Gender issues? Altered mind state? You're a geek. No use explaining anything. Go grab a pair of boobs.

I'm going to be a junior in the fall.

If you don't like parties, don't party. If your friends don't let you, find friends that don't like to party. I still haven't gone to a single frat party.

Zmaj: Or you can take Zmaj's route and become one of the people you look at with something akin to disgust.

Yeah! Get rid of that disgust, baby, it's bad for your health.

Are you kidding? Contempt is the best possible state to be in. Plus, it's fun!

No no no. I'm not saying I don't like it. It just occurred to me that gender issues become much more relevant than usual during reveling and associated.. activities.

Enough beating around the bush.

^+1 for that pun... xD

Meh never mind. I was just curious if anyone else felt that this was when these issues are often most relevant. In my experience that's when.

Perhaps part of the problem is we aren't sure exactly what you are talking about. Can you please site one or two examples and how they compare to other situations where they don't happen?

^ what do you know. Webdip DOES have reasonable, logical people on it :p

Sure.

When people get drunk, they do things that they wouldn't normally. If you're not as drunk as they, there is a certain idea that you should prevent them and take care of them. But I'm a guy, and if this friend is a girl, there is now a gender issue, especially if what she's going to do is hook up with a guy.

If you intervene, it's a bit assholeish and paternalistic and awkward. If you don't, you're being irresponsible by letting your drunk friends do things they might regret.

Here's another one:

When you go to clubs with a mixed group of guys and girls, it's a bit awkward because sometimes you get different treatment at clubs, whether in entry, or in guys buying girls drinks. Negotiating that sort of thing means you come into contact with gender roles in a big way as well.

Another one is beer pong. There is a kind of expectation that a guy is supposed to be better or more into playing beer pong, which is of course bullshit, but a lot of times those kinds of caricatured gender roles come to the fore while you're drinking at parties.

In general my observation is that alcohol and party culture seems to be a few decades behind regular life in terms of gender relations.

Maybe I'm not making myself clear, but you know what I mean I hope.

Re: the first part.
If a girl wants to get drunk and fool around it certainly isn't your position to stop her. Would you do the same stop a make friend of yours?
The point I'm making is not that you shouldn't intervene if someone is taking advantage if a drunk friend of yours is being abused but, rather, girls have just as muh right to get drunk and sleep around as guys do so without mor information I can't say that you have any reason to worry about gender roles there.

Yeah, for the first situation, your "responsibility" to "protect" your female friend from harm's way is to make sure protection is being properly used. ...which might be kind of awkward.

When I would go out with female friends, they would occasionally ask me to make sure they didn't go home with anyone sketchy. Otherwise, they were pretty much on their own.

If a girl hooks up with a guy when she is drunk, that is her business. If she regrets it in the morning that can be her lesson - its her choice. It's not your responsibility. Sure if you have reason to believe her life is in danger, then some wise words are in order.

I have often felt the same way Thucy feels...

However, being older and wiser, I have learned that you have to let people make their own mistakes and that when you do intervene,most often, both parties resent it.

Okay, so I see two categories here. The first category is how you treat your friends and the second is how others treat your friends.

If you have a male friend and a female friend that are each going to hook up with other people when drunk, do you feel like you should discourage your female friend and cheer on your male friend?

I would discourage both. One of the great benefits of monogamy is not having to deal with diseases. Hooking up with random strangers while drunk is just asking for trouble on both the disease and pregnancy fronts, for both men and women. Both could drastically alter the direction of one's life.

As for feeling like you should buy the girls drinks because you are the guy, take a page from Feynman and just say no to buying girls drinks.

I'm not sure what the problem is with beer pong. Do your friends give you crap if you don't want to play or are beat by a female friend? For the later, just respond by pointing out that she would kick the other person's butt too. Make light of it. Plus, then they are playing and you aren't, assuming you aren't wanting to. Accused of being afraid to play her? Turn it around and say no, you were actually hoping to see her kick the other person's ass.

Ultimately though, if your opinions on these things don't match with your friends, you'll soon part. But wouldn't that be a good thing anyway? Wouldn't you prefer friends who have similar views on life? Or just accept their way of doing things if you want to partake in the group. But don't torture yourself about it. Just decide one way or another and go with it.

That help at all? Disclaimer: I'm really just making shit up based on how I would feel in these situations, not real experience, because I'm a happily married introvert and wouldn't be in those situations anyway.

One of the reason young people like to get drunk is so they can hook up. Mainly to get over inhibitions and partly because "hey were drunk... it doesn't mean we're married" or if you get rejected you can save face by saying "I was drunk". Freedom from responsibility is part of the attraction of alcohol. Not just for guys, but girls too. Girls like sex just as much as guys.

Sometimes it's worth intervening in a situation like you all describe in order to save someone's ass. Beer and drugs are one thing; what you do while drunk and stoned is another. That's how I have always looked at it. People say you can't keep your senses while on that stuff. That's bullshit. Just takes a little more willpower than people like to think they have.

Whoa I think you guys think I hold opinions I don't hold. I just said those are the choices that have to be made, I didn't endorse either choice. Don't pigeon hole me here.

For the record, I've reviewed my comments and don't believe I indicated belief in your opinions one way or the other. I asked a bunch of questions about your opinions and try and understand your dilemmas and then expressed my own opinions on the various matters. If I did, I didn't intend to.

Ironically, I do think women and men should be treated differently in some cases, but not in the cases you specified. And not in a negative way, just different, due to the physiological differences.

Guys paying at entrance while girls get in free and with free drinks is rational business discrimination, I think I don't have to explain why. Gender issue it ain't (in my book at least), unless you also think student discounts are an ageism issue. You don't actually have to buy the girl drinks in order to hook up but you're in a market so expect your chances to relatively decline. My friend has a golden rule of not spending more than 50 bucks (all expenses inluded like taxi and such) on a girl before seeing some action but that comes from a country where beer is cheaper than water. I never had to discourage my friends of either sex from hooking up; unless you came into the bar already desperate, your standards won't plummet just because of the booze - at the point they would, you're so drunk you're not in a mood for hooking up. Of course if your friend told you aforehand that she want to sleep alone that night, you can flex your chivalrous muscles all you want and I can guarantee you'll both have some laughs from the ensuing situations since such role is inherently funny. We don't play beer pong around here so I can't chime in.

"If you intervene, it's a bit assholeish and paternalistic and awkward. If you don't, you're being irresponsible by letting your drunk friends do things they might regret."

The problem here is that trying to protect people from things they *might* regret... is paternalistic. I think it's clear that paternalism should be avoided. You should probably lower the threshold a bit to "things they [almost] definitely will regret." To illustrate, it's certainly paternalistic to stop your friends from drinking, from driving, and from smoking weed. It's not paternalistic to stop them from doing all three at the same time. Point is - each activity on its own has the possibility of regrettable actions, but the chance is relatively minimal in isolation. You combine those three and yeah, there's a good chance something quite regrettable is on the near horizon, and it would be irresponsible not to do something.

So it comes down to likelihood of regret; you can't just try to stop anything they might regret.

As for the more general question, I'm not a partier at all, but I certainly deal with people who are, and I would say that both:

(a) gender relations (and specifically gender parity) show up more often in partying situations than in normal life, and
(b) the partying scene is a backwater shithole of gender relations (which is honestly one of the reasons I never got involved; quite frankly, it is extremely difficult to combine sticking to my principles on the matter and being successful at attracting most college-age females).

So yeah, your feeling on the matter isn't without merit. My advice is to go find a woman that not only agrees with those principles of yours (because many would, were they to hear them) but then actually lives them out (because of those many who would agree with them, most wouldn't live them out) and just exclusively date instead. Unless you're into polyamory that should work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY7-0W0celo

It is not 'just because you're in college' it s just because you're in a new environment which adds a level of learning and new expierences, and there is mating going on, which is the biggest male-female cultural conflict. (that is male culture vs female culture) Mostly we can get along fine with a little bit of respect/tolerance for the culture of the opposite sex; but here the two interact.

Being in college and hence free from the paternal influences of one's parents may be a major factor here.

Oh come on orathaic I've been partying like this for almost five years it isn't new to me, just a thought I had.

Anyway you have to remember that a lot of the time these choices are pretty easy in hindsight and when sitting in your living room on the computer at 3:30 PM but when its 2:45 AM and you're on various substances it can be a bit more difficult to attempt to weigh it.

Normally my measuring stick for whether something is a good or bad thing to do is "what would other people say about this if they heard what I'm choosing?" The problem with many of the dilemmas I'm referencing is that there are lots of people on both sides for this stuff, in my experience.

For the record in the past year or so I have been erring heavily on the side of the ultra-feminist, but I often have pangs of guilt, a voice in the back of my head that says "are you not so obsessed with being unsexist that you're actually beginning to treat women differently than guys, but in the reverse way?"

Anyway interesting thoughts all around.

Also since no one is taking the other side I will play devil's advocate briefly, especially on the first question since it's what you're all referencing:

I myself have been in situations where I got too drunk, too fast, and got into a kind of "whatever, fuck it, let's just do it" attitude. You can say it was my own fault, sure, but friends are supposed to be there for you, and to whatever extent is reasonable, stop you from making mistakes. I have personally actually been in a situation where, partly due to outside circumstances, I was going to go home with some girl I had just met. I didn't tell anyone beforehand to stop that behavior - I didn't say anything about it. I wasn't allll that drunk, just a normal level. And my friend (a girl, lol (maternalism?)) stopped me. I protested. I was upset. I said she should let me live my life.

I woke up in the morning, thought about it, and realized she saved me from a serious downward spiral back into some dark places. I had been on a precipice - she had no way of knowing, she just knew I was trying to go home with someone none of my friends had ever seen. I called her and thanked her and apologized sheepishly and she told me it was what she thought any decent person would do.

So.... now that waters are muddier.. what do you think of that?

"was going to go home with some girl I had just met."

That doesn't so bad to me. Some might say you got lucky. But then again maybe she was a female Jeffery Dahmer in which case that was a lucky escape.

@Thucy I tried to be a "good guy" one time. I was moderately drunk (8 or 10 drinks), and I approached some random girl at a party. Literally 10 seconds later, she was shoving her tongue in my mouth. A few minutes later, we were out the door and heading back to her dorm.

At this point, I realized she was REALLY drunk (and I realized that if I realized this, I must not be that drunk), and started to feel bad about it all. We got back to her dorm and it took her three tried to remember which room was hers. I found the Residential Adviser and the drunk girl was taken care of. Obviously, I ended up not hooking up with her.

The next day, I see her at a football game. I approached her (she was hot and I was drunk again) to ask if she was okay from last night. She didn't remember me, and I told her the story of what happened. She was mad at me that I didn't have sex with her.

We exchanged numbers, she texted me at 1 AM that night, and we had sex. And again in the morning.

tl;dr: yes really means yes.

Emfries I think you might have done the right thing. If a girl is toooo drunk it is best not to go there. One reason is for the sake of the girl, the other is for you sake - in case you are making yourself vulnerable to a date rape accusation.

... if she didn't even remember you the next day, she was definitely tooo drunk.
I must admit that I am impressed that she mad with for not having sex with her despite not remembering you. I am guessing you have must have a very good time on campus :-)

@spyman well I'll say she was "not the most difficult girl to hook up with", if you catch my drift.

Lol.

"That doesn't so bad to me. Some might say you got lucky. But then again maybe she was a female Jeffery Dahmer in which case that was a lucky escape."

She wasn't ugly, but I'm pretty much mentally done with casual sex, so I was glad of the intervention. I was only doing it because I was drunk.

The truth is, you cannot know in advance whether a drunk person would really want what they are doing if you could ask their sober selves. You just have to guess, hence the dilemma I am discussing.