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Drinking Societies
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WelshPixie
I'm just thinking of the alleged 'secret' societies where it seems you have to flash a lot of money to get an invite from lord rah rah - very old school tie.
I'm sure they do exist...
I'm sure they do exist...
Yeah, I think there are a few around where if you don't know they exist then you're automatically not eligible to become a member, all to do with having been at the right schools and so on. But there do seem to be a lot more college drinking societies around for [relatively] normal people, so I guess we don't have to worry about them.
right, i'm back, and this thread has me nice n' riled, so here i go:
1) College drinking societies; they CAN tend to dominate social events in SOME colleges. it depends WHAT the event is, and obviously the nature of the people within the society. the sidney ones were fairly quiet up until last year....its the people that make them, not the society itself. and remember, the people leave eventually, and get replaced by others. although they may be SIMILAR in character to their predecessors, everyone is slightly different- if it gets to the stage where people are getting pissed off with the societies because of what they do to initiees etc, then that can be changed.
2) just because you see a group of people who are either already friends or enjoy going out/having a good time in the same way as each other, doesn't mean they should be shot or whatever. the idea of having ties etc, IMO, is more of a skit on tradition, the fact that its cambridge/oxford. colleges have scarves/political parties have all sorts of things, why can't drinking societies have their own ties? its not doing u or me any harm, if people are offended by it then i'm sorry, but they need to get a life.
3) they aren't ALWAYS exclusive. again, it depends on the sense of the people who are in them. like i said in my previous post, if they have any sense, they won't just go on people they saw in freshers week.
1) College drinking societies; they CAN tend to dominate social events in SOME colleges. it depends WHAT the event is, and obviously the nature of the people within the society. the sidney ones were fairly quiet up until last year....its the people that make them, not the society itself. and remember, the people leave eventually, and get replaced by others. although they may be SIMILAR in character to their predecessors, everyone is slightly different- if it gets to the stage where people are getting pissed off with the societies because of what they do to initiees etc, then that can be changed.
2) just because you see a group of people who are either already friends or enjoy going out/having a good time in the same way as each other, doesn't mean they should be shot or whatever. the idea of having ties etc, IMO, is more of a skit on tradition, the fact that its cambridge/oxford. colleges have scarves/political parties have all sorts of things, why can't drinking societies have their own ties? its not doing u or me any harm, if people are offended by it then i'm sorry, but they need to get a life.
3) they aren't ALWAYS exclusive. again, it depends on the sense of the people who are in them. like i said in my previous post, if they have any sense, they won't just go on people they saw in freshers week.
this article is relevant, I really like it:
When you find out someone went to boarding school, you should treat them as if you'd found out they'd served multiple jail terms: with suspicion, but also with sympathy. I went to boarding school, and I'm not proud, except of the fact that I got through it without losing my mind. In the outside world, a lot of people see Cambridge graduates just as a lot of Cambridge students see ex-public school pupils: smug, over-privileged, ready to put their feet up until one of their old friends offers them a job. Of course, the stereotype is accurate a lot more often in the latter case than in the former. That's why I wanted to forget my past when I got here: some people never really leave boarding school, and I wasn't going to be one of those people. After my leavers' dinner, my original dream of putting my boarding house to the torch was sadly reduced to the milder rebellion of refusing to buy a school tie. Still, I thought I was free. But a year and a half later, I find myself in an all-male drinking society, and proposals for the design of our official tie are getting emailed round. How did I go so wrong?
Drinking societies, for their ex-public school members, are all about hopeless nostalgia. There's nostalgia, first of all, for a time before girls invaded one's life. At school, our only term-time contact with girls was at the occasional, humiliating 'house dances' - and I think most drinking society members who didn't go to boarding school would be appalled to find out how closely our formal swaps seem to be modelled on them. Put on a nice shirt, endure half an hour's awkward small talk, then sit at a long table, boy-girl-boy-girl, over a better-than-average canteen meal, then dance to bad pop while everyone watches everyone else to see if they've 'pulled' (dear God, how I loathe that word). The only difference was that the dancing took place in the same hall in which you'd just eaten, not in Cindy's, and no one's teeth were dyed blue with WKD because you weren't allowed any alcohol.
Why on earth would anyone choose to recreate these soul-flaying evenings? Because some people find a return to those days comforting. Back then, you knew when the girls were going to arrive, you knew when they were going to leave, you knew that there was no need to judge them on anything deeper than looks, and you knew that, if you embarrassed yourself, you were unlikely ever to see them again. After a lifetime of single-sex education, some people never quite get used to living with girls. How else do you think it took Magdalene until 1988 to accept women students? When your interactions with the opposite sex are regimented that carefully, everything can seem as safe and simple as a leisurely flick through Nuts.
There's also nostalgia for a time when being a man was a less ambiguous thing. All-male drinking societies, with their strict male-female ratios and haze of flirtation, implicitly exclude gay people - but then, with their festering homophobia, so do boarding schools. You're a success at a drinking society if you down a lot at your initiation and then fondle a pretty girl after the dinner, two criteria of masculinity that haven't changed for thousands of years. None of that 'New Man' stuff here.
Lastly, there's nostalgia for a time (which none of us have actually experienced) when being from public school really was like being part of an exclusive, privileged club. Thankfully, these days, there are very few institutions left where having an old-school tie will guarantee you a job - and this makes a lot of people feel cheated. But join a drinking society, and for a little while you can pretend that you're still part of an acknowledged elite (with ties and everything!)
Perhaps you're in a drinking society that follows the usual single-sex formula and yet it has no public school members. Or maybe it has a few, but you're not one of them, you've co-existed normally with girls all your life, and you enjoy it anyway. How do I explain that? I don't need to. I've sometimes had a good time at formal swaps. But you should ask yourself why exactly you're imitating this twisted social institution, originally invented by old public school boys, for the benefit of old public school boys, to the exclusion of all others. You're participating in this bizarre regression ritual when it doesn't even apply to you, and giving your support to these ancient, ugly notions of sexual politics. The most important thing for Cambridge's future is to end its private-school dominance - but now that we've had a little bit of sucess in that, why should we hold on to the worst features of the previous era? With all these public school boys going out into the world and making everyone else imitate their customs, we might as well still be in colonial times.
So that's why I'm resigning from my drinking society, and I won't be joining any in the future. The ties were the last straw. For a while I wore pink nail varnish to the formals to register my discontent about the kind of man they were turning me into, but, as I learnt when I left school, mild rebellion gets you nowhere. I can't forget my past, but I can do my best to make up for it. We're adults now: if our mates ask us to join a club, we should be capable of turning them down. Who's with me?
When you find out someone went to boarding school, you should treat them as if you'd found out they'd served multiple jail terms: with suspicion, but also with sympathy. I went to boarding school, and I'm not proud, except of the fact that I got through it without losing my mind. In the outside world, a lot of people see Cambridge graduates just as a lot of Cambridge students see ex-public school pupils: smug, over-privileged, ready to put their feet up until one of their old friends offers them a job. Of course, the stereotype is accurate a lot more often in the latter case than in the former. That's why I wanted to forget my past when I got here: some people never really leave boarding school, and I wasn't going to be one of those people. After my leavers' dinner, my original dream of putting my boarding house to the torch was sadly reduced to the milder rebellion of refusing to buy a school tie. Still, I thought I was free. But a year and a half later, I find myself in an all-male drinking society, and proposals for the design of our official tie are getting emailed round. How did I go so wrong?
Drinking societies, for their ex-public school members, are all about hopeless nostalgia. There's nostalgia, first of all, for a time before girls invaded one's life. At school, our only term-time contact with girls was at the occasional, humiliating 'house dances' - and I think most drinking society members who didn't go to boarding school would be appalled to find out how closely our formal swaps seem to be modelled on them. Put on a nice shirt, endure half an hour's awkward small talk, then sit at a long table, boy-girl-boy-girl, over a better-than-average canteen meal, then dance to bad pop while everyone watches everyone else to see if they've 'pulled' (dear God, how I loathe that word). The only difference was that the dancing took place in the same hall in which you'd just eaten, not in Cindy's, and no one's teeth were dyed blue with WKD because you weren't allowed any alcohol.
Why on earth would anyone choose to recreate these soul-flaying evenings? Because some people find a return to those days comforting. Back then, you knew when the girls were going to arrive, you knew when they were going to leave, you knew that there was no need to judge them on anything deeper than looks, and you knew that, if you embarrassed yourself, you were unlikely ever to see them again. After a lifetime of single-sex education, some people never quite get used to living with girls. How else do you think it took Magdalene until 1988 to accept women students? When your interactions with the opposite sex are regimented that carefully, everything can seem as safe and simple as a leisurely flick through Nuts.
There's also nostalgia for a time when being a man was a less ambiguous thing. All-male drinking societies, with their strict male-female ratios and haze of flirtation, implicitly exclude gay people - but then, with their festering homophobia, so do boarding schools. You're a success at a drinking society if you down a lot at your initiation and then fondle a pretty girl after the dinner, two criteria of masculinity that haven't changed for thousands of years. None of that 'New Man' stuff here.
Lastly, there's nostalgia for a time (which none of us have actually experienced) when being from public school really was like being part of an exclusive, privileged club. Thankfully, these days, there are very few institutions left where having an old-school tie will guarantee you a job - and this makes a lot of people feel cheated. But join a drinking society, and for a little while you can pretend that you're still part of an acknowledged elite (with ties and everything!)
Perhaps you're in a drinking society that follows the usual single-sex formula and yet it has no public school members. Or maybe it has a few, but you're not one of them, you've co-existed normally with girls all your life, and you enjoy it anyway. How do I explain that? I don't need to. I've sometimes had a good time at formal swaps. But you should ask yourself why exactly you're imitating this twisted social institution, originally invented by old public school boys, for the benefit of old public school boys, to the exclusion of all others. You're participating in this bizarre regression ritual when it doesn't even apply to you, and giving your support to these ancient, ugly notions of sexual politics. The most important thing for Cambridge's future is to end its private-school dominance - but now that we've had a little bit of sucess in that, why should we hold on to the worst features of the previous era? With all these public school boys going out into the world and making everyone else imitate their customs, we might as well still be in colonial times.
So that's why I'm resigning from my drinking society, and I won't be joining any in the future. The ties were the last straw. For a while I wore pink nail varnish to the formals to register my discontent about the kind of man they were turning me into, but, as I learnt when I left school, mild rebellion gets you nowhere. I can't forget my past, but I can do my best to make up for it. We're adults now: if our mates ask us to join a club, we should be capable of turning them down. Who's with me?
priya
right, i'm back, and this thread has me nice n' riled, so here i go:
2) just because you see a group of people who are either already friends or enjoy going out/having a good time in the same way as each other, doesn't mean they should be shot or whatever. the idea of having ties etc, IMO, is more of a skit on tradition, the fact that its cambridge/oxford. colleges have scarves/political parties have all sorts of things, why can't drinking societies have their own ties? its not doing u or me any harm, if people are offended by it then i'm sorry, but they need to get a life.
2) just because you see a group of people who are either already friends or enjoy going out/having a good time in the same way as each other, doesn't mean they should be shot or whatever. the idea of having ties etc, IMO, is more of a skit on tradition, the fact that its cambridge/oxford. colleges have scarves/political parties have all sorts of things, why can't drinking societies have their own ties? its not doing u or me any harm, if people are offended by it then i'm sorry, but they need to get a life.
No but what does quite rightly offend people is the antics of these groups of disrespectful w***ers. See
the Bullingdon society's recent 'skits'.
Drinking societies lack my Three I's: Intensity, integrity, and intelligence.
Dudes, in Oxford, one dining society ate a lavish dinner at Quod (posh Old Bank Hotel resaurant on the High) and produced to have a food fight and break glasses. At the end of the meal, all the dinners' credit cards were dropped into a hat and one card was selected at random by the maitre d'. All damage was charged to that card.
I am not a fan of flash rahs with no social conscience - although I kinda envy them their richesse and ignorance. However I am less of a fan of drunk rahs, especially drunk rah boys with too much testosterone & cash, whiling away the hours in drinking socs.
I am not a fan of flash rahs with no social conscience - although I kinda envy them their richesse and ignorance. However I am less of a fan of drunk rahs, especially drunk rah boys with too much testosterone & cash, whiling away the hours in drinking socs.
_Ellie
Dudes, in Oxford, one dining society ate a lavish dinner at Quod (posh Old Bank Hotel resaurant on the High) and produced to have a food fight and break glasses. At the end of the meal, all the dinners' credit cards were dropped into a hat and one card was selected at random by the maitre d'. All damage was charged to that card.
I am not a fan of flash rahs with no social conscience - although I kinda envy them their richesse and ignorance. However I am less of a fan of drunk rahs, especially drunk rah boys with too much testosterone & cash, whiling away the hours in drinking socs.
I am not a fan of flash rahs with no social conscience - although I kinda envy them their richesse and ignorance. However I am less of a fan of drunk rahs, especially drunk rah boys with too much testosterone & cash, whiling away the hours in drinking socs.
It could have been the bullingdon club which is all old etonians - they smashed up a pub last year and then paid for the damage in cash. Was this recently? I saw a load of guys in white tie at the bridge on tuesday and thought some of them had buttons with BC on them.
I'm in my college's girls drinking soc and it's nothing like that. You can't judge it til you've been in one. Imagine going to a nice meal quite cheaply with lots of wine, your best friends and lovely guys who are out to have some good chat and a fun time. It's not about pulling. A lot of the people in drinking socs have bfs/gfs anyway. That said, I met my boyfriend at a formal, although we got together a few months afterwards - yet another reason why I like them!
Tonight Matthew
Drinking societies lack my Three I's: Intensity, integrity, and intelligence.
Your post, however, didn't lack three pages of white space.
Lauren
I'm in my college's girls drinking soc and it's nothing like that. You can't judge it til you've been in one. Imagine going to a nice meal quite cheaply with lots of wine, your best friends and lovely guys who are out to have some good chat and a fun time. It's not about pulling. A lot of the people in drinking socs have bfs/gfs anyway. That said, I met my boyfriend at a formal, although we got together a few months afterwards - yet another reason why I like them!
I'm not in one, but I've been out with a few and some of them are great, just like you say. I really don't like the Clare one though - maybe they behave better when they're out with other girls, but when they're just in the bar and generally around college, they act like complete nobs.
Helenia
I'm not in one, but I've been out with a few and some of them are great, just like you say. I really don't like the Clare one though - maybe they behave better when they're out with other girls, but when they're just in the bar and generally around college, they act like complete nobs.
If by 'nobs' you mean 'roudy, rough, but really, ruggedly regal' I agreem completely.
priya
surely thats just boys in general, sometimes its hard to differentiate between those in drinking socs and those who aren't.
Nah, when they're out together they're the creme de la creme of nobbishness. A couple of them on their own are really lovely (one of them has been going out with one of my best friends for ages) but I hate it when they get all together and start being drunken gits. After BCD this term the boat club decided it would be best to leave the bar as the Crabs were down there too and one way or another stuff was going to get damaged, and we didn't want to have to take the blame (seeing as college hates the boat club). So if they were being worse behaved than the boat club, that's saying something...
I still long for the night that I see a 'drink soc' out in Cambridge. I guarantee that I will produce a fresh pair of buttocks to the lot of them. They won't know what hit them, except for their mate 'Big Gav', up the arse, as a punishment for not engaging in the latest round of 'drinking games'.
Utterly gash.
Utterly gash.
Ridiculous. The CRABS are gentlemen. And I hear they are very well-endowed.
Tonight Matthew
I still long for the night that I see a 'drink soc' out in Cambridge. I guarantee that I will produce a fresh pair of buttocks to the lot of them. They won't know what hit them, except for their mate 'Big Gav', up the arse, as a punishment for not engaging in the latest round of 'drinking games'.
Utterly gash.
Utterly gash.
As a minor hint, you might want to try Life on a Sunday night which is where a hell of a lot of them seem to end up. Look for the ones with the matching ties.
Tonight Matthew
I still long for the night that I see a 'drink soc' out in Cambridge. I guarantee that I will produce a fresh pair of buttocks to the lot of them. They won't know what hit them, except for their mate 'Big Gav', up the arse, as a punishment for not engaging in the latest round of 'drinking games'.
Utterly gash.
Utterly gash.
you do that, and they'll applaud you. might even ask you to become part of their illustrious cohort.
Originally posted by Tonight Matthew
As a member of the Pitt Club in Cambridge, I will be giving you a.k.a. Tonight Matthew a very wide berth. I advise all Pitt Club members to avoid Tonight Matthew since he appears to be a little strange.
I still long for the night that I see a 'drink soc' out in Cambridge. I guarantee that I will produce a fresh pair of buttocks to the lot of them. They won't know what hit them, except for their mate 'Big Gav', up the arse, as a punishment for not engaging in the latest round of 'drinking games'.
Utterly gash.
Utterly gash.
As a member of the Pitt Club in Cambridge, I will be giving you a.k.a. Tonight Matthew a very wide berth. I advise all Pitt Club members to avoid Tonight Matthew since he appears to be a little strange.
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