Deep That Drink

Mistakes made and lessons learned at university

I’m going to be honest. I’ve done some really stupid s**t in my time. Maybe it was something about getting to university which unveiled this degenerate side of me — assimilating into a student culture here which glamorised vices and ‘feral’ behaviour. Whether it was a feminist outburst of asserting my freedom to drink and smoke, my sexual liberation, or an outlet for frustration of my comparatively repressed past, it’s a lifestyle I began to imbibe.  

In my head, it was behaviour long-accepted and almost idolised in, and among men. In the past few decades, among the more liberated, it’s become attractive amongst women too — this ‘I don’t care’ attitude of engaging in ‘frowned upon’ activities as a rebellion. It was attractive to me, to live by the very simple belief that any action or behaviour acceptable from a man should be acceptable from a woman. It was attractive, the freedom to assert this kind of staunch feminism, coming from a culture in which patriarchal and conservative values always seemed to linger in the background.

Unfortunately, but not shockingly, this attitude led me to a rude awakening: our conception of ‘modernity’ exists only in theory, and does not reflect the reality of how we’re really socialised. 

This way of being, this practical form of feminism, it felt exactly like who I thought was. But increasingly, I realised this started to excuse the escapism I felt I needed to cope with the very normal insecurities that come with being a 20 year-old girl. Was it a guise of empowerment? Or was it me grasping at straws — a plea to the drinks and the occasional cigarette to hold up an image of nonchalance I wish I really had? Was the acceptance of any male attention instead of an expression of my right to ‘enjoy my life’, really just desperate attempts at fulfilling the craving of feeling desirable?

Everyone is insecure, and the more ‘intense’ among us — a word I’ve been called and have tried to escape my whole life — may respond to insecurity with this ‘I don’t care’ attitude. In an ideal world living this lifestyle, you’d laugh off the stupid thing you said, or the dodgy person you kissed — until you realise that your words may have caused pain, and that dodgy person was really a lot more dodgy than you drunkenly thought. You’d shrug off the one-night-stand as a perfectly ‘okay’ assertion of your independence — but really you spend the next week dragging around a debilitating mix of shame and disgust, wishing you’d experienced real intimacy instead, a kind which didn’t completely destroy your entire perception of self respect. It wasn’t just silly and drunk, it was stupid and harmful. 

Anyone who has experienced the infamous ‘hangxiety’ knows it's up there with one of the worst feelings in the world. It’s when you know that you should have been in control and you weren’t, you can only blame yourself. 

Those who know me may think I’m ‘deeping it’ all a bit too much, particularly my friends who have grown up in cultures where this is a normal part of being silly and young. For someone who has lived the ‘party animal’ student lifestyle, nothing about my life is abnormal, it might even seem relatively tame. I can count on one hand the amount of truly debauched experiences I’ve regretted, most of which I would attribute to the inherently gendered aspects of intimacy. Nothing can minimise the extent to which I feel that drinking can put women in situations where issues of consent, urges, and power structures feel nebulous. 

This is especially hard to navigate when, at the end of the day, the responsibility falls entirely upon us. With that being said, nothing truly catastrophic has happened, and maybe I ought to have a tougher attitude, practise what I preach, and enjoy my life. As I write this, I have no intentions of quitting big nights out or the odd pint. But I am realizing that we can’t always be proud of the way imbibing this ‘uni lifestyle' makes us, and protecting our true character is more important than the one we’ve always wanted to have.

Image from Wikimedia Commons