Something I wanted to talk about in this week’s blog post was the drinking culture, especially in college and how it relates to masculinity. The video we watched in class was a real eye opener when discussing the dangers of the excessive drinking culture in college. I think especially for men binge drinking is dangerous on college campuses. There is competition between males to out-drink one another and prove their manly-hood by drinking until the point where they black-out and put their life in danger. I know a lot of people throw out the word, “black-out” like it’s funny when it happens and you don’t remember your night. But in reality, blacking-out is caused by oxygen not being able to be transported to all parts of the brain so one’s brain shuts down the memory producing part of your brain to keep you alive. So really it’s not a funny manner and is more serious than just forgetting your night.
Something in the news that relates to this topic is the recent suspension of Greek Life at West Virginia University. At a frat party, a male student was found unconscious and later died from alcohol consumption. This relates to the video we watched in class discussing how males are pressured to drink large amounts of alcohol to prove themselves as male. Not only does the video we watched in class mirror this event but also most of the readings discussing male sexuality relate to this. Males need to be strong and the aggressors according the male scripts of Kim et al., and if they want to be desirable by females they need to exemplify Cad characteristics that may take on the “bad-boy” images displayed by binge drinking according to Taylor’s article. Since when has putting your life in danger become a way men feel they need to take part in to fit in with society?
In regards to the incident, the Dean of Students has shut down greek life for the rest of the semester. But in reality, what is this going to do? It’s not just greek life that drinks excessively and certainly wont change the way males drink in the future by shutting it down for the last two months of the semester. People will find other ways to consume alcohol whether it’s in a greek life setting or not. Something else needs to be done to the drinking culture at colleges.
I mentioned in class about a guy I went to high school with you recently passed away from excessive drinking mixed with stimulant drugs such as Adderall. His mother is working to stop this kind of behaviors at Universities. She talked about how when she went to the University of Michigan the drinking culture wasn’t nearly as excessive as it is now. Also, she mentions that the combo her son passed away from wasn’t out of the norm, this is something a lot of male students partake in to drink heavy amount of alcohol and she explains how it has to stop. Below is an article about her son and her hopes of starting a new campaign to combat these kinds of behaviors on campuses across the country.
This whole epidemic of binge drinking on college campuses and students putting their lives at risk it disheartening. There needs to be changes done, but I don’t know how it is possible to change something so prominent in society.
Kim, J. L., et al. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research.
Taylor, L. D. (2008). "Cads, dads, and magazines: Women’s sexual preferences and articles."
Hey Mara!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post this week. You made some excellent points about how Kim’s heterosexual scripts are strongly embedded into the drinking culture across college campuses. I strongly agree with you that men feel both the need to be aggressors and portray cad like characteristics due to heterosexual scripts and female selection preferences. I also agree with you that something needs to be done to counter the binge-drinking epidemic on college campuses but like you point out at the end of your article, there is not yet an effective solution. I agree with you that something so prominent in society seems difficult to change. But perhaps the concepts we learned about in the Joyce and Harwood article can help generate a couple ideas about changing binge-drinking culture. In their research they found the peer-generated content was more effective in generating message-consistent attitudes (Joyce & Harwood, 2014). I think that the documentary we watched in class was really impactful but that is probably because, as communication students, we have spent the majority of our time studying these topics and are invested in them more so than your average college student. If there were some sort of peer-generated, college student produced, content that addressed the problems of binge drinking, I think that it could be more effective than a government sponsored ad like the ones you see about texting and driving etc. Maybe if college students who have lived through consequences from binge drinking produced a video, it would start a more effective movement on college campuses to end binge drinking.
Thanks for a really interesting post!
- Kelly