It’s the fall of 2015, the first full day of orientation. After years of meticulously planned afternoons, late nights, and bleary-eyed mornings doing assignments for every AP class they could cram into their schedules, or long hours at McDonald’s to help their family make rent, or summers of internships and weekends at band practice, tutoring, or varsity sports, and then months of essay writing, test taking, and hand-wringing, these new freshmen were in—at college, away from their parents, in the big city. For many, the focus of anticipation was on what they had deferred—or not been allowed to do—while they were working so hard to get in: “getting drunk and getting laid.” Lots of students party really hard during orientation. Many move on fairly quickly, finding friends or other social activities, but for some, it’s the beginning of four years of frequent binge drinking. Columbia is not the only campus where students joke that there’s no such thing as an alcoholic until after graduation.
Nick, a senior from Ohio, reflected on that week. “One of the guys bought some beer and I walked across College Walk with like a twelve-pack of Bud Lite. . . . ‘This is so cool, this is sick. [I’m not even] 21, you know?’” Nick was written up for drinking by his RA several times over the course of the freshman fall. “I had to, like, go to speak to advisors and stuff like, ‘Do you have a problem?’ Like, ‘Do you have a drinking problem you wanna talk about?’ I’m like, no, I’m just a fucking college student.”
Freshman fall is both exciting and socially painful. Students are homesick, or feeling bad about how relieved they are to be away from home, or both. They are scared that everyone is smarter than they are. They’re nervous that everyone is more experienced. Drinking together can break the ice—providing the courage necessary to walk into a party of strangers, jump out onto the dance floor, or flirt with a possible hookup. Not everyone drinks; some students cope by going for a run, visiting a museum, or engaging in religious observance.1 But a lot of students drink a lot, and their binge drinking intersects with the campus landscape; some Americans even celebrate this kind of drinking as a part of the normal college experience. The stress young people experience factors in, but stress is a justification as much as a cause.
Students arriving on campus have to manufacture an entire social world. Making friends and finding your people are central to the college project. For students new to campus and unsure where their college paths will take them, a big, loud party with some red Solo cups holds a distinct lure in those early anxiety-filled evenings. The contents of that cup promise to dull students’ worries about meeting new people and offer a shortcut to building friendships with them.2 Drunkenness and college are also tightly coupled in the American social imaginary. Before Jennifer’s older son left for college, the family settled in for a long-weekend movie binge of college-themed films, culled from lists of “best college movies” and Facebook friends’ suggestions. But after following Animal House with Old School, Back to School, and Revenge of the Nerds, Jennifer shut down the film festival. It was not fun; it was a master class in binge drinking.
As much as some students don’t really want to drink, we were surprised to find that unless activities and groups explicitly reject alcohol, even student activity groups that might not stand out as being structured around drinking frequently cement group bonds by incorporating alcohol into their social events. During the fall semester, drinking provides a common set of challenges and experiences that students can share. As on a scavenger hunt, students work collaboratively to solve a series of problems regarding money or fake IDs or party locations or bars where the bouncers card loosely if at all.3
On the opening days of the school year we sat outside bars and watched as bouncers let in large groups of freshmen, some of whom looked like they were high school sophomores or juniors.4 Students were thrilled to have “gotten in” to the local Irish bar for a classic orientation week scene: drunkenly making out with relative strangers, enveloped by the smells of bodies sweaty from the late August heat, feet sliding on a floor slick with spilled drinks and poorly cleaned-up vomit. If that sounds disgusting, it was. But the first-year students we talked to described it as fun—escaping home, breaking the rules, awkwardly discovering the body of another person, creating stories they could revel in hours, days, or even years later. Students form deep friendships, and sometimes even find true love, while caring for their drunk friends—getting them to drink water, or go for a walk, holding their hair while they vomit, or watching to make sure they don’t aspirate vomit while passed out. Assuming that no permanent damage is sustained, the frequently absurd, occasionally life-threatening, hazily remembered and very intense experiences of drunk young people become shared jokes: mistakenly peeing in the closet when too drunk to notice it’s not the bathroom, or standing in rumpled formal clothes outside a bar as the rain begins to fall, arguing about whether a friend—stumbling but still conscious—needs an ambulance, or just a taxi home followed by water and ibuprofen.
An ambulance is always parked on College Walk, the main pedestrian path through campus, where Nick so proudly walked with his twelve-pack of Bud Lite. Mostly the ambulances serve students who are exceptionally drunk or on some drug, or who are injured while intoxicated. Were this a housing project rather than an Ivy League campus, we can imagine the outrage at the necessity for such a thing, or the criticism of how that ambulance was facilitating degeneracy by lessening the consequences for bad behavior. But there is no outrage here. This is privilege: students don’t have to go far or wait very long for help, and if the Columbia ambulance takes them to an emergency room, the ride is free (although the ER visit, notably, is not). There are lots of reasons why young people who attend college drink more than their out-of-college peers, engaging in a riskier behavior and breaking the law at considerably higher rates.5 Their privilege gives them some license to break the rules.6 And for the most part, the law gives them a pass.
No one wants to get “cava’d”—taken away by the university ambulance corps (formerly, Columbia Area Volunteer Ambulance), but this service is an important option and is provided at no cost. Good Samaritan policies encourage students who may themselves have been drinking while underage or using illegal drugs to intervene to help a friend who seems in danger. While the ambulance ride may be free, the ER bill that follows can be well over $1,000.7 And if the Columbia ambulance is busy, students pay for the ride as well. As much as young people are legally adults, their parents typically find out at this point. An out-of-network ambulance ride and IV drip is a rounding error for some family budgets and a month’s rent for others. Because a well-meaning intervention can result in disciplinary action at school, or financial troubles at home, the students who are most likely to drink are the ones who can afford it—not just the alcohol itself, but the risks that go with it.8
Both of us remember our own college drinking. Shamus’s junior year was particularly alcohol-filled. He had to take a bit of a break from drinking after he’d danced in a fountain, passed out in some bushes, and woke up with a horrific hangover and an even worse cold. Jennifer dutifully slurped down the contents of a cup of beer with a goldfish in it as she stood in a basement during orientation week. Thankfully, she doesn’t remember the feeling of the goldfish sliding down her throat. She thought swallowing a goldfish was what you did at college. After all, her dad had done it as well.
But drinking-related mortality is not limited to goldfish. The CDC fact sheet that Jennifer made her older son read after a sheepish call from the emergency room in the winter of his freshman year notes that in the United States six people die every day from binge drinking, about three-quarters of them men. Binge drinking is defined for women as four or more drinks in two hours and for men as five or more drinks.9 In one large national study, about a third of college students reported at least one episode of five or more drinks in the past two weeks.10 The SHIFT survey found similar rates among Columbia students.11 Nationally, the students who binge drink are more likely to be white men from the most privileged backgrounds. This doesn’t just apply to students; wealthier men in general drink more.12 Students from this demographic are the ones most likely to have seen their own fathers drink heavily, and to associate heavy drinking with a normal transition to adulthood.
Those concerned about how young people drink today perhaps don’t realize that the average eighteen-year-old today drinks less and is less likely to use illicit drugs than one who came of age in the 1970s.13 Policies and programs have had a measurable impact on substance use among high-school-aged youth, so that students begin college today with less experience drinking than their parents likely have had. But during college, students do a lot of “catching up”—and by the time they graduate they’re drinking about the same amount as previous generations.
We could compare students not just to their parents, but to their grandparents, at least for those whose grandparents also attended college. In 1959 two deans at UCLA wrote, “Think of college and you think of flaming youth; thinking of flaming youth and you think of liquor and sex.”14 They go on to cite the heavy drinking, decades before, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s few years at college, noting that his “preoccupation with drink is second only to his preoccupation with sex,” before bemoaning similar dispositions in other college students. Studies dating back to the 1950s noted the impact of alcohol on “male aggression” in dating-courtship relations.15 However, we would be wrong to imagine that since this kind of excessive drinking has been going on for so long, there’s nothing we can do about it. Society made great strides in addressing smoking and homophobia—both of which were far more tolerated a generation ago. We have good models for how to make inroads into the problems of alcohol abuse.16
Why do people act in ways that seem dangerous, stupid, or both? The concept of social risk—the good (social) reasons we have for doing things that are bad for us, or for not doing things that would benefit our health—helps explain why people engage in behaviors with detrimental consequences, act in ways that seem illogical, or fail to take actions that could protect them.17 The idea of a social risk highlights one way that peers, organizational environments, and the broader culture shape actions that feel like individual choices. People engage in sex that can have health consequences—for example, forgoing condoms as a demonstration of trust—in part because sex isn’t a health behavior, but rather, a social behavior, laden with all kinds of meaning and influenced by our peers, our pasts, and our institutions.18 Other parts of everyday life are no different; people smoke, drink, eat too much, don’t exercise, and subject themselves to enormous amounts of stress. We are not health-maximizing beings; instead, we often prioritize all kinds of social goals over our personal and collective health.
Social risk helps us make sense of why people drink so excessively when they hate how terrible they feel the next day, when they do things they regret or can’t even remember, and when other parts of their lives that are valuable to them are negatively affected by their drinking. The drunk sex that happens after a party may be dangerous insofar as it puts students at risk of all kinds of things, including sexual assault—either being assaulted or committing assault. But in college, where party drinking is a major way people socialize, it also may feel like the best strategy to meet potential sexual partners, make new friends, or create meaningful experiences with existing ones.
Students on the same campus experience different social risks in relation to drinking. Forgoing the purchase of a fake ID can mean missing out on socializing with the “right” people, on being able to go wherever those people go. But for others, the social risks of getting that ID feel greater. For example, for people of color, the far higher likelihood of incarceration and the dangers of an encounter with a police officer at a traffic stop are well documented. And for many men, who cannot imagine themselves being sexually assaulted, and who haven’t thought about how drinking might make them more likely to commit assault, the conversation about assault and drinking feels irrelevant. Race, class, gender, and sexuality intertwine with institutional structures, peer networks, and cultural frameworks to produce different orientations to what, socially, is a risk. The stress of college, sexual shame, the legal drinking age, and the cultural and structural legacy of elite institutions of higher education as places for white men to come of age all intertwine to shape campus drinking.
When Nick asserted that he was “just a fucking college student,” he was drawing on a deep history of American residential higher education as providing a place where “flaming youth” safely toggle between living the life of the mind and being the life of the party. Campuses have grown ever more diverse; thus there are more and more students for whom the social risks of drinking exceed the risks of not drinking. Yet heterosexual, white, wealthy male students still wield enormous social power, because they control scarce social space, and because they can more easily enjoy the undeniable social benefits of heavy drinking—the bonding, the fun, the stress relief, the easy access to casual sex—without worrying so much about being assaulted, or arrested, or the cost of the bill from an ambulance ride. Our point is not that college drinking is the fault of wealthy white men. It’s that histories of advantage and specific kinds of masculinity have produced a particular drinking environment—an environment that intersects with the contextually specific rationale behind the heavy partying that is so typical of freshman fall. Which is exactly the period, sometimes referred to as the “red zone,” that college students are most likely to experience sexual assault.19
Today’s college freshmen were almost all born well over a decade after Congress’s passage of the 1984 Uniform Drinking Age Act, requiring states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 to qualify for receipt of federal highway funds. From a population health point of view, this is an unmitigated success, estimated to have saved half a million teenage lives.20 Yet today’s college students still drink, and enter a context in which institutional liability has pushed drinking out of campus pubs, lounges, and hallways, and behind closed doors and in dark corners (although it is worth noting that there is substantial variation in campus drinking environments, which include traditions and school culture as well as the demographic makeup of the student population, policies or laws at the institutional, community, and state level, and the enforcement of those laws).21 An unintended consequence of laws to reduce alcohol-related harms is that the easiest path to some crazy orientation-week story is to venture into spaces controlled by older students—usually men.
Freshmen arrive at college already familiar with age-based social stratification. Differences in institutional knowledge, maturity, self-confidence, and friendships deepened through time and shared experience further disadvantage younger students, with these structural inequalities amplified by the control of space on campus. Almost all traditional-aged Columbia and Barnard undergraduates live in student housing, and an unexamined fact of college life is that juniors and seniors have access to better space—either suites with a shared living room and single bedrooms, or apartment-style living. This is a critical aspect of the geography of partying on campus, promoted by the different kind of monitoring to which juniors and seniors are subject. Since seniors are often 21 or older, there is little push to enforce minimum legal drinking age laws in their dorms. Incoming students walk into a situation in which two precious sources of social currency—alcohol and space to party without getting in trouble—are unequally allocated by class year. Such stratification systems are taken for granted, with questions rarely raised about why policies provide better spaces for people who are more “senior,” even in the face of evidence that such policies may create considerable harms.
Like Prohibition, laws making 21 the legal age to buy alcohol have led to a series of social work-arounds. Institutions incur liability should they fail to enforce the law, with the result that underage students cannot drink openly in the spaces that they control—their dorm lounges, the small shared kitchens in the freshmen and sophomore dorms, or even cinder-block hallways. But students can get away with drinking in their dorm rooms if they do not to disturb their neighbors or otherwise attract an RA’s attention. If they do, students under 21—typically freshmen and sophomores—can get “written up,” as Nick was, for drinking with friends in a space they control. The take-home lessons are: don’t crank the music up, and drink quickly. In this context, pregaming—drinking rapidly with a few friends before going out, sometimes in the form of a drinking game—follows a robust logic of efficiency. Students save on the unit price; shots from a “handle” of vodka, purchased by a friend with a fake ID or an upperclassman, cost a fraction of what students would pay for a vodka soda at a local bar. They also avoid the social price. Parties get packed quickly, and as they do, students often have to run a gauntlet to gain admission. Fraternities, by rule, are not allowed to serve hard liquor. If you’re a man, getting in is tough, as brothers tend to limit access to men who are part of the house (in part to keep the gender ratio to their advantage). If you’re a woman and you don’t want to drink cheap beer, you have to subject yourself to the evaluation of some fraternity brother, who will decide whether you are cute enough to get a shot of vodka. Pregaming enables students to consume alcohol when, where, and with whom they please.
Rich kids swagger onto this landscape, with wealthy, white freshmen as the ones most likely to arrive on campus with a fake ID. Cecile, a willowy sorority girl from Atlanta, recalled deciding in ninth grade that she wanted to run with the party crowd. They got their fakes as a group, buying them from kids at a different high school. The racial codes of her description made us cringe. The fakes were good because they got them from people who knew what they were doing; she said, somewhat unbelievably to us, that they “also sold cocaine and guns”—she paused to laugh, “Like, who the hell were those kids?” Once she and her high school friends got their IDs, they quickly developed a strategy for where to use them: go to where the poor people were. “You just like go to a more sketch neighborhood and walk into a liquor store.” Without needing a paying job of her own, before she even started college Cecile had money to buy liquor, and a “good fake.” She was well dressed, with money to spend and the resources to avoid trouble—an ideal patron for a bar or club, except of course for the fact that she was underage. Parents sometimes paid attention to credit card bills. But rich kids had plenty of work-arounds, including ways to get the cash they needed to buy drugs. Charge dinner with a friend on Mom and Dad’s card and have your friend pay you back in cash. Mom and Dad probably wouldn’t notice that dinner was twice as expensive as it should have been; you can rely on assumptions about how expensive New York is. It was a hustle many wealthy students had learned in high school.
Two decades ago women like Cecile would have entered a campus landscape filled with people like her—wealthy and white, and, in Columbia’s case, mostly male. Columbia today is less than 50% white, with a sizable number of students from low-income backgrounds; nearly one in five undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college.22 Students like Cecile don’t totally rule, in part because there are now plenty of students from the “sketch” neighborhoods she referenced. As a white student, Cecile complained, there are certain things you can’t talk about—race particularly. It just gets you into trouble. And so for the most part, you learn to be quiet and keep your thoughts to yourself. Most of these rich students also learn fairly quickly not to flaunt their privilege.
The cultural and social traces of higher education’s historical role as a coming-of-age setting for white men linger in the social organization of campus drinking. Part of this involves the physical institutions—Princeton has its eating clubs; until just a few years ago Harvard had its finals clubs; and lots of schools have fraternities—where upperclassmen who are frequently white and wealthy control high-value space and access to alcohol. Drunken college hijinks are a core element of the cultural imagination of the American ruling class. Norman, explaining why a friend of his from Germany drank so heavily during his first weeks at school, pointed to Bluto of Animal House fame, and said that Franz was “just trying to go out there and be, like, college.”
Two basic principles define the relationship between institutions of higher education and fraternities: liability and loyalty. In terms of liability, who is, or should be, held responsible for hazing, sexual assaults, or harms related to binge drinking that are tied to Greek life? In terms of loyalty, how much can or should schools do to regulate, or even shut down, such social institutions, to which alumni may feel an intense devotion, and to which some current students are equally devoted? But there’s a third set of questions that might be asked, about how these quasi-independent institutions can, in the aggregate, work against institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion—not necessarily through any intention on the part of the members themselves, but solely by being places that reproduce wealthy men’s control over (party) space.
Colleges and universities across the nation are struggling, in ways large and small, with their histories as predominantly white institutions—the names on buildings and statues, the financial legacy of endowments that began with profits from America’s original sin of slavery.23 The drinking culture is not generally flagged as part of this, but our work suggests that the shift to diversity and inclusion requires addressing the dominance of white cultural practices.24 Although there is not a massive literature on institutional characteristics and levels of binge drinking, it is well established that students at historically Black colleges and universities—HBCUs—drink less.25 Some of this, no doubt, is because Black Americans are surveilled far more aggressively, punished disproportionately for their transgressions, and subject to potentially lethal force when policed. Students at historically white colleges and universities experience none of these biases, and are, in critical ways, freed up to drink more.26 Even within institutions that are more racially mixed, Black students drink less than white students.27 And Greek letter organizations, often flagged as institutional sources for the reproduction of binge drinking, are actually only associated with higher rates of binge drinking when they are white men’s Greek letter organizations.28
We noted that the Mexican independence party to celebrate “el Grito,” hosted by Latina women students, took place in a fraternity. Going back at least to Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Fraternity Gang Rape, work on masculinity and campus sexual assault has examined fraternities as the institutionalization of toxic masculinity.29 Frequent and egregious examples keep this narrative alive. But our position is more nuanced. As others have also noted, fraternities are not all the same; in addition to the racial and ethnic diversity of some fraternities even on historically white campuses, some are actively involved in intentionally trying to remake masculinity, while others seem primarily focused on managing liability.30
Critically, at Columbia there’s at least as much variation in prestige between fraternities as there is between men who are involved in Greek life and those who are not. The same is true of athletics.31 Students we asked almost all reproduced the same list of the “best” fraternities and sororities, and the “hottest” men’s teams, where “best” and “hottest” mean the most exclusive, with members who are supposedly the most attractive, with the highest value as sexual partners. There was also a high degree of concurrence about the “worst” fraternities. From the point of view of the broader campus culture, the problem is not that fraternities offer a highly valued mechanism to foster connections with peers (and alumni); it’s that they reproduce an unequal allocation of access to space, alcohol, and a specific vision of college fun. The Latino men, in handing over their house to women for the “el Grito” party, suggested just how malleable that inequality could be.
There is Greek life that is actually the opposite of boozy; it’s officially dry. Sororities can’t serve alcohol at their events; some can’t even have alcohol in their houses at all. That isn’t an informal practice; it’s a national rule to which chapters must adhere. This further concentrates the power of distributing alcohol in the hands of wealthy men in historically white institutions—and here we are talking about fraternities, not universities. It’s not that Black, Asian, and other students don’t drink, because many of them do—although notably less so in spaces that they control—but that college binge drinking is a white man’s cultural practice that other students emulate to embody the white masculinity of “the college experience.” The SHIFT survey found gender and racial-ethnic patterns of binge drinking at Columbia similar to national ones, with men, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics engaging in binge drinking at significantly higher rates than other students.32 Girls in high school are increasingly likely to drink excessively, closing some of the difference between how girls drink and how boys drink. There are many reasons for this, but we think that part of this is a vision of “equality” that means acting like the guys.
At 9 a.m. on the Saturday morning of homecoming, one of the year’s biggest drinking days, the university-assigned and -employed party monitors came in to inspect a fraternity and make sure it was following regulations—no serving booze other than beer, no kegs, food and nonalcoholic drink available, no nuisance noise. A monitor went through her checklist ritual with the fraternity’s “compliance officer”—a junior who was assigned this important leadership position. Was there soda available? Yes. How about food? Five different brothers pointed to the bagels. How loud would the music be? “Party level.” The brothers demonstrated. One of the party monitors joked, “Aw, c’mon y’all, this is not party volume, I would not come to your party.” Everyone laughed, and they turned the volume up more. The second monitor located the required soda.
There was no acknowledgment of the fact that many of the fraternity members—all wearing logo-printed tank tops and Bermuda shorts despite the fall chill—were already drunk. There were no open cans of beers in sight. No one asked, in part because that alcohol was hidden away. Meanwhile, the guys were fiddling with their phones. Typical enough for college students. But they weren’t just texting friends about meeting up to go to the game. They were making “party arrangements.” This meant scoring whatever remaining drugs they needed. Maybe some pot. But mostly cocaine. An upstairs closet already held nine boxes of vodka. Boxes, not bottles. One of the brothers slyly but proudly showed this to us after the university staff member had left. She wouldn’t be back. She’d done her job.
Murray and Cooper, two of the fraternity brothers, headed out into the chilly morning rain, still festively attired in Bermudas and tank tops, warmed by their buzz from the morning’s shots and their adrenaline about the day to come. As they walked over to the local liquor store they knew would sell to them, they planned their purchase. Both were rich, or at least their families were. Theirs is a kind of masculinity that might be called more “metro” than “macho.”33 Murray said to Cooper, “Man, I just want some rosé wine or something, my stomach’s kind of fucked, so I just want something easy and girly.” Cooper emphatically agreed, hoping they could get a particular brand of “classy” boxed wine—“This is a party, man! But I just spent like a grand on coke this month, I’m out of money. And the problem with that boxed wine is, it is just gone.” Murray suggested that Cooper get some and just keep it in his room, but Cooper retorted, “Man, the point of boxed wine is to get the party lit! You can’t hoard it.” In the end Cooper bought two magnums of the least expensive sauvignon blanc. Girls were more likely to drink white wine. Murray got a larger stash of his own. Cooper and Murray were providers for the party. With some portion of their spending money that remained after the thousand dollars spent on cocaine (in our estimate, not an exaggeration), Murray and Cooper demonstrated their “success” as men. Only some students have the means and ability “to make the party lit.” This, of course, puts them at risk for supplying things that are illegal; their privilege comes with an entitlement that promotes dangerous risk-taking.
These men cared about being good hosts, but reveled in their mastery of the space. Control of the physical space in a fraternity house is not just about who gets in the front door—the brothers make it known, sometimes less than subtly, that it is literally their home. Chilling upstairs after the liquor store run, Murray needed to pee. He walked out of his bedroom and up to the first door down the hall. He knocked, heard a female voice, and walked to the second door, where the same thing happened. Frustrated, he leaned his back up against the door, bent one leg, and started kicking the door as hard as he could with his heel. It sounded like he was about to kick the door down. The female voice inside let out a shout of surprise. Two women emerged, flustered, from one of the bathrooms. Turning to us, he explained, “I care about my brothers, but these other people, like, I don’t care about you, you’re in my way.”
Later, back in his bedroom with the door closed again, Murray wanted to talk about a woman he’d just kicked out of his room—not the one in the bathroom, but another one, earlier that day. There was something important he wanted to share with us, and he felt she couldn’t be there to hear it. She was, he told us,
really sexy and really fratty. She’s great. Like she can hang around with me and guys and I can get drunk and she’ll sit on their laps and the guys are like “Whoa, Murray doesn’t care,” ’cause we’re past that shit, man. And we were in this groove last year where, like, we’d have sex, I’d wake up at six for practice, get back, she’d make me breakfast, we’d have sex, I’d go back to sleep and see her in the evening. It was great.
Clearly, one of the things he valued most about her was her willingness not to disrupt his masculine social circle.
Fraternity men have expanded their social circles to include not just women (if they are sufficiently “fratty”) but other types of men who were previously not welcome. Murray asked one research assistant, Alex, about himself. Alex shared that he was married to an Israeli man. Murray was quick to try to prove to Alex that he was not homophobic:
Aww, that’s cool man. . . . Dude, I wish I was gay and could just like date a man. I don’t think that men are smarter than women, but I do believe that men are more emotionally grounded than women. Like, I’d love to just be able to be a gay dude and chill with a guy and like watch sports and play Xbox and fuck. That’d be a chill relationship.
Alex—not a big Xbox player or sports fan, but a great ethnographer—wisely nodded and said little. Murray continued:
And like, some of the brothers here are gay. But they’re such chill fratty dudes who like sports and play Xbox. I think that when you’re in a homophobic place people get pushed into this spot where they need to build a community so they get all fay and faggy, but in New York, it’s fine and these bros can just be themselves and be chill bros and not all faggy. I fucking hate the liberal social justice warriors on this campus, but ironically, now I know all these Black guys and gay bros who are super chill and normal. Am I like offending you?
Alex said he was not offended. “Yeah, man,” Murray concluded, “you’re chill.”
There were a series of oppositions here: chill, fratty, and normal on one side; fay, faggy, and social justice warriors on the other. But gay people—and even, Murray emphasized, Black people—could be on his side of that line, as long as they were, in the judgment of people like him, “chill” and “normal.”34
Malachi, who was a junior when we interviewed him, spoke of Columbia’s whiteness throughout his conversation. He shared his regret at having joined a white fraternity rather than a Black one, in part because in his telling, students drank more at white parties and danced more at Black ones. He criticized what he felt was the fundamental whiteness of the school’s core curriculum, and was concerned about his elevated vulnerability to accusations of sexual assault because of the “stigma of being a Black male.” For him, the safest strategy was to not drink at all. Carl, a Black senior and varsity athlete who we frequently saw surrounded by adoring women and envious-looking men, eschewed alcohol as part of rejecting the whiteness of that college experience. “I’m really just not interested in, like, living someone else’s college experience.”
There is plenty of drinking that happens outside of the fraternity context and historically white spaces. At the campus center for Jewish student life we saw religiously observant students drenched in sweat and dancing wildly—separated into single-sex groups—in celebration of Simchat Torah, a holiday traditionally accompanied by intense revelry. After a party hosted by the Black Students Organization, we stood near a public safety office in the student center and watched as two men helped a third stagger into the bathroom to vomit; the officer looked at us and shook her head. We also sat through a few beloved “wine-nights”: intimate (and, to students, adult-feeling) dinners where students who have found their people and aged into having a suitable space would gather to drink and cook.35
This chapter has focused on one very particular kind of drinking—the socially patterned toxic campus brew. It rarely occurs to privileged white men that they could be sexually assaulted, and few have had prevention education that emphasizes how heavy drinking significantly increases their risk of assaulting someone else. This embodied practice of privilege has an unintentional negative impact on the broader social collective. It spreads outward in two ways: culturally through a kind of symbolic domination, where drunken hijinks come to be seen as a key route to the essential college experience, and structurally, through their unequal access to the resources necessary to host, as well as the resources to cushion the blow of whatever might happen while blackout drunk. Which, a lot of times, is sex. Sometimes, it’s sexual assault.
Nearly six feet tall, with blue eyes, curly blond hair, and a little stubble, Norman was the very picture of the self-possessed undergraduate. As he spoke it became clear that he’d made himself at home on the campus both his parents had attended. He repeatedly described himself as “fortunate,” in the way that rich people do—“fortunate” that he didn’t have to take the cost of college into account when deciding where to go, “fortunate” that his small private school helped him find an unpaid internship in a vaccine research lab when he was just sixteen, “fortunate” that his mother raised him bilingual, so that he could chat in Spanish with the guys in the liquor store on 125th Street. In his telling, this made it so much easier for him to buy liquor (he also had a good fake ID).
Norman described Columbia’s “really serious work-hard, play-hard culture. Like people go out and they’ll be, like, all right, got an A on my exam, time to go out and just get, like, blackout.” He was critical of it. “It can be fun, and it can be good to spend time with your friends, but I also think it’s super unhealthy . . . the going out with the expectation of relieving all of your stress by just getting, like, insanely smashed.” But what he took to be the “Columbia culture” and the norm was actually his own experience as a wealthy white man. Students told us, nonchalantly, of heading to Butler Library on Friday after dinner, bags filled with their laptops, notes, and a water bottle. They’d set an alarm for 11:30 p.m., open their water bottle, and start drinking. They weren’t hydrating. For the next thirty minutes they’d finish up their work and drink four or five shots’ worth of liquor so they weren’t too far “behind” their friends when they showed up at a party just after midnight, when the library closed. There’s an intentionality to this kind of drinking, through which students get out of work mode and into party mode; it is an almost baroque imitation of the after-work drink.
Conversations about sexual assault on college campuses frequently point to the substantial research on alcohol as a source of vulnerability—as if raising students’ awareness of the dangers of combining alcohol and sex would deter them from doing so.36 But what goes unacknowledged is that young adults don’t get drunk and just happen to have sex. They frequently get drunk in order to have sex. The mystery here is not the persistence of drunk sex among students; rather, it is the persistent exoticization, among adults, of students’ recreational drinking and sex, especially considering their own well-accepted practice of drinking to have sex. If adults reflect critically and honestly on their own sexual behavior and history, how different does it look? This is particularly true for wealthier, white Americans.37
When asked if he drinks or uses substances before a sexual encounter, Norman responded with a clipped “no.” But, perhaps noting our surprise, he expanded: “Like, going out and getting drinks beforehand, but not in like preparation for a sexual encounter. Just more as a social thing.” He then added, with a sort of bizarre quantification, that he was “probably like twenty-five percent funnier” when drunk. To Norman, the risks of drunk sex felt primarily reputational. “I have definitely hooked up with girls and regretted it on my end.” He dimly recalls one night freshman year that began with many rounds of shots; by the time he got to the party he was very drunk. Mischa, who was in his core curriculum section, had been flirting with him, but he was not interested in her; in fact, he described her as “like a three-day-old pizza . . . if you’re really that hungry, like, you might microwave and eat it, right? But like, then it’s not gonna be that satisfying.” And yet, he went back to her room with her and they had sex. He was emphatic, albeit circuitous, in his claim that it was “definitely not something that was not consensual.” He regretted having sex with her even as it was happening. “I was just like, ‘I don’t think you’re smart at all, like you’re someone I just don’t want to spend time with. . . . ’ She was definitely not as attractive as most of the girls around . . . the boxes just, like, weren’t checked as far as what I would normally want.” Yet what he regretted was not the bad sex. He had lowered his standards to have sex with Mischa. His friends later made fun of him for it, because she wasn’t, in their view, hot. The consequences for his social standing seemed to be his primary regret.
The Centers for Disease Control has stopped using the word “accident” to describe firearm injuries: an accident is something that could not have been predicted or prevented. Instead, the CDC uses the term “unintentional injuries.” The United States chooses not to regulate weapons, and consequently has a gun death rate that far exceeds every other developed country in the world—nearly ten times as many deaths per capita as our Canadian neighbors and almost thirty times as many deaths as Denmark.38 Other countries have effectively used laws and policies to prevent firearm-related deaths. So these deaths can’t, in good faith, be called “accidents.” Similarly, there might be an element of unpredictability to any particular incident of drunk sex, but there is a clear overall social patterning. As Norman might say, getting drunk, hanging out with friends, and then maybe also hooking up with someone, checks off a lot of boxes. (And hopefully it is not something to compare later to three-day-old pizza.) Chelsea, in one of the all-women focus groups, shared sharply ambivalent feelings about this: “It’s so challenging to meet people organically on this campus. . . . I would argue that the only times I’ve had flirtatious interactions with men [have] been intoxicated. I actually like genuinely hate it”—at which point Shamus broke in to ask, “You mean you’re intoxicated or they’re intoxicated?”
Both. Or . . . I don’t know. I’m not ashamed of this actually. Part of joining the sorority was to meet boys. I just don’t know how to meet them. Like, where are they? So being thrown into a fraternity basement where everyone is drinking or, you know, they rent out a bar. Everyone’s drinking. The interactions I’m gonna have with people who I want to get to know more or I think are cute are gonna be shaped by how much I’ve been drinking or—and then also, you know, if we’re both intoxicated and we’re talking, then the culture that I’ve experienced so far has not been let’s see each other again soon. It’s come back to my room tonight. Like, sleep over if you want, but that’s gonna be the end of it.
Drinking is a big part of white heterosexual students’ strategies to accrue sexual experience. But we found that across racial and ethnic groups, sexual orientation, and gender identity, drinking to have sex is central to many students’ early-college projects. It is fairly common; analysis of SHIFT survey data showed that two-thirds of sexually active students who had had sex in the prior three months reported some substance use prior to or during sex.39
Rowan, an aspiring neurosurgeon, was hazy on many details of one orientation-week hookup; in fact, she slept with a guy without being one hundred percent sure of his name, although she did remember stopping to buy cookies on the way back to his room—but the thrill of recounting it was evident, as she described telling her newfound friends about this adventure as something that was “very college, very what you do in college.” Students talked about how being drunk dulls the awkwardness of hookups, like Novocain before dental work. Margot noted that she “only has the courage to hook up when drunk,” and Jeanette talked about drinking in anticipation of hooking up “because it would, like, blur my memory a little bit, I would just be more relaxed about it. . . . I didn’t want to remember awkwardness. . . . It was appealing that I could get really drunk and not necessarily be super self-conscious.”
Stress and sexual shame are at the heart of a lot of why drunk sex is so common. Scholars have shown that being drunk produces vulnerability to sexual assault, and individuals, communities, and organizations have taken note.40 One response, common during sexual assault prevention programming, is to convey to young people that they can’t consent to sex if they’re drunk—that consent, as a legal standard, cannot be given if one person is intoxicated. That may be somewhat true, except that many students (and likely many of our readers) have been drunk and had sex to which they agreed and did not regret. The coupling of alcohol and sex means that for those students who do drink as part of their anticipation for meeting a sexual partner, prevention messages that discourage drunk sex are effectively like saying, “Don’t have sex.” Moving the needle on drunk sex isn’t going to be easy. But moving the needle on some of the underlying causes may be more feasible, and may have additional benefits.
On a tour of one of the dorms we stopped in the basement lounge, looking at the boardroom-like table and whiteboard, to ask what was the most fun thing that he recalled happening there. Our student guide answered, “Um, probably the puppies—when they bring in the therapy dogs during exam time.” Everyone loves the puppies, and evidence suggests that they provide real benefits to students—but what does it say about the environment of college today that it requires that degree of stress mitigation?41
There are parts of college that are hard in ways that are not modifiable, nor should they be: demanding academics, the developmental challenges of growing up, the college project of figuring out who you are and what you want to do. But there are modifiable sources of stress. Schools can’t change the labor market, but they can improve career services; for students without a family friend to get them an internship, the summer job race begins in September, and requires sending out hundreds of resumes to find a position. Leaving behind family and friends can be hard. But schools can do more to address the social and emotional needs that are part of that transition. It’s not just a question of what happens during orientation week; schools with the resources to do so can consider how campus social geographies, including both identity group–specific spaces and public spaces that facilitate social interaction, shape students’ experiences.
While schools have had little impact in reducing drunk sex by warning students of its dangers in relation to sexual assault, there are at least two precursors of drunk sex that may be more modifiable: sexual shame and difficulties in forming new attachments. Sexual shame is socially produced, reflecting the shame about one’s own body produced by porn as a primary source of sexual information and the impact all of those “not under my roof” messages that deny young people’s sexual citizenship.42 Sex with people one doesn’t know well reflects the power of hooking up as an ideal, a way to “be college,” but it also reveals the role that peer networks and extracurriculars play as substitute families. If it were easier to make friends throughout one’s time at college, students might be more willing to risk an emotional entanglement with someone they already know and like. There are ways to build a social environment in which it is less likely that students experience the need to drink heavily to get themselves over that bar where they feel like they can just “let go” and have sex. If sex didn’t feel so scary in the first place, students might not need to get so drunk to quash their fears and shame. And so another way into the question of drunk sex is to look at sex more generally: how campus sexual geographies shape it, what students’ sexual projects are, the social risks they juggle in realizing those projects, and the moments in which they see, or fail to recognize, each other’s sexual citizenship.