It isn’t about the drinking, you know; lord knows we’re all entitled to drink what we like. It isn’t about societies, either, and it isn’t even that drinking societies are bad, in themselves. I was in one myself, and it was daft and fun and harmless.
The problem, really, comes when they’re not harmless, when some bright spark floats the notion of spiking women’s drinks on a crew date, or when Conservative society decides dressing its women up as animals for a “fox hunt” social.
I just can’t help but feel that anger with the press for shining a light on, say, rugby players dressed as savages for an off-colour bop, or white folks in blackface in general, or people dressed as the exploding Twin Towers, for fuck’s sake, is particularly well placed. Blacking up, it should not need to be said, is not banterous, it’s a hurtful, overtly racist means of belittling a whole group of people for the colour of their skin. Describing women as “FREE PUSSY” and seeing them as nothing more than quarry to be hunted is equally unacceptable, and when this stuff happens, you can be damn sure it counts as news.
To be clear, I do not report on every last speck of ill behaviour I hear about; “shitfaced lax team projectile vomits across curryhouse toilet” is not news. You are vastly welcome, as far as I’m concerned, to get as battered as you like and indulge in as much naked windmilling as you physically can without the thing falling off, and you’ll never see me publish so much as a frowny-faced emoticon on the matter. But if you’ve gotten arseholed and disrupted A&E en masse in Cambridge, people are going to want to hear about it.
I admit that Oxford does get more than its fair share of press. I’ll tell you why: you are the elite, socially and academically, and people care about you and your misdemeanours. Why do you think the boat race has a viewership in the tens of millions? I guarantee it is not because Britain at large harbours a secret love of rowing. So if you misbehave on an egregious level – which of course practically none of you ever do – it will be read about.
There’s this feeling that Oxbridge somehow gets a negative rap in a media totally stuffed with alumni. If anything, I would contend that it gets a positive ride verging on the hagiographic, and that truly negative articles are noteworthy entirely by their rarity.
But it isn’t just you guys up to no good. There are drinking societies acting the twat up and down the land, from Stirling to Aberystwyth. Hell, when the Cambridge Wyverns were told they could no longer invite (intelligent, autonomous) women to jelly-wrestle in their pants, they invited them instead to ride a big pink bucking penis.
On a personal level I always found the whiff of class that pervaded most Oxford drinking societies to be more obnoxious, with their black ties and their black-balling. But my distaste for the likes of Grid and Piers Gav is better understood through a prism of economics, and the way Oxford’s posh boy boozing jamborees illustrate Oxford’s posh boy problem in general. That, though, isn’t news.
