Vices and Virtues
Oct. 26th, 2009 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe cafes in Britain are all closed by six. Now on one hand this makes perfect sense - only a crazy person wants to drink caffeinated beverages at nine o'clock at night - but on the other hand I am a crazy person, and the fact that I can't get my hot chocolate fix at a reasonable hour is just exasperating.
This issue of closing hours is not something I was expecting. In my (not very cosmopolitan, half the size of York) hometown, the cafes stay open till at least ten, and the ones on campus stay open till midnight. The bookstores are open till ten or eleven; even the public library is open till nine; and the supermarkets are mostly open twenty-four hours.
Possibly I'm looking in all the wrong places, but in York the only things that seem to be open after seven are the pubs. I suppose this is all right, because college social life (as the drinking age here is eighteen) seems to revolve around the pubs.
I've heard a number of people at home suggest that lowering the drinking age will make people drink more responsibly. This is bullshit. College students here drink exactly as irresponsibly as they do at home, and the only difference is that half of their antics are sponsored by the university - because obviously the only way to get freshers to loosen up enough to speak to each other is to ply them with alcohol.
And why on earth would college students drink less if the drinking age were lowered? If alcohol is totally acceptable people will drink less of it, because it no longer feels transgressive? People don't have vices* because of reverse psychology ("It's considered vile! Therefore I must do it!"); people have vices because vice feels good, and generally speaking it feels even better when it isn't laden with guilt.
Because really: when did young women have more premarital sex? In Victorian times - or now?
*I realize that the word "vice" makes me sound like a latter-day temperance warrior, which is a twitch stronger than I mean to be; I just can't think of another word that bundles drinking, smoking, drugs, and sex together efficiently.
This issue of closing hours is not something I was expecting. In my (not very cosmopolitan, half the size of York) hometown, the cafes stay open till at least ten, and the ones on campus stay open till midnight. The bookstores are open till ten or eleven; even the public library is open till nine; and the supermarkets are mostly open twenty-four hours.
Possibly I'm looking in all the wrong places, but in York the only things that seem to be open after seven are the pubs. I suppose this is all right, because college social life (as the drinking age here is eighteen) seems to revolve around the pubs.
I've heard a number of people at home suggest that lowering the drinking age will make people drink more responsibly. This is bullshit. College students here drink exactly as irresponsibly as they do at home, and the only difference is that half of their antics are sponsored by the university - because obviously the only way to get freshers to loosen up enough to speak to each other is to ply them with alcohol.
And why on earth would college students drink less if the drinking age were lowered? If alcohol is totally acceptable people will drink less of it, because it no longer feels transgressive? People don't have vices* because of reverse psychology ("It's considered vile! Therefore I must do it!"); people have vices because vice feels good, and generally speaking it feels even better when it isn't laden with guilt.
Because really: when did young women have more premarital sex? In Victorian times - or now?
*I realize that the word "vice" makes me sound like a latter-day temperance warrior, which is a twitch stronger than I mean to be; I just can't think of another word that bundles drinking, smoking, drugs, and sex together efficiently.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 02:35 pm (UTC)TBH, I've always found 21 being the legal drinking age very bizarre. From what I've gathered, people drink in college anyway, which practically speaking makes it slightly redundant. But more to the point, 18 is presumably the age of majority, as it is here? So I don't really get how the state feels it can stop people doing something that is, basically, their right. It has always seemed to be unwarranted inhibition of a person's rights as an adult.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 07:38 am (UTC)IIRC, the drinking age became 21 (in most states) right after the end of Prohibition, at which point people didn't feel they had a right to drink - they were just glad the government was allowing it at all.
At this point there are a lot of people who think it should be changed, but its pretty low on everyone's to-do list, so what mostly happens is that the law only gets enforced for over-18s when they're doing something else illegal anyway, like being disruptively publicly drunk.
I think the problem with the idea of a drinking age, generally, is that people seem to think they can hit on an age that will solve the problem of binge-drinking college students walking into rivers, and a) college students will always be stupid, so that's really not possible, while b) things like binge-drinking and drunk-driving are really more controlled by drinking culture than drinking laws, which can't be changed by fiat.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-02 06:37 am (UTC)Er, I'm sorry this comment doesn't really say anything.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-02 09:01 am (UTC)Of course it's not true. But the idea makes them feel better.