LMFAO and Lil Jon ask in “Shots,” their spring break anthem, “All of the alcoholics, where you at?” After a week in the Florida panhandle, I’d venture to say that they were in Panama City, where wet T-shirt contests, all-night foam parties and the verve to wash off one’s scruples in the nippy ocean were motivated by shots shot shots and more shots.
Spring break was extreme, but its participants and the media like to claim that this happens every weekend across American college campuses. Despite ample populations of teetotalers at their respective schools, the college drinking culture becomes defined by the few who play hard.
Actually, alcohol-fueled debauchery is frequently bloated out of context. Drinking is often used in the college student’s vocabulary as a method of relating to one another and not necessarily reflective of the amount one actually wants to consume.
This means that statements such as “I can’t believe how drunk I was last night,” which Reynolds Price overheard on campus and recounted in a 1993 Founder’s Day Speech, shouldn’t be taken as a definitive alarm for Duke’s drinking practices. Such playful claims are more often fiction than fact.
When students are perceived as heavy drinkers, those outside the Duke bubble are led to believe that the drinking culture is a greater evil than its reality. Students on their part, run the risk of fulfilling the prophecy.
Indeed, Duke freshmen are socialized into a version of campus culture inundated with mythologized images of binge drinking and immoral behavior, where the concept of fun is portrayed as naked without the qualifier “free kegs.”
Some are immediately drawn to the forbidden fruit, while others react by keeping a wide birth and throwing value judgments into the resulting schism created between drinkers and non-drinkers.
Either way, alcohol becomes a fulcrum of moral contention. Students regard it as a demon, an excuse and a weakness just as often as they glorify it. And in the slim years between matriculation and legality, many tango with the stigma of the bottle whether they drink or not.
What we lose when we create and fall victim to the vilification of college drinking culture is forgetting the value and practice of drinking as a simple, uncomplicated pleasure.
We forget that frat boys aren’t the only ones who drink. Spanish sheepherders, gypsies on Bourbon Street, farmers in Madagascar drink. We drank under Caesar, and we’ll drink when we move to Mars.
We forget that alcohol brings people together whether or not everyone drinks. By increasing social interaction, alcohol increases the chance for personal connection, which is why many events use it as a strategy to attract crowds. Certainly drinking is not the only way to attain social interaction, but like it or not, it often gets the job done the fastest.
Instead, we often judge alcohol consumption in its worst light. Dukies are guilty of coveting over-achievement, and drinking is another sphere where one can do that. When the habit becomes a manifestation of something that is not actually about play, but reflective of one’s insecurities, alcohol becomes a crutch or weapon rather than a tool to unite and have fun. Although this does happen, drinking at Duke can be too easily portrayed as competitive when it is not.
So how do students avoid the negative hype and enjoy alcohol?
As long as the legal age remains 21, the University’s hands are tied. We as students need to be more proactive in our responsibility towards self-education: We need to get really comfortable with drinking.
By this I mean non-drinking students need to overcome the conception that alcohol universally degrades college campus culture. Alcohol must not be regarded as the cause of Duke’s social problems and a harbinger of inevitable immorality, but accepted as a fact of life that can be enjoyed for harmless fun if harnessed.
We must regard alcohol and those who use it in a more open-minded and honest way so that we are able to answer not only “why do I drink?” but “why do my peers drink?” This way, students will be more likely to see early on that the reality of drinking in college is most often tamer than what we are warned.
And the sooner we see this, the more quickly we can accept that fun is not measured by the number of drinks we’ve consumed or the parties we’ve attended, but by the value each has added to our college experience. Indeed, by becoming comfortable with the idea of drinking, we can learn how to use alcohol as a tool instead of a crutch and make drinking decisions without guilt or moral ambiguity.
In these last bill-less, job-less, responsibility-less years, we’ll be able to enjoy ourselves with or without shots.
Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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