Q: [After a night of drinking,] do you talk about what happened the night before?
A: Yeah, like if someone remembers something that someone else doesn’t. It’s, “Do you remember when you did that?’ and they’re going, “No, I did what?” and you know, it’s just, usually it’s all harmless things, so it’s funny. We don’t have any like vandals or serious kleptomaniacs or anything but…
Q: Okay, so do you ever say, “Do you remember what you said last night?”
A: That usually happens to me.… I repeat myself a lot when I’m drunk and people say, “You know how many times you told me this?” I’m like, “probably about eight” and they’re like, “Yep” and I’m like, “Oh.” Yeah, usually it’s me that, I get really embarrassed because, even though I drink on a fairly regular basis, I still get embarrassed because I feel like it’s not how I should act. I need to be more disciplined; I need to be more distinguished. I, this image, this pristine image of myself is tarnished when I do that. And granted, people don’t see me like, you know, this pristine image that I have for myself, you know, it’s, I don’t know…
As her remark demonstrates, Grace claims to feel embarrassed on the morning after an awkward public display. But is this really embarrassment that she is feeling? What is embarrassment? Most sociologists seem to agree that embarrassment is an almost immediate, overwhelming, psychological and physiological response to a sense of failing to meet the expectations of a social situation. According to sociologists Weinberg and Williams, embarrassment is “[s]ignified by embodied emotional signs such as blushing, fumbling, sweating, etc. Embarrassment occurs when we fail to project an acceptable self before others in the social situation.”24 Thus, embarrassment is an immediate emotional and physical response to a situation where one has failed to behave in line with the identity that one claims for oneself. Grace, on the other hand, feels emotional distress on the following day after hearing about her behavior. According to sociologists of emotion, then, this is not embarrassment. If Grace had been truly embarrassed, she would have felt uncomfortable that night immediately after being told that she repeated herself about “eight times.” But for heavy drinkers, the psychic pain is delayed until they are sober again and see their behavior with a more critical eye. Readers will remember that the college drinkers highlighted in chapter 3 claimed to be using alcohol strategically to produce a carefree attitude—an attitude that is supposed to insulate them from feelings of embarrassment. The “care-removal machine” that alcohol ignites results in a presentation of self that does not generate embarrassment at the time but does produce regret on the morning after intoxication. College drinkers don’t feel embarrassed while they are intoxicated because they “don’t care” if they meet social expectations or because social expectations are different in the drinking scene. The next morning, however, they become reengaged with their more critical self. Now they care. When the sober self sees the drunken self as an object, dark feelings emerge. Debilitating emotions arrive the next day when drinkers evaluate their alcohol-fueled behavior from a sober, more conventional perspective. What the regretful drinker feels is shame.
Drunk Behavior and Shame
Since college drinkers have temporarily disabled their ability to feel embarrassed, they often end up behaving in ways that, upon reflection, produce distress the next day. A common regret for college drinkers relates to the drunken use of cell phones to contact love interests while intoxicated, known as a “drunk dial” or “drunk text.” Intoxicated students feel emboldened to communicate electronically with ex-partners or romantic interests in ways that they normally would not if they were sober. This twenty-year-old female appears to feel only a mild sense of regret after a “drunk dial”: “Then I started drunk dialing my friends and called a boy and told him I wanted to make out with him on his voicemail.… The night was so much fun overall, except I was a little embarrassed about that voicemail I had left.”
Some behaviors that many of us would regard as extremely regrettable are less disturbing to college drinkers than a drunk dial or a drunk text. This may be due to the fact that an intoxicated message leaves a record that could be saved and used as evidence of someone’s inebriated lack of good judgment:
It was fun and exciting. The reward was the good time we had laughing and hanging out. We played beer pong and then started playing beer pong games, like strip beer pong—take off a piece of clothing when your team loses. My friend puked, my other friend hooked up with her beer pong partner, and I went to bed in my swimsuit (I put a swimsuit on cuz I didn’t want to be in a thong when I lost beer pong). The bad consequence is that I text messaged my ex-boyfriend who wants to get back together and I was trying to avoid him. (nineteen-year-old female)
Although drunken messaging may deliver some anxiety the next morning, other intoxicated performances trigger more powerful feelings during the post-intoxication period. Regret is particularly punishing when the drinker experiences shame. According to sociologist Thomas Scheff, shame is the most powerful social emotion:
By shame I mean a large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants, most notably embarrassment, humiliation, and related feelings such as shyness that involve reactions to rejection or feelings of failure or inadequacy. What unites all these cognates is that they involve the feeling of a threat to the social bond.… If, as proposed here, shame is a result of threat to the bond, shame would be the most social of the basic emotions.25
Feelings of shame are overpowering because it seems to the shame holder that he or she has created a massive gulf between himself or herself and the social body to which he or she wishes to belong. When college drinkers experience shame it is much worse than feeling immediately embarrassed over a social faux pas; shame can feel like a dramatic sense of social distance, alienation, and isolation. According to sociologist Jack Katz, this emotion features a sense of irreversibility:
A common feature of the experience of shame that is directly related to the sense of irreversibility is a desire to turn the clock back and take another course of action. Fantasies of escape are common; one may think, for example, that “maybe it’s not too late to change my name and move to Costa Rica.”… [T]he immediate experience is an excruciating awareness that one cannot go back to the situation and correct oneself, and that it is improbable that one will ever have an opportunity to put a new, face-saving gloss on the long past situation.26
According to my informants, one of the most common forms of shame-producing drunken behavior involves an ill-advised or casual sex act. Gretchen, a twenty-year-old female, describes her post-intoxication consternation after a regrettable sexual encounter:
This party ended horribly for me. I kissed one of my guy friend’s brothers and while eating at Wendy’s with friends got in an argument with my roommate that ended up with her staying at the sorority house for the night and me going back to my dorm crying. At my dorm, my best guy friend and I spent a lot of time complaining about my roommate (his ex-girlfriend). We were both drunk and angry and we ended up sleeping together. I cheated on my boyfriend with my roommate’s ex/my boyfriend’s friend all because I was drunk and temperamental. Until then, my boyfriend had been the only person I’d slept with. I felt like a dumb, drunk slut—your typical college sorority girl. I was hung over and ashamed the next day.
Gretchen’s shame is connected to her failure to act appropriately towards her social relationships. She was disloyal to her boyfriend and to her roommate. Her shame reflects her temporary sense of social distance from relationships that mattered to her. In addition, according to Gretchen, her drunken misbehavior transformed her into a walking, talking stereotype (e.g., “a dumb drunk slut”; a “typical sorority girl”). Feelings of shame triggered by intoxicated sexuality may be more common among college women. According to Kathleen Bogle, the author of Hooking Up, women are held more accountable than men are for casual sexual encounters: “For college men, there are virtually no rules, but for college women it is a very d
ifferent story. In fact, there is a host of norms for the hookup script that, if violated, lead women to get bad reputations.”27 The following interviewee, a twenty-year-old female, describes the post–drinking episode despair that a college woman might experience:
Q: Do you know women who have a lot of regrets the next day about some of these connections [hookups] they may have made the night before?… Let’s say your friend might say, “Oh, I can’t believe I did that.”
A: Uh huh, yes… I’ve had that, well, I don’t know, sometimes it’s serious, sometimes it’s not. Like, pretty much everyone goes, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I did that” but then there are those times when it seems like it’s really, deeply remorseful. Like, “I can’t believe I did that, oh my god, what am I gonna do?’
What are you going to do when your behavior delivers you such shame that you feel that you cannot face the social world? When drinkers behave in ways that bring them shame, they often turn to their friends and drinking partners to make things right. In the next section, I discuss the manner in which members of the college drinking scene provide excuses and justifications for their guilt-ridden friends in order to reframe negative drunken performances.
Don’t Worry About It, You Were Hilarious! Support for Regretful Drinkers
The shamed college drinker feels remorseful about something that she or he has done or said after getting sloshed. This is interesting since, in some cases, college drinkers knowingly use alcohol to conjure up carelessness. The temporary deliverance from social constraints that alcohol brings creates an emotional debt that must be paid later. In extreme cases, heavy drinkers feel profound shame about their drunken comportment. Shame is socially marginalizing; it is a sense that one’s connection to the rest of the social body has been seriously damaged. These powerful emotions might discourage the average drinker from getting that hammered again. But regretful college drinkers often find ways to explain away their indiscretions. The most simplistic strategy involves putting all of the blame on alcohol. In this case, a troubled drinker denies responsibility for the behavior in question by acting as if the alcohol drained him or her of free will and personal agency. Offering an excuse or justification for objectionable behavior is known by sociologists as “giving an account.” Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman, two revered American sociologists, articulated their original theoretical statement concerning accounts in the 1960s. According to Scott and Lyman an account is “a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior—whether that behavior is his own or that of others and whether the proximate cause for the statement arises from the actor himself or from someone else.”28 The authors described two types of accounts, excuses and justifications: “Excuses are accounts in which one admits that the act in question is bad, wrong, or inappropriate but denies full responsibility.… Justifications are accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it.”29
Most humans use accounts frequently, maybe even daily. The function of an account—especially an excuse or denial of responsibility—is to protect and preserve the identity one desires to claim for oneself. If I claim to be a level-headed, antiviolent pacifist, but then get into a drunken fistfight over a beer pong game, I’ve got some explaining to do. When college drinkers go searching for an excuse for their drunken buffoonery, they do not need to look very far—alcohol is a ready-made, convenient excuse. Let’s return to Carmen’s story for a simple example of the “drunk excuse.” The reader will recall that Carmen had casual sexual relations with two men in a matter of hours. Feeling regretful about her sexual encounters, she offers the following account: “It wasn’t until last night and this morning that I started feeling really bad about sleeping with some guy I hardly know. Alcohol is no excuse for my actions but I think those things would not have happened if it weren’t for all the alcohol I drank.” Carmen’s account features the use of a common rhetorical game. She makes a socially acceptable statement about her belief that alcohol is “no excuse for my actions” but then goes right ahead and blames the alcohol anyway. Carmen is claiming that she is not the kind of person who would normally engage in reckless sex acts with virtual strangers. She will not own those behaviors because she would not typically choose them. In other words, Carmen’s behavior was not the result of some moral failing or something essentially pathological about her—it was the alcohol that caused it.
Carmen’s attempt at damage control is a solitary act. She is telling herself that the alcohol made her do it. But many college drinkers receive help from their codrinkers, friends, and roommates to justify drinking-episode behaviors. When college drinkers agonize over their drunken escapades, their friends may come to the rescue by giving them positive appraisals. Sociologists have developed a theoretical tradition around the notion that audience appraisals affect our self-concept. That is, our view of self is produced in part by our sense of how others regard us. This phenomenon is known as the reflected appraisal process:
Through role-taking a proud [person] is able to visualize [himself or herself] as an object toward which others have feelings of respect, admiration, or even awe. If we are addressed with deference, we come to “take for granted” that we deserve this. If we are constantly mistrusted or ridiculed, we are influenced to reject ourselves; if ignored we think of ourselves as a “worthless object.30
College drinkers rely on positive reflected appraisals to help them to reclaim their sober identity. Thus, regret is often filtered through a social process in which codrinkers help their emotionally sensitive cohorts by justifying, and sometimes even celebrating, their intoxicated exploits from the night before. Regretful drinkers, then, are able to manage the stigma that may otherwise be attached to drunken behavior by accepting the reflected appraisals from friends and roommates who tell them, “Don’t worry about it. You were hilarious last night!” Moreover, codrinkers may assist their friends in the process of post-intoxication dissociation (i.e., “That wasn’t you last night; that was the alcohol. You were wasted!”). Post-intoxication dissociation allows a fretful drinker to totally disavow his or her actions from the night before. Thus, painful regrets become a less compelling reason to desist from serial intoxication if one’s closest friends readily justify untoward behavior.
Grace—the twenty-year-old woman who repeats herself when she’s wasted—gets mixed signals from her closest friends after a night of partying. While one of her friends appears to criticize Grace’s intoxicated self, another cohort assures her that her drunken performances are humorous:
I have a couple best friends here and the one I was referring to earlier, that’s, you know, very serious about watching out for me, she makes me feel really bad, like, she will, I don’t know if she intentionally does it, because she was the one babysitting me… but I’ll feel like, really guilty after hearing, like, what I did.… And it’s just so embarrassing, I cannot believe it. But, my other best friend is like, “Oh my god, we had the best time, you were hilarious. Do you know what you were saying? Oh my goodness.” And I’m going, “Oh, I’m so embarrassed,” and she’s like, “No, don’t be, it was funny. It’s ok.”… She’s not like cheering me on, she’s just… I think she knows that I feel bad about it, and that I’m embarrassed about it and she wants to make me feel ok about it. Because we all… have those nights. You don’t do it all the time so it’s ok.
Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old female, provides positive appraisals for her drunk and misbehaving friend. Chaney’s drinking partner is a “chronic offender” who frequently annoys others when she gets hammered. And while the friend is sometimes criticized for her drunken performances, she also receives some assurance from her social circle:
CHANEY: I have a couple of roommates, one who… is the nicest, sweetest girl and you know she is pretty social and will talk with you but when she gets drunk, maybe only three beers and she is loud, and a lot of people describe her as very obnoxious. And I have to say that it is
kind of true. She just doesn’t remember a lot of things, in a lot of respects I don’t think she really knows people are like, “Oh no, she is drunk again!”… Her sober self is not loud or obnoxious, she is social and talkative, but when she gets drunk she is loud and in your face, “listen to me talking!”
Q: … And you said that she doesn’t know about this?
A: I mean she has an idea, but I don’t think that she understands that sometimes people are like, “Oh my god I wish she would never drink again,” because she yells at people and doesn’t remember it and that kind of thing.
Q: You sound like you are close friends. Have you or anybody else ever told her?
A: Well, we have said things but it is kind of one of those things where we kind of laugh it off. Sometimes she has said something to people when she’s been upset or angry with them and we will kind of tell her but in a gentle way…
Q: Can you think of anything that she has said to somebody?
Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard Page 19