Yâknow, I have a problem with this. Not the burglary â the assumption that teenagers have any great need for alcohol in the first place.
My circles never did. Doesnât mean it was absent, but few people were drinking in significant quantity.
Weâve successfully changed the social equation so kids who smoke are largely considered idiots rather than cool. I think itâs time to start thinking about how we can achieve the same with kids who drink to excess just because theyâ re getting away with something or think it shows theyâre âadultâ when itâs actually proving theyâre far from.
Yeah, I know, this is a slice of the authorâs life, at a time and in a place and so on. And yes, Iâm being a bit idealistic about this. But Iâd have been much, much happier if the word âtroublesâ in the very first panel was changed to âtroubledâ, past tense.
Be careful what expectations you set. Kids can read them, and will live up â or down â to them.
Teenagersâ peers did not stigmatize smoking, $4 gas and big taxes on cigs did. Plenty of teens smoke and now some are starting and exclusively smoking e-cigs which is just mind boggling. I think for the most part HS drinking is overstated but college is not, where most ppl arenât. 21 until years 3/4 and get sloshed most weekends.
The surefire way to get a child to want something is to forbid it. Stigmatization only works if being an outsider / part of an outsider peer group doesnât appeal - and it does, a lot. Loosen up a bit, teach children that drinking is ok in moderation and you wonât have the binge drink / teen drink problem.
Partly agree. We have something of a cultural standing wave in the US and I think itâs going to take a deliberate effort to break it. On the other hand, I agree that part of the attraction may simply be that it is forbidden. On the other other hand, stigmatization has worked with tobacco; it depends on the kind of stigmatization. Being an outsider doesnât appeal if that type of outsider is classified as âloserâ.
Partly agree too. Some do embrace âloserâ status. They are lost and bloody hard to get back. And they do damage - to themselves and within their peergroup. Thatâs the worst part of stigmatization - children donât have perspective to deal with it when it happens to them, and you do see a âwell, fuck it all thenâ change happen sometimes. Smoking, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, ârisky behaviorâ, personality problems, academic problems, nearly every emotional disorder, and I could on - in some way or another the foundation is a self-esteem issue. Paint a line and say once you cross that you are bad - and some will cross it, and believe they are bad.
Where I grew up, teenagers did have a great demand for alcohol. I shudder to think of the quantities we consumed. There were people in my circles who were hardened drinkers at the age of 16, guys who would drink 10 litres of beer and a bottle of vodka in an evening. Those were exceptional, but even I used to habitually drink 2-3 litres of beer in an evening. There were some who were smart enough not to take part in this madness, but most, me included, weren´t.
All of that is pretty horrifying when I think about it now but at the time I didn´t give much thought to it. In short: The teenage drinking doesn´t seem unrealistic to me.
I was straight-edge in high school but had many friends who would drink and would capitalize on this by checking the dumpsters of the local grocery stores where many students worked. You see, they would âaccidentallyâ drop cases of beer so they could be written off, these damaged cans were then placed in the dumpster where they could retrieve them after work. Often, a bottle of liquor would accompany them. My partner and I would retrieve these items while they were still at work and then sell them to people closer to our circle of friends. No-one was ever the wiser nor did they care about the dents or filth covering the cans.
AMERICA. COMMERCE.
A thought that keeps popping up when reading Real Stuff: âChrist, what an asshole.â
Often heavy drinking shows the teens have serious problems. In Def Backderfâs comic My Friend Dahmer, Derf notes Jeffrey Dahmer was getting drunk every day, to try to drown out his inner demons (he fantasized about having sex with cadavers.)
My Friend Dahmer is amazing and everyone here should read it. Also available on Comixology on all platforms.
No sex, nudity, or even misogyny this time around, though. I was mildly surprised.
Either that or they grow up in a drinking culture. If every teenage heavy drinker in my country turned out to be a serial killer we´d have a serious problem (in addition to teenage alcoholism).
Fortunately I lived far enough out in the countryside that we could get served at our local pub aged 16 (we also worked there). In my opinion this worked pretty well, because we were drinking surrounded by neighbours and relatives, whoâd make sure we didnât get to far out of line.
In fact, I tend to agree that thereâs something to be said for de-stressing alcohol to make it less interesting as a point of rebellion.
But I would like to see a reduction in the expectation that kids must drink â and drink stupidly â as a mandatory rite of passage. Hence my quibble with the stripâs language.
Shrug.
âMostâ certainly wasnât true at my school. Some, and some, certainly.
I would too. I donât drink, have never been drunk, and have never been remotely tempted to try and get a buzz. I donât have any moral objection to alcoholic drinks in and of themselves (Iâve tried dozens of different drinks myself, but I just canât stand the taste of alcohol), though I think getting stupid drunk is a⌠well, stupid thing to do. But why should I knock it if I havenât tried it? Plenty of people out there apparently enjoy intoxication, to the point where my preferences are in a vanishingly tiny minority when it comes to drinking.
Still, I think many recreational drinkers would be surprised at how much fun I have living without alcohol altogether. Doesnât matter, really. Most people are gonna drink, and at some point or another, most people will eventually drink too much (or at least to the point where they later wish they hadnât imbibed quite so much that one time). Nothing wrong with that, up to a point.
But yeah, anytime I turn my attention to what high schoolers and college-age kids are up to these days, all I ever hear about is somebody wringing their hands over the binge-drinking culture that has taken over Americaâs youth. But the kids donât care, and the problem has gotten worse. I know Iâm just the squarest of squares, getting all Church Lady about young people having some harmless fun getting their drunk on, but really: drinking till you puke is now considered perfectly normal, funny as hell, and not particularly dangerous.
And thatâs a sorry state of affairs right there.
Google âWSU drinkingâ (washington state university) and prepare to see exactly how sorry things can get. I get technogeekagainâs point as well, but problem or not (and all the various degrees between) teen and young adult drinking is âa thingâ imo.
To a certain extent, itâs been a thing for as long as thereâs been a legal drinking age. There was a fairly depressing episode of This American Life about the heavy drinking culture at Penn State, and it was such a big deal (particularly in the wake of the Paterno/Sandusky scandal) that they revisited Penn State two years later.
Earlier this week, Emily Yoffe at Slate posted an article that tried to make the case that college-age women might improve their chances of avoiding rape by easing off on the drinking and partying. Predictably enough, Yoffe promptly got lambasted as a victim-blamer, both at Slate itself as well as elsewhere. And that kind of bummed me out. Yoffe kinda bent over backwards to reiterate time and again that victims arenât to blame, but rapists are. And yet it comes across to me that some people are so invested in their freedom to drink themselves into oblivion that anyone who points out that Risky Behavior Is Risky gets painted as a rape apologist, no matter how much condemnation that person pours on the heads of rapists and would-be rapists and generally creepy opportunists who are careful to stay on the right side of the law, if only by a hairâs breadth.
Itâs weird. Telling your kid âif you drink and drive you might kill or maim someoneâ is apparently sound advice, but if you tell your kid âif you drink too much, someone might take advantage of you (or you might lose enough inhibition to do something to someone else that you otherwise wouldnât), so know your limit and donât go impairing your judgment at parties,â youâre apparently sending the message that rape is a natural phenomenon as common and blameless and unavoidable as being caught out in the rain or stuck in traffic.
Of course, now this argument has been brought over here. Sorry about that, folks. Drink on.
right. I see the issue as a subculture that would never have existed but for the imposed separation of the underaged which has (d)evolved over time. when we were both 18, my German friend who was visiting couldnât understand our laws and told me âif you can walk up to a bar and ask for a beer, youâll be servedâ in Germany (though I think this has changed since '93?) You could get beer in vending machines. point being, the abuse and âbad behaviorâ seems to stem partially from having to engage in sneaky, underhanded means just to obtain any alcohol at that age. (Iâm told there was no organized crime in the US until prohibition, either, which seems like parallel behavior) There are no role models present to establish the merits of moderation. everyone is an unseasoned drinker with a body that is at itâs most tolerant to any abuse you might throw at it (I never even got hangovers until I was 25) and the drinking must be done at a clandestine location after obtaining the booze illegally. fast forward X years since the establishment of the legal age. is there any doubt about the outcome? every chance to drink becomes a full-blown bacchanal, thatâs just how the risk vs return games out.
I have a lot of great memories of underaged drinking. The fact that none of them involved strolling to the pub and sitting in a controlled environment is what turned it into an adventure.
[Iâd posit that because kids arenât allowed to do fuck-all anymore, it makes them up the ante when they finally do cut loose, but thatâs an even less scientific argument than the one Iâm trying to make.]
