Dina sends me this depressing article from the UK Daily Mail. This is a must-read.
Excerpt:
The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it’s a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has ‘only’ drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of Jagermeister (during a drinking game called I Have Never) and still feels ‘a bit sober’. Her friend Hannah Freeman, 19, was punched in a fight and stumbles about swearing and searching for a bathroom.
‘We only do embarrassing things when we’re really drunk,’ Naomi says. ‘I kiss random men in the street and Hannah has had sex behind a chicken coop.’ She screams with laughter as Hannah lurches unsteadily in the stairwell of Charleston Bar and Grill on Caroline Street (known locally as Chip Alley) and unashamedly urinates in front of us.
Amazingly, none of the 80-strong throng of passers-by seems to notice – or perhaps care. Hannah rearranges her minuscule dress, steps over her own urine, shouts ‘f*** off’ and the pair stumble back to Walkabout. It’s only midnight, after all.
[…]But as I found out on the streets of Cardiff after midnight, many of these women are – by day at least – well qualified pillars of the community. Among them I met teachers, nurses, occupational therapists,
personnel professionals and full-time mothers, all determined to shake off responsibility and have fun in the only way they know how. By getting ‘smashed’.Every week, the ritual is the same: Groups of between four and six girls congregate to dress up and competitively drink bottles of cheap wine or sickly shots. Competition ramps up over who can wear the tiniest mini-dress, the highest heels or the reddest lipstick. Drinking carries on during the bus ride to Cardiff (many young women travel from the surrounding Valleys) and continues in bars between 9pm and 11pm, or until they feel bold enough to dance.
Condom in purse and telephone number for a pre-booked 3am taxi in handbag, they stagger between nightclubs. The ritual continues long into the morning when, dulled by hangovers, they congregate for McDonald’s or fried breakfasts to giggle about the drunken ‘fun’.
New figures show that alcohol misuse costs the nation £7.3 billion in crime and antisocial behaviour and that one woman in five drinks at levels hazardous to health (more than 14 units each week).
I went looking for the answer to the real question: Why? In a series of raw but illuminating interviews, I discovered that beyond the superficial bravado, their nights of booze-fuelled excess make them anything but happy – but they still have no intention of changing. Naomi Jenkins is a classroom assistant from Carmarthen and is adamant that downing sickly Jagermeister shots (which she nicknames medicine) is ‘a laugh’.
I hear the same knee-jerk answer again and again. Human-resources administrator Becky Sherlock
from Chepstow tells me: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll lift my head off the pillow and think, “Oh s***.” But it’s worth it.’‘A hangover is the sign of a good night,’ says her friend Danielle Malson, a secondary-school teacher.
What quickly becomes apparent is the ease with which these young women distinguish their responsible weekday personas from their ‘fun’ selves. Naomi easily switches from diligent teaching assistant to Saturday night party girl when she squeezes into a skintight minidress. She tells me: ‘I wouldn’t do this if it affected my work.’
Occupational therapist Sally Baldwin, 24, added: ‘If I bumped into any of my patients or their relatives, I’d hide. It doesn’t give off the right image… But as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work, I’ll carry on.’ By splitting their characters into two personas (professional and social), these young women appear confident that their professional reputations remain unblemished. In their own minds, at least.
‘I just like knowing I haven’t lost my mojo,’ admits a 27-year-old full-time mother, dressed in a skimpy football kit and slumped in a shop doorway on St Mary Street. ‘The world seems a better place when you’re wearing beer goggles.’
[…]It is a sad testimony that obliteration of reality is the highlight of the week for many of these young women. For Alicia Howley, 20, and Lucy Griffiths, both shop assistants, the ritual of dressing up in tight minidresses and wearing lashings of make-up begins at 4.30pm, straight after their Saturday shifts at Matalan.
Lucy says: ‘After a few drinks, you feel like you can do anything. It’s amazing. The only time I usually talk to new people is speaking to customers at work. Alcohol makes me loads more confident… Like the time I had a foursome.’ They laugh.
Read the whole thing, as this is going on with women from late high school right through college, until they are age 35, when they suddenly want to have a baby. And that doesn’t mean they want to get married first. They are happy to conclude from their careful search for Mr. Right during drunken “foursomes” that there are no good men. After all, they are already perfectly suitable for marriage as they are, so if Mr. Right doesn’t come along, then it’s not the woman’s fault. And it’s nothing that a little IVF, day care and public school won’t solve – all taxpayer-funded, of course.
This story makes me think about why men like me (chaste, and marriage minded) are in the situation that we are in today. I have been taking some flak from friends of both sexes about my reticence to try to get married. I think that people who are criticizing need to realize what is out there right now to choose from. This is what is normal for most women who go through college today. And even if I could find a girl who managed to stay chaste while getting herself mature and independent, the laws are being made by the majority of women, who are more like the ones in the article.
Even when people mouth the words “I’m a Christian” you have to understand that most people who claim to be Christians go through 15 years of church and learn nothing at all that is useful about Christianity. I understand that once women become aware of what men like me want, that they are able to do it and to see the reasons for doing it. But it’s very difficult to convince women to be serious about things like economics and apologetics these days – many of them aren’t being serious about preparing for marriage in the time that they should be doing that.
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WINTERY KNIGHT 
This is the kind of thing that frustrated me as an undergrad. Most of the “christian” girls I met were just like the girls described in the article. But then again, most professing “christian” guys in college acted the same way. It was always interesting the different reactions I would get from girls upon telling them, “Sorry, I don’t drink, but would you like to study together? Or, since you say you’re a christian, would you want to do a group Bible study together?”
It usually ended as a fail. I can now completely agree with Paul in 1 Cor 7:8-9.
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That was exactly my experience in college, except the women were more like that pastor’s wife.
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The women described in this post might be professional, but they aren’t Christian, or if they call themselves Christian we might have to check the definition. The bible clearly talks about being sober. Of course there are some churches that advocate a complete abstinence from alcohol altogether, but at the very least Judeo-Christianity recognizes the importance of being sober. From the curse upon Canaan arising from the drunkenness of Noah, the rules in Leviticus that call for sobriety in the Church, proverbs 31: 4 (“It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted,”), the descriptions of those chosen by God like Samson and John the Baptist (Luke 1:15-16, “For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.”), to the command in Titus 1:7-8 (“For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not self-willed, not soon angry, not given to wine…But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just holy temperate,”) which is relevant to all of us as we are called to be a Holy Priesthood, we can see in the bible a clear call to sobriety. As Christians the call to be sober is tied in with our role and our work as part of the Church Militant, being sober is as important to a Christian as it is to an officer on duty, even if it is a struggle for some of us.
Paul in particular gives us plenty of reasons. In 1 Thessalonians 5:4-8 we read, “But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober.” Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians and Ephesians, tells us that drunkenness excludes us from heaven and Luke said in Chapter 21 verse 34, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap.” Meaning that Christians who waste their time drinking instead of doing apologetics might be both figuratively and literally caught with their pants down. Peter calls us away from this type of behaviour labeling it as pagan and stating in 1 Peter 4:3, “For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry.” And that’s the point, Christians don’t act this way. We really can’t afford to. As the Church Militant we are in a constant battle against evil and we must remain sober at all times, we must be on guard for ourselves and our brothers. Like on active military duty we must be able to clearly hear and be able to respond to our Commander. Ephesians 5:18, tells us “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit,” The voice of the spirit must be able to reach us in order to guide and direct us. We can’t afford to just blow off our Christian obligations because we feel like having fun. We do not know the mind of God, nor his plans and for that reason we need to be paying close attention, and if we do get distracted at the very least we cannot be drunk! Christians, both men and women need to take their faith seriously, we need to be constantly supporting each other in the body of Christ. There are Christians out there who do take their faith seriously, obviously the bible tells us that we all fall short, but that is precisely the reason we need to build each other up. Personally I have never drank to get drunk, and I have also heard the voice of God audibly, and not just talking to me, but God calling someone next to me, who also heard the voice. That isn’t to say I haven’t also clearly missed his voice at other times, but thankfully my errors are not compounded by this particular act of disobedience. Be sober! God loves you and wants to speak to your soul and not so you can have a warm fuzzy alcohol replacing relationship, but because he has a plan and purpose for your life that he is trying to guide and direct. He knows the desires of your heart and if you prepare a place for him and make him Lord of your life he will direct your path.
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“There are Christians out there who do take their faith seriously”
I’ve met only a handful. But hey, I’m only 22 so I still have more people to meet.
“Personally I have never drank to get drunk”
Do people drink to not get drunk? I sincerely want to know.
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Yes. People drink without the desire to get drunk. You can enjoy 1 or 2 glasses of wine or a beer tasting at a brewery without the aim of getting drunk.
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I didn’t see anywhere that these were Christian women out getting drunk… but I know when I was in my twenties that’s all my girlfriends were doing. I liked hanging out with my friends and I was usually the designated driver since I had my license, I never cared for drinking and I was pretty responsible. I’ve been drunk 2 times in my life and I never could understand the thrill of going out on the weekend and getting drunk.
I’m kind of glad I went through the bar thing in my twenties, because I can honestly say it cured any chances of me being Lot’s wife and looking back on my youth and feeling like I missed something. Even though I didn’t go the bars as much as my girlfriends, I wish now that I had used my time for something more productive with my life. The non-Christian people in the world have a goal of having fun, getting drunk, etc. As Christians, we know that this is not our goal in life. People like to point to the scriptures where Christ sat with “wine bibbers and prostitutes” but what they fail to understand is that Christ himself was not there getting drunk with them but being an example and teaching them about the gospel. I honestly feel that being in a bar or some other place of ill-repute is not where Christians should be. It would seem hypocritical to try an evangelize with ridiculously loud music blaring, half-naked women dancing and men being drunk and obnoxious. There are better places for that.
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I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you made a very interesting statement.
“I’m kind of glad I went through the bar thing in my twenties, because I can honestly say it cured any chances of me being Lot’s wife and looking back on my youth and feeling like I missed something.”
Couldn’t it also be said that Lot’s wife looked back because she missed something of her life in Sodom? As in, the things she did and not the things she didn’t do?
I bring this up because there are persons (such as myself) who actually made it through college without drinking or ever even going to a bar. I don’t believe I could miss something that I never really experienced as I don’t consider “drunkenness” a necessity for human flourishing. Fruitful relationships I do consider important (having at times experienced them), and this is what I feel I “missed”.
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Some people can handle booze and others let booze handle them,Me ? I prefer The Comforter not Southern Comfort,
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