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Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

Page 10

by Thomas Vander Ven


  Q: So do you think it is the alcohol that inspires people to engage in encounters, romantic, it doesn’t have to be sexual, or … are people looking for that anyway?

  A: Somebody is probably lonely or wanting companionship to begin with and drinking is kind of like a vehicle or excuse for that, they use it like that.

  Q: And do people use that as an excuse: “I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t drinking”?

  A: Yeah, certain people do, but I think a lot of people… like I am looking for somebody and just going out to the bars is a place to meet people and you just happen to be drinking and it makes it easier. (Stephen, twenty-three-year-old male)

  Tasha, a twenty-one-year-old female, is skeptical of some of her friends who continually use alcohol as a rationalization for their frequent hookups. According to her, the “because I was drunk” excuse wears a little thin after repeated use:

  Q: Do you think that people use alcohol as an excuse for their hookups?

  A: Yeah, like if a girl never usually hooks up with a bunch of guys and then she does sleep with a guy, then the next morning she could be like, “Oh I never usually do that” and then she’ll probably keep doing that but she’ll keep saying that she never usually does that or stuff like that and it’s like, “You are up to like twenty guys now” and they try to say that they never do that like they are sweet and innocent or something, but they are not and they try to make the excuse like they are drunk or something.

  Q: So they keep using alcohol as an excuse for behavior they say they wouldn’t normally do but they keep doing it anyway?

  A: Mm-hmm.

  Alcohol may allow drinkers to feel more confident when approaching a love interest because they know that their friends will accept their drunkenness as an explanation for their aggressive pursuit of another. In this respect, intoxication serves as a “liquid justification” for obvious flirtation. Furthermore, drinkers may know that saying “I was drunk” will satisfy any queries about why they would hook up with an objectionable or unsuitable partner:

  Q: So if girls are flirtatious when they are drunk is that the alcohol that makes them that way or does it allow them to be that way?

  A: It allows them to be that way. In some cases it is used as an excuse. I have known a girl to drink one beer and I know I can drink way more than that and she can go talk to the guy that she has been liking. It is not so much the physical aspect, just that they have that to fall back on that. They can be able to say, “Oh I was drinking.” They can blame it on that.

  Q: So a built-in excuse?

  A: Yeah.

  Q: After hooking up with someone, do people ever say, “I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t drunk”?

  A: Oh, yeah, oh yeah, totally. For the most part I don’t think that is the case. I think that they really have feelings for that person, but they were just embarrassed to tell other people—ashamed that other people might laugh about the person not being as physically good looking, not the other person’s type, so you can say, “I was drunk. I would never do that when I was sober.” (twenty-one-year-old female)

  Thus, because alcohol can be successfully employed as an unquestioned motive for hooking up, college drinkers may consciously plan to use the “drunk excuse” even before they have an encounter. In this case, the individual gets intoxicated before a potential questionable sexual encounter because he or she is aware that if anything happens, it can be effectively attributed to the alcohol. According to Katie, a twenty-year-old female, college drinkers may be actively seeking out reasons that others will accept before an act occurs:

  Q: Do people blame their hookups on alcohol? You know, would someone say, “I can’t believe I did that.… I was so drunk last night”?

  A: Yeah, it depends if it’s someone that they liked or had been seeing, then they wouldn’t. But otherwise it can be kind of a way to get out of the responsibility of it.

  Q: So you think that people use alcohol as an excuse—after the fact—for hooking up with someone?

  A: Yeah, it’s an easy way to avoid taking responsibility. Like, you know, “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so wasted.” They maybe knew exactly what they were doing but it’s easier to say it was the alcohol so they don’t look so bad.

  Q: Okay, how about using alcohol as an excuse before the hookup? Do you know what I mean? Like, I’m going to get drunk tonight and if I hook up with someone I can blame it on that. Does that make sense?

  A: Yeah, definitely. It can definitely be like that but I don’t know if that’s always a conscious thing or if they just know that they will probably be drunk and they will probably hook up so they know before that they can blame it on being too drunk.

  Katie describes alcohol as an instrument of impression management or as a way of “saving face.”18 The “because I was drunk” excuse may be effective in part because everyone in the college drinking community may feel compelled to use it at one point or another. In other words, I might let your seemingly lame drunk excuse slide today because I may have to make the same claim tomorrow to explain away my objectionable behavior. College drinking is a constellation of collective practices, rituals, attitudes, and beliefs. They are “in it” together and that is part of what makes it fun. And to boil it down, fun is what college drinkers are seeking. This is not a controversial idea. But what, exactly, is fun about being wasted with your friends?

  College Drinking: A Romantic Comedy with Brief Nudity and Explicit Language

  When my respondents were asked about why being wasted is fun, they often highlighted one particular activity—laughing. College drinkers laugh a lot when they get intoxicated. This might appear to be too obvious to mention, but the presence of laughter is so overwhelming in my research findings that it cannot be ignored. We have already established that drinkers feel changed when they are intoxicated. One of the ways in which they believe that they have been transformed is that they believe they become funnier when they are ripped. Do their comic talents really improve when alcohol is added, or does it just appear that way because their audiences are more relaxed, more carefree, more willing to appreciate the lighter side of life? It’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, college drinkers actually believe that they become funnier when they are under the influence. And who among us doesn’t enjoy making people laugh? Everyone loves the class clown.

  Philip, a nineteen-year-old male, is sort of an “old school,” physical comedian when he gets drunk. Here he describes an impromptu comedy set that included a prank, some slapstick, and a willingness to sacrifice his body for his “art”:

  When I get drunk, I become extremely goofy and I am funny. So we were in the dorm drinking 151 [151 proof rum] and beer and I totally lost sanity. I took a bucket of water and threw it on the bathroom floor hoping to trip someone up. Turns out, the drunker I got, I was the only one to fall on it. I suffered a mild concussion sitting in my own prank and decided that I was going to take a shower with my clothes on.

  While Philip was calculating and systematic about his attempts to draw laughter, other college drinkers can’t quite put their finger on why intoxication is so funny—it just is. According to many respondents, drinking inexplicably makes everything funny:

  We went to the dining hall really drunk and just laughed and had the whole dining hall laughing hysterically. (twenty-year-old male)

  It loosens me up when I am hanging out with my friends and we just laugh a lot because everything is so much more funny. (twenty-one-year-old female)

  I love to be drunk. It is so much fun. Everything is so funny. (eighteen-year-old female)

  Being drunk made me laugh at everything. (twenty-year-old male)

  What’s going on here? How can alcohol make everything funny? Social scientists who study laughter attribute its presence to a variety of factors. Their insights might help us to understand why people laugh so much when they get drunk. Three common explanations for laughter include the relief theory, the superiority/hostility theory, and the theory of i
ncongruity.19 The relief theory suggests that “people laugh upon realizing that a threat is no longer a threat or upon being freed of some psychological burden.”20 This may apply to the relationship between college drinking and laughter in a few ways. For example, laughter may be generated among underage or overserved drinkers who have successfully avoided detection by authority figures (e.g., resident advisors, police officers), who then laugh in relief at their good fortune. It can be thrilling and funny to get away with something. More importantly, however, the inexplicable laughter that springs from drinking may have more to do with feeling generally released from the psychological burdens of rigid self-awareness. Remember that college drinkers often describe a sense of “not caring” about anything. This sense of relief is present when students refer to being relaxed and able to do whatever they want. Tracey, a twenty-year-old female, believes that alcohol allows her to relax and stop worrying. As a result, she is funnier: “Drinking creates a feeling of relaxation where I can not worry about the stress caused from the week and enjoy myself without worry. After drinking I am usually pretty animated and funny (but who isn’t?)” And the delirious mental state that results from feeling carefree may have helped to produce the spontaneous laughter in the following drunken performance: “It felt a little weird but funny at the same time. Everything was just funny to me afterwards. It seemed like if somebody spoke to me or told me early happy birthday I started laughing. I just couldn’t help it” (twenty-one-year-old female).

  Similarly, this twenty-year-old female and her friends left a drinking establishment and entered a world where everything appeared humorous. According to her, there was no particular source for the hilarity. After being released from the bars, they greeted the night with a general good feeling that she could only describe as “jolly”:

  Q: Okay, so you drank at the bar?

  A: Uh huh.

  Q: And what kind of condition were you in when the bar closed?

  A: Hilarious, like I was, I was comprehending everything, but everything was just funny. Like it was, it was just funny.

  Q: Okay, and were your friends all in a similar condition?

  A: Let’s see, they weren’t as drunk as I was. But, yeah, they were, I mean, everybody was just jolly. “Jolly,” kind of a weird word, but that’s exactly the atmosphere. It was just like, “Hey, hey woo hoo!!” One of those type of things. (twenty-year-old female)

  A different sort of explanation for drunken, student laughter is provided by the superiority/hostility theory. This perspective posits “that people laugh when comparing themselves to others and finding themselves stronger, more successful, or at some advantage.”21 Superiority-driven laughter can emerge during a competition when one opponent laughs in triumph at the defeat of another. The superiority thesis also includes those moments when we laugh at the misfortunes of another (e.g., finding glee in others’ embarrassment when they fall or otherwise make a fool of themselves in public). While getting drunk is generally not a competition (drinking games notwithstanding), college drinkers do experience different outcomes, giving more “successful” drinkers the opportunity to laugh at those who did not fare so well. The following story, offered by Skylar, an eighteen-year-old female student, describes the laughter that ensued at the expense of a drinker who exhibited a kind of vulnerable incompetence:

  When we got to that house there was one guy that was passed out on the couch, with a case, and it was almost empty there were like 1 or 2 beers in it, a case of beer on top of him. He was just completely passed out, which is, we all giggled about it and thought it was funny and I think we even picked up the beer bong and empty beer bottles and put them on him just because we thought it was funny, we were all pretty… we were definitely drunk. (eighteen-year-old female)

  A passed-out drunk may be funny enough—illuminating his sorry state of affairs by piling trash on him is even more hilarious. This practice—“messing with drunks”—is a common pastime in some social circles.22 The pastime is so common and generally accepted, in fact, that the victim of such abuse may graciously accept his or her punishment as one of the potential hazards of drinking. Jonah, an eighteen-year-old male, gets the “full treatment” from his roommates but claims that he had a good time anyway:

  I was very intoxicated and I passed out with my head on my desk for what my roommates said to be an hour. They drew on my face and neck when I was passed out and videotaped me when I woke up from passing out. I do not remember it, but the tape showed me stumbling and threatening to hit my roommate who was taping me. The next morning it was embarrassing to watch the video and it took 45 minutes to wash off my face and neck. I had a good time [though].

  Jonah’s friends had a laugh at his expense, and he seemed to accept it. The practice of drawing on a passed-out drunk’s face—which is sometimes referred to as “chiefing”—is a common source of entertainment for some college drinkers. But laughing at someone’s intoxication is not necessarily done out of a feeling of superiority or hostility. Intoxicated people can be funny just because they lack the ability to execute the everyday motor functions that we usually take for granted. This explanation relates to the theory of incongruity, which suggests that “laughing results from experiencing the unexpected, from a perceived inconsistency between what one believes will happen or should happen and what actually occurs.”23 Normally, people can walk without falling down and they can talk without slurring or constantly repeating themselves. People become “funny drunks,” however, when the alcohol turns them into the Shit Show. Finding humor in intoxicated performances is generally a good-natured recognition of the incongruous behavior of a drunk: “The night that we drank was great! We had lots of laughs at each other’s and friends’ expense, from people spilling beer to people laughing so hard that they had to spit the beer out” (twenty-four-year-old male). The following twenty-four-year-old female engineered her own physical disability with the use of alcohol. And she was amused: “I laughed at everything and everyone. I couldn’t walk straight either and I thought that was funny too” (twenty-four-year-old female).

  Being smashed and making an ass of yourself, then, need not be embarrassing to the drunken performer. Often, intoxicated mishaps are respun as humorous events for all to enjoy. College drinkers sometimes openly document their Shit Shows on social networking sites (e.g., Facebook) and create their own websites where they post photographs of their intoxicated exploits. Photographs of students vomiting, sleeping on bathroom floors, and looking toasted and squinty-eyed are displayed for virtually anyone to see. Another source of drinking-related humor for college drinkers is drawn from the absurd text messages that they sometimes send to one another when they are in the throes of intoxication. These living records of drunken misbehavior are sometimes posted to the popular humor website, “Texts from the Last Night.”24 Although “Texts from the Last Night” is not limited to college drinking material, it is clear that many of the posts draw from university drinking culture. The site appears to specialize, in fact, in making light of the problematic situations that college alcohol users find themselves in. The following post, for example, depicts an inebriated person who helps her vomiting friend and, in the process, finds her true calling: “You were holding her hair as she threw up saying ‘I’m going to be a great doctor’ repeatedly.”25 In this next post, an unfortunate drinker finds out via a text message the next morning that his ability to find the bathroom was disabled by his drunkenness: “You opened the fridge, pissed on the food, fell over, then threw up on yourself. That’s what’s all over the kitchen.” Finally, this text depicts a young woman wondering about the moral implications of her behavior in the drinking scene: “Is it trashy that while he was throwing up in the bathroom, I was hooking up with his childhood best friend?”

  Drinking, Laughing, and Feeling Good

  Whatever the reason, college drinkers do laugh a lot and they often mention laugher as the keystone to an enjoyable drinking episode. But what’s so great about laughter? Well, for on
e thing, laughter is good for us. Research suggests that laughter has physiological and psychological benefits, including stimulation of the cardiovascular system, stimulation of the nervous system, and the production of certain hormones.26 Moreover, laughter makes us feel good. Laughter releases endorphins—natural pain-killing enzymes—that relax us and give us an overall sense of well-being.27 It is no wonder, then, that college drinkers mention laughter when accounting for the fun of drinking. Apparently, alcohol creates a context for laughter, which makes us feel euphoric and contributes to the overall pleasant feeling of a drinking episode. As important as laughter is, however, the fun of college drinking is a bit more complicated than a bout of mindless giggling. Drinking is fun because it creates a brand-new world.

  Adventures in Drunkworld

  Collective intoxication creates a new world of possibilities. Let’s call it “drunkworld.” In drunkworld, people fall down, slur their words, break things, laugh uncontrollably, act crazy, flirt, hook up, get sick, pass out, fight, dance, sing, and get overly emotional. Think of collective intoxication as an interesting place to visit where taken-for-granted human abilities (e.g., motor skills) are challenged and everyday interactions take on a dramatic air. Drunkworld presents a matrix of unpredictable events and outcomes. Adam, a twenty-one-year-old male, explains:

 

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