So, let me just say from the outset that I am verging on being a complete teetotaller. I pull a Viv (go sober) all the time and I go to the notorious Friar Tuck’s sober. This resulted in me acing Viv’s little alcohol survey as my total Alcohol Use Disorder Test score is 0.
So, let me just say from the outset that I am verging on being a complete teetotaller. I pull a Viv (go sober) all the time and I go to the notorious Friar Tuck’s sober. This resulted in me acing Viv’s little alcohol survey as my total Alcohol Use Disorder Test score is 0.
This is worth mentioning because an estimated 82% of female Rhodes students drink more than I do. Wow, that’s enough to go and make me crack open a nice cold one.
I think it’s great that the university is putting in so much effort to try and restore Rhodes’s reputation and that I can go to university-organised events where they serve soft drinks, saving me the embarrassment of asking for a vodka “with lots and lots of Coke.”
But the anti-alcohol initiative has its many flaws. If the university really wanted this to work, they can’t just have once-off events like the talent show or the residence alcoholfree challenge events, they’d have to have alternative, alcohol free events at least once a week.
Even then, students will find the much-abused stripper pole at Pirate’s and the Friday drinks specials more tempting than, say, a quiz. Will these events raise awareness? Yes. Will they stop students from getting
“motherlessly drunk” (Viv’s favourite phrase), no.
That doesn’t mean that the university should stop trying, especially in a place that has been termed “the drinking capital of the world”. My problem isn’t with the initiative itself, but with the treatment of students as children while the executive act like prefects trying to monitor our behaviour.
At least that’s how it feels anyway. For instance, the clamp down on the advertising of drinks specials and the push for liquor by-laws by the university.
My point is that you can encourage responsible drinking but you can’t enforce it. The university needs to realise that drinking is a choice. No one is forcing students to drink.
Not the advertising, or the bar owners or even the fact that this town is the size of a pinhead. We’re all legally, although most not mentally, adults. Which means I can choose to be taken in by the alluring drink specials advertised.
I choose not to drink excessively because I actually like to remember my nights out and not embarrass myself hideously like the many girls I’ve seen crouched down, peeing in the middle of the street or decorating establishments with their multicoloured chunks. Let’s not start on unprotected sex.
I don’t agree with it, but it’s their choice. In the long run, trying to control our behaviour won’t help, but providing viable alternatives without the cheesiness and constant repetition of ‘see, you can have fun without alcohol’ might. It’s all down to freedom of choice, and I say cheers to that.
