Among the strangest rituals of the tribe Guyus Collegius is
"drunk shaming," in which an individual who has drunk himself into a
stupor is decorated with markers, makeup, food and, occasionally,
furniture.
Drunk shaming may seem brutish to individuals over
the age of 30 who hold jobs and don't regularly drink to the point of
unconsciousness, but in many dorms and frat houses across America, the
practice seems as legitimate as, say, showing one's breasts to cameras
on spring break, or dunking a roommate's toothbrush in the toilet bowl.
On the site Shamings.com, oblivion is just a one-way street. Dead to
the world but not the Web is a young man taking a nap and coated with
gravy mix. Below, a victim Saran-Wrapped to his bed, and a partygoer
who was the first to get wet at a kegger.
(Shamings.com)
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Drunk shaming is
not new; it has been honed to a fine art by legions of young men across
the country, perhaps for decades. The Internet has transformed drunk
shamings into a public spectacle the same way the Net makes everyone's
private degradations public (those nude pictures an old boyfriend took
a decade ago).
On CollegeHumor.com and Shamings.com, two Web sites
owned by an enterprising band of recent college grads, there are
hundreds of pictures of guys half-naked with epithets scrawled across
their chests. Usually, those who've done the scrawling send in the
photos, though apparently sometimes the drunk guy does it himself, once
he wakes up. Better to be shamed and famous, it seems, than dignified
and anonymous.
The shaming community has its own code of conduct. If
the guy's asleep in bed, you can't Shame him. (Well, you can, but he'll
wake up and pound you.)
"The standard rule is, if you fall asleep with your
shoes on, you're fair game," says Ricky Van Veen, 24, who went to Wake
Forest University and is one of the guys who run Shamings.com.
Some individuals might become alarmed if a friend
were so unconscious that even Saran-Wrapping him to his bed wouldn't
wake him up, but not the folks who post to Shamings.com.
"We luv ya but you know you deserved it!" says the
caption beneath a photo on Shamings.com, in which a young man who
appears to be sleeping has been stripped naked, has a slur written in
sunscreen across his chest and a watermelon positioned over his nether
region.
It goes without saying that shamings seem to be
primarily the purview of the male half of the species. Anthropologists
might suggest that young men use this ritual to explore the essential
nature of masculinity. For example, sometimes, the individual who has
passed out is dressed in a slip and pink panties, and sometimes, he is
made to wear a tiara. Often, the epithets on his body accuse him of
being gay. In one unusual photograph, a face is shaved into a young
man's rear end. The standard approach to shaming -- common enough that
the Shaming.com founders are utterly unimpressed by it -- is to draw
male genitalia on a fellow's face with a Sharpie marker. The shamers
post their photos online with triumphant, "Lord-of-the-Flies"-ian
captions, as if they've won a battle against the Nation of Sissy.
"Kid thought he could handle it . . . he needed
someone to put him back in his place," says the caption underneath a
close-up of a guy in a blond wig. A cigarette is dangling from one
nostril, and his entire face is painted red and blue, with I H MEN
across one cheek. Aliens studying this picture might conclude that
there are few things more disgraceful in young adult culture than a
male who cannot hold his liquor.
The group shaming ritual is "really a social
construction of dominance hierarchies," says Lois A. West, who is not
an alien but a sociologist, which is perhaps not dissimilar. She
teaches gender issues at Florida International University in Miami.
West points out the college guy conundrum: On the one hand, they have
to drink a lot to be macho. On the other hand, if they drink too much
and pass out, they're wimpy. "It's one step from there to guys drinking
until they die," she says.
You imagine her shaking her head over the phone,
mom-like. "Don't they have enough to do with their time?" she asks.
"Aren't they studying?"
There are all sorts of questions raised by the drunk
shaming. There are the practical ones: How long does it take to scrub
Sharpie marks off your eyelids? Can you continue to be friends with
someone who has shaved your backside? What individual wrote the cruel
caption "Fat kid passed out, covered in pudding"?
And there are serious ones. Whither
shame? Once upon a time, a scarlet letter kept the community away from
the one who'd sinned. We had public floggings and stocks and pillories.
(Now you stick your head in a pillory for a picture, then go for a
candy apple.) Some have argued that shame is dead in our society. It
isn't, and technology has raised the stakes of it. The soldiers at Abu
Ghraib photographed their prisoners to complete the humiliation.
