The transformative qualities of the alcohol high may permit the College Drinker to be the kind of person he or she would like to be—the kind of person that his or her active, sober self will not normally allow. Here, William, a nineteen-year-old male, philosophizes about the fluidity of self when alcohol is introduced into the process:
Q: When somebody’s drunk and they are more outgoing than they would be normally, is that the real self that has been revealed because the shyness is sort of an obstacle to them being who they really are, so the alcohol sort of removes that shyness? Is the true self revealed? Or is it fake? You know what I’m saying?
A: It may not be their true self but it might be who they want to be.
Q: The ideal self?
A: Their image of themselves and what they want to be in their head.
According to some students, alcohol can help them to be “what they want to be in their head” by muting the societal expectations for conduct that we all carry around with us in everyday life. In other words, for some college drinkers, alcohol weakens the persuasive powers of their conscience—that morally upstanding inner voice that reminds people to “be good” and act “properly.” If the conscience is an internal dialogue with oneself about proper courses of action, then it is a close relative of self. The conscience tells oneself to behave in accordance with normative standards of behavior (e.g., to exercise self-control, to drink in moderation, to meet one’s social role obligations). The intoxicated self, however, may have other ideas. Shawna, a twenty-two-year-old female, discusses the manner in which alcohol disables the conscience:
I think spontaneous decision making is made more frequently and your conscience is repressed a lot more. I guess you’re a lot more selfish, you just do what you, you know, what works out best for you at that time, you don’t think about other people. I guess it’s just being less conscious of your actions.… I’ve seen some people that are so shy and self-conscious, and they’ll go completely the other way. You know?
“I Love You, Man”
Shawna’s analysis of the intoxicated self paints a picture of a selfish person who “doesn’t think about other people.” If alcohol renders the self less judgmental, then college drinkers may take social risks that they normally would not take when sober. This could be a bad thing if people become aggressive, mean, or violent, but a less constrained self may also allow people to more readily express their positive feelings about peers. Just like the members of Jason’s cheering section, alcohol appears to cause some college drinkers to be less guarded about their affections for others. Samantha, an eighteen-year-old female, lets her love flow when she’s under the influence:
I think when people are drunk they are more talkative because alcohol erases all of your inhibitions. It also makes people more touchy-feely. I know when I drink I’m always hugging everyone and saying that I love them. I know a lot of people are like that.
Similarly, the liberating quality of an alcohol high inspires Pam to kiss her friends and share an unusual bonding experience with a fellow drinker:
My friend and I had accumulated the alcohol from her older sister who bought it for us. There was eight of us. We drank jello shots, vodka, and some Bacardi.… We made sure we were not caught by putting the Bacardi (which was clear) and vodka in water bottles. We drank mostly in the dorms and we stayed quiet. When we wanted to get loud we took our water bottles and went for a walk. It was a lot of fun. Me and another girl peed on the baseball field. I kissed all my friends on the cheek. We were just goofy. (Pam, eighteen-year-old female)
Intimate communication between romantic partners may also be enhanced during a drinking episode. If it is true that some men typically frustrate their more expressive female partners by being relatively inaccessible emotionally and unwilling to profess their love openly, a little alcohol may “do the trick.” Here, Lauren, a nineteen-year-old female, gives her boyfriend a positive review for showering her with drunken affection: “Somehow me and my boyfriend sat down and he wanted to pick the names of our children out. He gets very sweet and all he can talk about is how much he loves me when he’s drunk.”
Kelsey, a twenty-year-old female, also likes the way alcohol shapes the discourse between her and a former boyfriend. According to Kelsey, alcohol enables the two of them to cover some previously uncharted emotional territory:
My friend and I used to date back in high school, so with the alcohol consumption we were able to open up and talk easier. I mean we are good friends, but we are able to talk about our previous relationship—anything goes with alcohol. Alcohol opens us up to anything and we are able to express our feelings better.
Much has been written about the violence and discord that erupts when college students are overserved. But my respondents emphatically argue that intoxication is often a prosocial state of mind. The “happy drunk” is socially agile and seeks to generate goodwill during the drinking episode. In the following two cases, the first respondent observes himself demonstrating a sort of drunk diplomacy and the second informant finds she hates her date a little less when she’s drunk:
After consuming the beer I felt very relaxed. I found myself going up to everyone and turning everyone into my new friends. (twenty-year-old male)
I drank because there was going to be dancing and I didn’t like my date so the more I drank the less he annoyed me. (nineteen-year-old female)
Alcohol-Fueled Dancing
Drinking episodes are designed to be celebrations. The less constrained are allowed to have unbridled fun, to lose themselves in the moment, and to take part in performances that would typically cause them to be embarrassed if they were sober. For example, dancing and singing in public may be made possible by the magic of alcohol’s care-removal machine:
Drinking felt very fun and exciting at the time. We were also meeting another friend at the bars to celebrate her 21st birthday. This occasion led to a little more alcohol consumption than usual. It was a very fun night. We danced and sang with no inhibitions and became louder and more social. (twenty-one-year-old female)
In fact, a good deal of dancing would not take place at all if the impulse-freeing powers of alcohol were not present (remember that Beth and her friends, featured in chapter 2, got inebriated so that they would feel more comfortable when they went out dancing). Drunken dancers may feel more comfortable both physically and psychically. That is, if alcohol relaxes the body, drinkers may believe that it improves their flexibility and makes them more daring. Moreover, being wasted may give the drinker a temporary sense of enhanced competence on the dance floor. Intoxication, however, is not likely to actually improve one’s dancing ability. Alcohol impairs a variety of functions that are clearly involved in dancing or any other athletic endeavor. Intoxicated dancers are likely to experience a decline in fine motor functioning, balance, reaction time, and the ability to perform more than one task at a time.9 Some college drinkers disagree. This respondent, for example, thinks she’s a better dancer when she is blitzed:
When we got there no one was there but him [her boyfriend]. But we were so drunk we didn’t care and started drinking the beer in the fridge.… After that me and my roommate started dancing to a power hour CD in the living room. When I drink I feel as if I can dance better. So I did. (nineteen-year-old female)
The intoxicated self enables some university students to cut loose in relatively harmless ways. Alcohol appears to allow college drinkers to be more talkative, more adventurous, more bold when approaching a desired love interest, and more likely to openly express themselves and give affection to friends, roommates, or partners. Thus alcohol is used strategically by university drinkers to overcome shyness, to combat social anxiety, to become more intimate with friends, and, as we will see, to facilitate romantic and sexual relations.
Being Wasted, Hooking Up
According to my informants, the transforming powers of alcohol do indeed take “a few bricks out of the wall,” allowing drinkers to approach the subjects of their sexual
and romantic interest with confidence and a perceived sense of enhanced social dexterity. Thus, alcohol is regarded by some as the key that opens the door to the “hookup.” In Hooking Up, a study of sex and dating on American campuses, Kathleen Bogle argued that drinking culture and “hookup” culture are so inextricably linked on American college campuses that “students who choose to forgo the party and bar scene are also excluding themselves from the hookup scene.”10 “Hooking up,” according to Bogle, can carry a variety of meanings for college students. Based on intensive interviews with current university undergraduates and alumni, she discovered that a “hookup” can run the gamut from relatively minor physical engagements (e.g., kissing, “making out”) to a one-night act of sexual intercourse with no promise of future relations.11 And although the nature of the relationship is not entirely clear, scholars have identified a strong link between sex and college drinking. For example, one study determined that 35 percent of college students had engaged in “alcohol-influenced” sexual behavior since coming to college.12 Furthermore, research has demonstrated a powerful relationship between heavy college drinking and an increased risk for sexual victimization.13 According to one recent review of the literature,
Researchers have reported that between one-fifth to one-quarter of college women are raped during the course of their college careers. Moreover, during an academic year, approximately 2–3% of college women experience forcible rape.… There is growing evidence of links between victims’ substance use and sexual assault. Data from the nationally administered 2005 Core Alcohol and Drug Survey showed that 82% of students who experienced unwanted sexual intercourse during the current academic year were under the influence of AOD when they were victimized. The College Alcohol Study (CAS) found that from 1997–2001, approximately 3.4% of college women reported having been raped when they were “so intoxicated that [they] were unable to consent” since the beginning of the school year.14
Drinking, sexual victimization, and the methods that college drinkers use to reduce risky sexual encounters will be addressed in detail in chapter 4. For the purposes of the current discussion, however, the increased potential for romantic connections and sexual liaisons is treated as a perceived benefit of being intoxicated.
Many of my respondents made it clear that a major benefit of being intoxicated was that it gave them the temporary nerve to approach, talk to, and flirt with members of the opposite sex.15 Getting drunk was seen as a necessary prerequisite for seeking sexual or romantic companionship. In the following stories, drinkers attribute their ability to simply talk to members of the opposite sex to their intoxicated state:
Yeah, not all but most shyness disappears, you are less afraid of consequences, of being too shy to talk to a girl, you know, under the influence of alcohol you might just walk right up to her and start hitting on her. Absolutely, for sure, it brings your inhibitions down, strengthens your confidence almost… and it’s fake but temporarily it’s effective. (Donovan, eighteen-year-old male)
This eighteen-year-old female claims that she is actually afraid to talk to men when she is sober. In this case, alcohol erased her fear and delivered her from her usual self-conscious belief that people might critically evaluate her when she interacts with them: “I felt a lot more open and laid back. I wasn’t afraid to talk to the guys as I usually am when I am sober. I felt I could carry on a conversation with them and felt like they weren’t judging me.” Similarly, the following two male respondents believe that intoxication improves their “game.” For most people, designing an effective approach to initiate a conversation with potential romantic partners is never easy. For these men, alcohol creates a temporary raft of confidence: “At first it was fun; I was talking with a large group of girls and normally I would not have been so social but since I was drunk I did not care” (twenty-year-old male).
Q: Would you say that you are shy normally?
A: No not really, I am not shy; when I am drinking I guess, if something like piques my interest, I might like pursue it a little bit more than when I am sober, I mean talking to people at the bar becomes easier, if you want to talk to a girl, sometimes it just becomes easier, I don’t know why that is. (twenty-three-year-old male)
The alcohol ride gives some college drinkers that extra jolt of sociability that they feel they need to set the hookup in motion. Furthermore, after making the initial contact with a potential partner, drinkers may use alcohol instrumentally to facilitate physical relations. Carrie, a twenty-two-year-old female, runs into a guy she likes, hits it off with him, and then uses alcohol to try to explore the possibilities of their new relationship:
We didn’t go out till 11 P.M. and I had my first 2 drinks gone by 11:45. I got intoxicated but not wasted. Mixed drinks (rum and coke) and tequila shots laced the night of bar hopping. I ran into people I know and a guy I liked in particular. We hung out with my friends for a while, then he and I went off alone. I was buying him beers to get him to stay and hang out with me because I wanted to see what would happen between us. At 2:00 am when the bars closed we decided to go to his house.… We got to his house, hung out, then ended up driving to my house. We smoked pot, drank more, then had sex. I was drunk; however, I do not regret it. I had fun, celebrated my birthday, and even got some ass from a guy I liked.
Notice that Carrie doesn’t blame the alcohol for her sexual experience and has no regrets about it. Instead, she describes using alcohol (i.e., buying him beers to get him to hang out) as a way to prolong an interaction that ultimately led to a hookup. From her point of view, alcohol was an instrument for manufacturing relations. Her intoxication did not cause the hookup. This is not a trivial point. Although college drinking and sexuality are clearly linked, the nature and the direction of that relationship are less clear. Does alcohol intoxication cause hooking up by lowering people’s inhibitions? Or, alternatively, is alcohol a tool or resource that college students consciously use to generate sexual encounters and/or to justify or rationalize casual coupling? According to my data, both explanations are supported by college drinkers. The following respondents give alcohol most (or all) of the credit for their recent hooking-up experience:
Needless to say, some things went on in the bedroom and part of it was because of the alcohol. However, we both liked each other and we knew what was going on. (twenty-one-year-old female)
The whole night was very fun because I got to kiss a boy… we got to talk more openly and we were allowed to say things that we had been wanting to say to each other. (eighteen-year-old female)
It felt pretty good to drink. I have to admit that even though it can be dangerous, it does help you to feel good about yourself. The real me came out. I was better socially and I made out with a girl. That might sound immature but, hey, it was a good time. (nineteen-year-old male)
While the respondents above believe that they have alcohol to thank for their hookups, drinking does not necessarily compel people to have sexual relations. Drinking and hooking up may appear to be causally connected because partiers are more open to a variety of experiences when they prepare for a drinking episode. Alcohol consumption and casual sexual or romantic relations may simply go hand in hand when college drinkers are feeling spontaneous and carefree. Terry, a twenty-two-year-old male, sees hooking up and drinking as natural companions:
Q: How about drinking in a way to facilitate romantic and/or sexual encounters? Is that a big issue?
A: I’ve never seen too much of that—well, I guess I have—I don’t think that is a big issue. I just think that is something that happens when you drink anyways because you lose your inhibitions, so I think that is just a natural part of drinking.
So the drunken hookup may not always be a simple cause and effect relationship. Drinking and sexuality may be reciprocally related. According to Bogle, “Although alcohol consumption may lead to hooking up, the link could also be reversed; that is, perhaps the hookup script requires alcohol.”16 If students are actively seeking a hookup experience, they may cons
ciously employ the use of alcohol to loosen themselves up for the approach or to create an excuse for an unsuccessful advance or an embarrassing encounter.17 For example, one might suggest that it was the alcohol, and not a rational personal decision, that caused one to engage in a regrettable sexual experience. To illustrate this point, consider the insights of the following interviewee, who suggests that alcohol use can be a ready-made excuse for questionable behavior:
Q: Have you ever said the only reason that I did this was because I was drunk?
A: No, I think people use that as a crutch, I don’t think you’re not going to do anything that you would not do normally… like the placebo effect or something; yeah, you are allowed to act a little looser.
Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard Page 9