Proposition II
College drinkers continue to become intoxicated, in spite of the risks associated with serial drunkenness, because of the many social rewards that they associate with drunkenness. College drinkers believe that (1) alcohol gives them more confidence and social dexterity by muting their critical self; (2) alcohol enhances social interaction and allows them to approach the objects of their sexual and romantic interests more easily; (3) group intoxication is fun and creates a matrix of adventure and unpredictable events.
Many college drinkers believe that alcohol enables them to reach a desired level of carelessness that allows them to be spontaneous, talkative, and less shy. By disabling the reflexive and often critical process of self-evaluation, drunken students are temporarily able to act impulsively without fearing that their performances will cause embarrassment or regret. One respondent argued, in fact, that alcohol allowed people to be the kind of person “they want to be in their head.” It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that so many college students use alcohol if they perceive that it enhances their social potential. The college years are a time for many emerging adults to expand their behavioral and emotional menus in an attempt to explore new adult identities. This leads to the next perceived benefit of intoxication. Carefree, spontaneous, and socially courageous college drinkers are more apt to shower affection on one another and may be more open and receptive to the affections of others. Consider Jason (from chapter 3), who received a rowdy round of applause just for showing up at the bar. The members of the college drinking scene receive a level of positive appraisal from peers that they may not have experienced in the past and may not ever receive again. Many respondents spoke of “loving” everyone around them, kissing their friends, and being able to speak frankly and openly with partners in ways that they could not normally manage when sober. The reader will recall that Lauren’s 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.” While this drunken expression of love may be sporadic and only triggered by alcohol, it appears to be a real benefit of traveling in the college drinking scene.
As discussed earlier, alcohol use and hooking up are inextricably linked. For many college drinkers getting wasted is an effective way to facilitate sexual liaisons. In fact, several informants reported that alcohol allowed them to simply speak to the men and women that catch their eye. And once an alcohol-fueled flirtation is initiated, college drinkers claim that drinking becomes a prefabricated justification for an ill-advised or regret-producing hookup. According to my respondents, heavy drinking provides both a context for casual coupling and a readily acceptable excuse for a one-night stand. The “because I was drunk” excuse is so widely accepted, in fact, that one respondent admitted that some drinkers are aware—even before the festivities begin—that they are going to get intoxicated and that they will probably hook up so “they know they can blame it on being too drunk.” This dimension of the college drinking scene is socially perpetuated because some drinkers will accept the “drunk excuse” from a codrinker because they are cognizant that they may have to offer the same excuse on another occasion. Thus, using intoxication as an excuse for questionable sexual behavior is protected by a mutually understood social contract.
Finally, and though this seems absurdly obvious, college drinkers believe that collective intoxication is fun. My respondents danced, sang, laughed, and misbehaved in ways that inspired them to keep coming back for more. It is common for nondrinkers to say that “people can have just as much fun without alcohol.” I suspect that most of my heavy-drinking informants would enthusiastically disagree. For many of them, alcohol generates a context for inexplicable, uncontrollable laughter. Drinkers laugh at themselves and at each other for losing control of their motor functions. And drinking partners make a sport out of drawing on the faces of their passed-out comrades, and some actually believe that they become funnier when they are drunk because their temporary carelessness allows them to take comedic risks. Part of the fun of drinking is generated by the unpredictable adventures that college alcohol abusers find themselves in. Walking home from the bars, for example, may involve absurdist group activities (e.g., pushing a friend in a broken desk chair down Main Street) that will be remembered and recounted countless times whenever college friends get together to tell war stories. The potential for drunken adventures was articulated best by Adam, who maintained that “I look at every night of drinking as another adventure. Anything can happen. All is left to chance.” The modern college student may be looking for adventure, in part, because American middle-class youth have enjoyed less autonomy and have experienced increasing parental surveillance in recent decades. Collective intoxication is attractive to them because the Shit Show temporarily releases them from the rule-laden determinism of everyday life.
Proposition III
College drinkers continue to become intoxicated, in spite of the risks associated with serial drunkenness, because codrinkers extend a tremendous amount of social support (i.e., drunk support) to one another when trouble arises. Drunk support reproduces heavy drinking because it gives drinkers a sense of protection against risk and because drunk support is often regarded by both the giver and receiver of support as mutually beneficial.
As suggested earlier, drinkers do not simply continue to get intoxicated in spite of the problems that commonly occur; they continue to drink, in part, because of the opportunities for support generated by drinking crises. College students who play the role of nurturer (e.g., aiding a sick friend) or protector (e.g., sticking up for a threatened friend or protecting a codrinker from the risk of sexual victimization), for example, are taking part in a sort of “real-life” apprenticeship in confronting and solving crises. This opportunity for developing adult problem-solving skills, then, is a latent function of drunk support. Moreover, the receivers of support benefit from the goodwill of their friends because it may reduce the potential for serious harm and because it is psychically and emotionally satisfying to know that someone is looking out for you. But giving and receiving support during drinking episodes is paradoxical because it reduces the risk of drinking-related harm while, at the same time, it perpetuates the behavior that produces risk.
Drunk support—the perceived or actual instrumental and/or expressive provisions delivered from one person to an intoxicated other when trouble arises during a drinking episode—comes in many forms and arises to meet the challenges of a variety of crises. According to my respondents, the most common drinking crisis involves one or more codrinkers becoming physically ill as a result of alcohol intoxication. Within the college drinking culture, getting sick—normally a solitary ritual in everyday life—often becomes a socially supported activity whereby codrinkers “hold the hair” of puking female friends, nurture their regurgitating drinking partners, and take special care to prevent their drunksick cohorts from choking on or inhaling their vomit. Though a few respondents seemed annoyed that they had to train their focus on a sick codrinker, most college drinkers appear to see this sort of nurturing as an important part of the drinking process. Caring for sick friends, for many college drinkers, is seen as a role or a job that must be fulfilled. Furthermore, one of my respondents took this concept a step further when she argued that taking care of drunksick friends is fun: “The only consequence [of the drinking episode] was my roommate got sick and I had to take care of her, but I didn’t really mind, it’s all part of the fun” (Janet, eighteen-year-old female). The care offered to ill drinkers is clearly beneficial for the sick person (i.e., the receiver of drunk support) because it may reduce the person’s risk of drowning in his or her own vomit. It is a good idea, then, to coach a vomiting cohort through the elimination process and to check on the person often in the aftermath of sickness. This critical form of support offered to sick drinkers, however, may actually perpetuate dangerous drinking since receiving help during this painful process probably takes a lot of the u
npleasantness out of a universally unpleasant experience.
College drinkers also get an opportunity to demonstrate adult competence when their “partners in crime” are apprehended by authority figures for unlawful drinking or public intoxication. Getting caught is problematic for a variety of reasons. Collared or arrested college drinkers may face penalties from the criminal justice system as well as punitive responses from the university power structure (e.g., suspensions or dismissals). Thus, when faced with the long arm of the law, binge drinkers often rely on their friends, roommates, and partners to guide them past police officers and resident advisors, to bail them out of jail, and to negotiate with the agents of social control for their release. To illustrate this function, recall the case of Sara, who rescued her friend by persuading a police officer to let her take her friend home rather than arrest her for public intoxication. College drinkers are involved in a perpetual game of cat and mouse with campus authorities. And those heavily involved in the drinking scene have developed a sort of intoxicated “underground railroad” that leads impaired or underage drinkers away from the threat of official sanctions. April fought through her own extreme drunk-sickness, for example, to hide her passed-out friend from their dorm advisor. This sort of support perpetuates heavy drinking because it reduces the risk that partiers will be held accountable for their drunken exploits and because it serves as a resource for adult identity claims (e.g., “I am a loyal and proactive person who will take extreme measures, even if it puts me at risk, to protect my friends.”).
Heavy drinking may facilitate the reciprocal flow of affection, but it also appears to generate a lot of relational conflict. Drunken arguments between partners, friends, roommates, and complete strangers are common in the college drinking scene. Intoxicated boyfriend-girlfriend teams sometimes spend their entire evening bickering with one another. Like all drinking crises, however, the drunken argument appears to have a “silver lining” for college students. Although some college drinkers—women in particular—often become dramatically sad after intoxicated arguments with other drunks, they generally do not have to deal with their despondency alone. When intoxicated college women get upset over relational woes, for instance, they can often count on their friends to talk them through their emotions. Intoxicated counseling sessions are common occurrences in the college drinking culture. The despair that results when love breaks down allows sympathetic friends to lend a shoulder to cry on. Some respondents referred to “mothering” their loaded friends during crises. Soothing a friend through his or her sadness is a prime example of maternal support; it allows emerging adult women to demonstrate adult gender competence in a practical way. This twenty-year-old female (featured in chapter 4) went the “extra yard” to console her girlfriend: “Last weekend I helped my friend by holding her, basically, for the whole night because she couldn’t stop crying over a guy.”
If drunk counseling is more likely to be “women’s work,” male college students are more commonly involved in the physical support of their friends in crisis. Intoxicated fistfights are a fixture on the social landscape of the drinking scene. Drunken fights often escalate from minor verbal slights, subtle acts of disrespect, or the prodding of audience members (e.g., “Are you going to let him talk that shit to you?!”). Whatever the reasons for alcohol-related brawling, male codrinkers often feel compelled to step up to support their imperiled cohorts. To illustrate this cultural mandate, recall the case of Ryan, who felt compelled to react aggressively to the assault of his friend: “So we confronted them and then the one guy punches my other friend. It’s sort of like, and I know this might sound bad but you know ‘that’s my boy or whatever so I can’t let you do that.’” Ryan got the opportunity to demonstrate his character on this occasion. He showed that he is the kind of guy who “has your back.” Although the risk of being assaulted is heightened when one participates in heavy drinking, the opportunity to show one’s mettle in a very public way is also increased. In this way, drunk fighting is a resource for demonstrating character and for making and supporting identity claims.
Researchers have built an expansive body of research on the relationship between serial intoxication and the risk of sexual victimization. According to my data, college drinkers appear to be aware of the vulnerability to victimization that accompanies drunkenness. They know that the “wolves” are out there and, in response, they have developed strategies to protect one another from predators. This system of informal support may be the most important manifestation of drunk support that exists on our college campuses. The most common method of thwarting the advances of a potentially unsafe suitor is the cock block (also known as “stepping in”). As detailed by many of the stories in chapter 4, college students will intentionally sabotage the discourse between an intoxicated friend (usually a female) and a flirtatious or aggressive third party if they feel the conditions are right for an unsafe or ill-advised hookup. The cock block seems to be an effective way of discouraging some risky encounters. This twenty-year-old female sees trouble brewing and immediately intervenes, temporarily squashing the seeds of victimization: “After that guy kissed her, I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ Like she’s totally trashed, she’s falling over, she can’t even stand up. I was like, ‘Leave her alone, I’m gonna take her home.’”
College drinkers also receive assistance from their peers on the morning after a drinking episode when hangovers and regrets threaten to ruin the thrills of a drinking episode. Hangovers do not seem to discourage many students, however, because they are able to redefine post-intoxication illness at inconsequential, as irrelevant, or as a fun part of the collective experience. Similarly, post-party shame and regret are easily dealt with if drinkers can convince themselves, and their audiences, that the regrettable or shameful behavior was not really engineered by them, but rather by the alcohol. The “because I was drunk” excuse is widely accepted in the world of college drinking and, thus, facilitates the persistence of patterns of heavy drinking even after someone has made of fool of himself or herself. In fact, codrinkers are actively enabling the intoxicated transgressions of their peers by accepting these excuses and by offering easy forgiveness. Grace’s friend, for example, told her not to be embarrassed about her most recent Shit Show, which may have the effect of contributing to Grace’s persistence in heavy drinking:
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.
This sort of unconditional drunk support allows the regretful drinker to reclaim his or her identity after a shameful intoxicated performance. As demonstrated throughout the book, getting wasted is a social process involving the collaboration of multiple actors. If college drinkers are able to successfully navigate through all of the potential crises awaiting them in the drinking scene and can, with the help of their peers, shrug off their physical and emotional pain the next morning, they are likely to continue to chase the alcohol high and all it has to offer them. And the history of college drinking-prevention programs suggests that breaking this cycle is no easy task.
Do Alcohol Prevention Programs Work on College Students?
Given the many perceived rewards of getting wasted and the supportive strategies that drinkers have developed to protect themselves and each other, it is not surprising that university officials have had little success in curbing heavy drinking. It is not, however, as if they have not tried. In recent decades, colleges and universities across the United States have made extraordinary efforts to reduce binge drinking among their student populations. Some of these programmatic efforts appear to be at least a bit promising; small and short-term reductions in alcohol abuse have been identified in scattered studies of the effectiveness of alcohol prevention programs. Overall, however, the accumulation of these efforts has produced little change in the college drink
ing culture. According to sociologist George Dowdall,
The evidence that has accumulated in the past few years helps us understand the apparent paradox of considerable progress in college-drinking prevention activity but yet no overall changes in college drinking. Colleges have done a lot in the past 20 years, but most of what they’ve done employs approaches that at best have very small effects (and only in environments with little alcohol promotion). Other approaches, such as BASICS, although they have demonstrated small effects, have been used on small fractions of college populations, producing little change at the population level. Still other approaches, like the AMOD [A Matter of Degree] and community-group approaches, also have small effects that don’t necessarily extend beyond the intervention.19
Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard Page 22