guy’s house. We all agreed to go. We had shots of vodka at the house and I threw up in the bathroom but felt better. Then we played spin the bottle and made out with every guy there.13
Peer Pressure
According to the current sample data, spontaneous drinking episodes—like Anne’s—sometimes involve a measure of peer pressure. Among the general public and in the media, peer pressure is an extremely popular explanation for a variety of youth misbehaviors. A common assumption is that many youth would not engage in potentially harmful activities if they were not encouraged to do so by deviant peers. One potential problem with this assumption is that young people may be more likely to surround themselves with like-minded peers who share their interests in deviance. Very little peer pressure, then, may be necessary for some college drinkers. In other words, young people may indeed encourage each other to drink, but students who enjoy the drinking scene are likely to find one another and hang out together (i.e., “Birds of a feather flock together.”). In fact, peer pressure was rarely mentioned in the current data.14 A few respondents did, however, attribute their drinking to folding under the pressure of persuasive peers:
I decided to drink because I felt it would probably be the last time that I would ever get intoxicated (not that getting intoxicated is an important part of my life). I can say that peer pressure was also a part of my decision to drink. Most of my friends drink regularly and constantly want me to join them like we did freshman and sophomore year! (twenty-two-year-old female)
The following informant fought through nausea to continue drinking because she believed her drinking party would not have cooperated with her decision to stop. The persuasive powers of the drinking scene were too much for her to handle: “I had a couple more beers and I took another shot (I did not want to because I felt sick but I did because no one would accept me saying ‘No.’”) (twenty-one-year-old female). Similarly, this nineteen-year-old female didn’t enjoy her drinking episode at all, but her need to feel connected to the social body overrode her displeasure: “I would say that it was a negative experience because I didn’t really enjoy myself or drinking because I felt as though I was only doing it to feel part of the group” (nineteen-year-old female).
Though few respondents named peer pressure as a direct influence on their consumption, more subtle signs of peer influence can be picked up in the data. Take, for example, our friend Tara, who never mentions peer pressure but changed her drinking plans radically because of her interactions with other drinkers. In Tara’s case, part of the pressure to drink more than she bargained for came from the bartenders who were buying her shots of hard liquor: “As the night progressed and more and more pitchers were bought the bartenders decided to treat us to our favorite shot.… Great! Free shots! So we, my roommates and I, chose sour apple shots, which consist of Bacardi 151 and sour apple mix, a very strong shot.”
Tara’s plan to stay relatively sober seemed to deteriorate a bit with every round of drinks that she and her friends consumed. The damage done to her resolve is partially explained by the delivery of free alcohol. According to Tara, you simply cannot reject the offer of free liquor.
I was engaged in a conversation with my roommate and I turned around to see my other drunk roommate flashing her bare chest to the bartender in order to receive a free t-shirt.… So after the bartenders got a show they decided to buy us all another shot… so we take it, you can’t give up a free shot, right? And at this point I realized I had too much.
The reader will notice that in exchange for her exhibitionism, Tara’s roommate received a free t-shirt and the entire crew got another round of shots. Using alcohol as a form of currency to meet women, to reward them, or to get their attention is a common activity, according to my research. And as Tara argues, for some drinkers the offer of a free drink is one they feel they cannot refuse.
The “Deciding to Drink” categories described above are discrete but not mutually exclusive. A college student may choose to drink, for example, because it’s her roommate’s birthday, because it’s Friday, and because she was pressured by a generous (or calculating) bartender. And the motivations to drink and the level of intoxication that one is willing to endure may change over the course of an episode. Reasons to drink and the forms, styles, and methods of consumption are all part of a complex, dynamic, social process. This brings us to the next step in the intoxication process, consumption methods.
Consumption Methods
Much of the anxiety concerning college binge drinking is about young people consuming dangerous quantities of alcohol. We have all heard horror stories about fraternity and sorority pledges drinking themselves to death and university undergraduates dying of alcohol poisoning on their twenty-first birthdays. While tragic, these high-profile stories may not capture the typical college drinking episode. Certainly, some partiers fully intend to get wasted during selected drinking episodes, but not all college drinkers seek obliteration when they drink. According to my research, college alcohol users often employ simple strategies to avoid severe intoxication and perform periodic buzz checks (i.e., “How drunk am I?” “Should I continue to drink or have I had enough?”) on themselves and on their codrinkers during the intoxication process. Codrinkers do indeed influence each other’s drinking decisions, for better or worse, and common consumption methods are not as wildly reckless as popular media images of college drinking debauchery would suggest. Though university alcohol consumption can, and does, get out of hand at times, my respondents suggest that the typical drinking episode tends to be planned and semisystematic. The following section explores some of the patterns, rituals, methods, and styles that govern the consumption process, from getting the party started to pregaming and drinking games to intoxication management.
Getting the Party Started
Okay, so you have decided to drink tonight. It’s Thursday, or your friend’s twenty-first birthday, or it’s Arbor Day. Whatever. What will you drink and what level of damage are you planning to visit upon your body? And where will your drinking take place? Is this a dorm room party? A house party? Will the festivities begin in your apartment and move to the bars? For underclassmen and -women, the party often begins and ends in the dorms. The typical dorm room party starts with an older friend or sibling buying alcohol for his or her younger protégés who gather in a cramped room for a covert, alcohol-fueled congregation. The usual ritual starts with sneaking the illegally procured beer or bottles of liquor into the dorm in book bags, suitcases, or guitar cases. Underage dorm residents must dodge the first line of college social control—the resident advisor (RA)—in order to successfully start the consumption process. Moreover, once the dorm party starts, special care must be taken to keep the noise down, to prohibit intoxicated revelers from patrolling the halls, and to keep the drunken histrionics to a minimum so as not to invite attention from the dreaded RA. The following story is a good specimen of a systematic dorm party ritual:
The most recent time I drank was this past Saturday when three of my guy friends, one of my girlfriends, and I drank tequila and beer in my guy friend’s dorm room.… [W]e obtained the beer from my friend who is 21 and snuck it in with a duffel bag. We drank the beer by playing “power hour” and the card game “asshole.” We drank the tequila by doing body shots with a lime and salt. We avoided authority figures by keeping the music turned down to a reasonable volume in the dorm room so that “noisiness” would not draw attention to our room. We also made sure that we hid or moved out of view of the door any alcohol containers before someone left to use the restroom. (twenty-year-old female)
As this example demonstrates, college drinkers conspire to avoid the tentacles of cont
rol reaching through university housing. Students who live in Greek and off-campus housing must also be wary of university and police surveillance, especially if some or all of the occupants of the house are under probation restrictions due to alcohol violations. The history of social control on our college campuses suggests that women have generally experienced tighter restrictions than their male peers. The residents of female dormitories, for example, often lived under rigid curfews and paid steep penalties for violating them or for having unauthorized males in their quarters.15 There appear to be gender differences in Greek housing as well. Fraternities often host keg parties and alcohol-laden mixers, while sororities are less likely to serve alcohol to outsiders. According to Brandy, a twenty-year-old female, the sorority house drinking at her university is limited to women pregaming with each other in their rooms:
Well, I have a bunch of friends in sororities.… [T]hey drink casually like in their rooms, like getting ready and stuff, but they never throw parties. Whenever fraternity guys drink, they drink like all day long. They’re out in the hallways in their fraternities, they’re outside in the yard, they’re on the roof, like, they’re everywhere. And they’re just a mess. But girls in sororities, they’re more casual and trying to like hide it a little bit more than guys are.
Overall, however, avoiding the agents of social control was not a major concern for my respondents. Similarly, obtaining alcohol to get the party started was not a difficult undertaking for most informants. For underage college drinkers, the usual practice of procuring alcohol involved using a fake I.D., persuading an older friend or sibling to make the purchase, or buying alcohol at establishments known for their lenient selling practices. As many studies of college drinking have already demonstrated, getting alcohol is not a problem for underage students. It is a “nonissue.”
Once the alcohol is stockpiled, codrinkers collaborate to plan and execute a night of drinking by designing partying “stages” (e.g., pregaming, barhopping, after hours) and by setting goals for themselves about how drunk they want to be. The first stage of consumption often involves pregaming rituals and drinking games.
Pregaming and Drinking Games
According to respondents, drinking episodes commonly begin with a preliminary round of alcohol consumption, generally known as “pregaming.”16 “Pregaming” is defined as the preparatory consumption of alcohol before leaving an informal private function or home—such as a dorm or house party—to go out to bars, larger parties, sporting events, or other main events. One function of pregaming appears to be to reach a preliminary state of intoxication that will allow partiers to feel emotionally prepared to meet the social challenges that await them at another venue. Beth, a twenty-year-old sophomore, explains:
The most recent time that I used alcohol to the point of intoxication was this past Friday. A group of girls that I am friends with decided that we would drink a little before we went out. We were going dancing and thought we would feel more comfortable and looser and have a better time if we had a few drinks in our system. We knew that where we were going we wouldn’t be able to drink there so we were drinking to get a buzz and then some to last us the night.
So, according to Beth, she and her friends pregamed for two reasons. First, they wanted to feel more “loose and comfortable” before they went out dancing. This is a theme that runs throughout the data. College drinkers believe that alcohol will lower their inhibitions in positive ways that will pay off when they interact with others in social settings. In Beth’s case, pregaming served a second function. That is, she and her friends knew that they would have trouble getting alcohol at their next destination (i.e., a bar where they believed they wouldn’t be served) so they “loaded up” at home so that they could arrive with a buzz. Like Beth, the following drinkers pregamed with a clear purpose: “We were going to a fraternity party. They have really long lines at the keg, so we wanted to arrive with a buzz so we wouldn’t have to wait for beer” (nineteen-year-old female); “My friend and I decided that before we went out we would get real drunk in our dorm room so that we did not have to stand in the lines for the keg” (twenty-year-old female). As suggested by the informants above, one important function of pregaming is to store alcohol reserves in the bloodstream when one expects to attend a function with limited alcohol resources or an inefficient method of serving alcohol. For other respondents, pregaming was just one dimension of the entire cosmetic preparation for going out on the town. This form of pregaming is more common among women, who include drinking as a taken-for-granted element of their preparatory routine. Thus, pregame drinking may have gender-specific textures:
So I went home and got showered and made up while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from the fridge. … All my friends had gone out for the night so I put on some Dionne Warwick and got tanked while I was waiting. (twenty-one-year-old female)
For these female respondents, drinking seems to be an integral part of the “getting ready” ritual. They are showering, getting dressed, and “putting their buzz on”:
After having some drinks we showered and got ready to go out. While we got ready we had some more wine and then when we were completely dressed and ready to leave for the night, we took some shots of vodka and then went uptown. (nineteen-year-old female)
It was a formal for my sorority and myself and friends decided to pregame before the function. I bought the wine myself and drank in the dorms while getting ready for the dance. (twenty-two-year-old female)
I recently attended my sorority’s spring formal function. I drank some rum and beer with my date and my other friends in the hotel while we were getting ready. (twenty-two-year-old female)
The night of the party, some of my girlfriends and I pregamed in our dorm a bit while we got ready… we just drank casually while we got ready to go out. (nineteen-year-old female)
Pregame drinking for these female informants may be part of an overall strategy to present the best possible self when interacting with others in social settings. “Getting ready,” then, is an exercise in putting on a cosmetic, hygienic, and alcohol-infused uniform to meet the social expectations of the college party scene.
For many college alcohol users, the usual pregaming episode involves playing drinking games. In fact, nearly 40 percent of the current study’s survey respondents mentioned playing some form of drinking game as part of their pregaming ritual. Mack, a twenty-two-year-old male, describes his drinking group’s usual protocol:
Every Friday night all of my friends all meet up at the same house for our night on the town. The friends consist of 25-30 people all drinking. We play drinking games like beer pong, quarters, “asshole,” etc. We always start around 9 or 10 P.M. and drink at the house until 12 A.M. or till we are intoxicated. Then the whole house will move to the bars where we begin to drink more.
According to the scholarship on college drinking games, university students usually list a few main objectives for playing drinking games. Those goals include intoxicating oneself, intoxicating others, meeting new people, and the fun of competition.17 Many of my respondents stated that drinking games, like pregaming in general, are designed to lay the initial foundation for intoxication. The following accounts support the idea that games are meant to achieve a quick, efficiently engineered fog: “many of my friends play drinking games to get the job done quickly” (nineteen-year-old female); “First we played some drinking games to get as drunk as fast as possible” (twenty-two-year-old male).
Though getting drunk quickly and economically is an important function of the drinking game, games serve a larger set of functions. Beer Pong, for example, is regarded by many participants as a true sport. Media observers trace the roots of Beer Pong back to the 1950s when Dartmouth College students simply married Ping Pong to beer drinking by using paddles to shoot at semi-full beer cups. Over the years, Beer Pong has morphed into a variety of incarnations, including “Beirut,” a paddle-free game that requires participants (usually teams of two) to toss ping-pong balls across a t
able at their opponents array of beer cups.18 Matt, a twenty-one-year-old, explains:
I was invited over to a friend’s apartment where… we decided to “pregame” (get a buzz before the real drinking) by playing a game of “beer pong.” Beer pong involves setting up six cups in a triangular fashion, filling the bottom of the cups with beer, then attempting, with a ping pong ball, to eliminate the other team’s cups. This is usually played two to a team, and as you make the ball into the cup, the other team must drink the beer in the cup that you made it. After 2-3 games of this, I was already beginning to feel some of the effects.
As Matt pointed out, Beer Pong is an effective and fun way to get a fast buzz before the “real drinking” begins. But Beer Pong is about much more than getting drunk. The following field note, written after observing an all-male game of Beer Pong at a house party, discusses some of the latent functions of the game:
What’s the point of Beer Pong? For these guys, it’s not just about getting hammered. This is a competitive pursuit. They want to win the game AND they want to win the contest of trading insults and making each other laugh. The players were constantly ragging on each other about their attire, their throwing styles, and their adherence (or lack thereof) to the rules (which seemed to be somewhat fluid). One player, Ken, took all kinds of verbal abuse for the shirt he was wearing, an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt that announced “I’d rather be partying” across the front. The other guys attributed all of his misfires and incompetence to his shirt (e.g., “What’s the matter, Ken, would you rather be partying?”). One of his opponents blamed the ridiculousness of Ken’s shirt for his own poor play. He couldn’t stop laughing, which affected his aim, because “I keep picturing Ken waking up in the morning, you know, and saying to himself, ‘I want to look really awesome today, I’m gonna wear that “I’d rather be partying” shirt.’”