This bit of adolescent advice may be the first thing I learned about sex, even before I had any very concrete idea of what sex involved exactly. I didn't learn it from my father or from other guys, though, but rather from watching romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s on TV. Plying the innocent with drink figures into a lot of the movie plots of that era.
And this is reliable advice. Alcohol is very effective at breaking down a girl's natural resistance to the idea of having casual sex with whoever she happens to be with at the moment.
But choice of sexual partner has drastic consequences for your life. It is probably the most important decision you ever make. Choose badly and you are in for a boatload of unhappiness.
OK, you are saying, this isn't news. "Everybody knows that", as they say on the Geico commercials. But do we? I wonder. Colleges and universities are currently suffering attacks of angst over the bad publicity they are getting for alcohol-related rapes on campus. As I've written before, university administrators suffering severe budget shortfalls seem more concerned with promising campus fun than with what happens to students once they get there.
What prompts me to write now is a web site, http://before-i-do.org, sponsored by the University of Virginia, which argues that casual sex before marriage is associated with marital unhappiness. What it doesn't say, though, is that alcohol use is the demon behind both evils.
University of Virginia does have relatively strict rules, on paper, about conduct and drinking in dorms. As reported by students on sites like colleges.niche.com, though, enforcement is lax. It seems there is a certain hypocrisy involved, playing to parents' concerns with loud proclamations of strictness while winking at prospective students who want to go there to party. Why is it that even University of Virginia, which purports to be relatively strict, can't just take the step of prohibiting alcohol use by students on the grounds that it is contrary to everything the university stands for? Because they would lose half their enrollment. Like most of us these days, faculty and administrators are afraid for their jobs. When I was young, it was common for people to take principled stands on such things at universities. It seems though that, finally, we've all become slaves to our bank accounts, credit card balances and 401ks. No one can afford to stand up for doing the right thing.
Even at a conservative school like University of Virginia, calling out alcohol use is too dangerous to the budget. It's duplicitous for the university to argue against poor choices with no mention of what they know perfectly well to be the chemical enabler lurking in the shadows.
