Social change, the group kind

[drwex]

I noted this weekend that the parties once again featured alcohol and drinking and I reflected thus:

The social group I'm typically part of did not tend to drink all that much in college. When I joined the crowd there was a fair amount of drinking at parties. Over time that fell into disfavor. Alcohol became... not shunned or frowned on, but just not the recreation of choice. There was a tad of snobbishness about it, as the crowd used the not-alcohol as part of its self-setting-apart metric. That snobbishness carried over into certain areas of pride in home brewing. If one was going to drink, one should drink GOOD stuff, not just drink for the effects of alcohol. Spread that "good stuff" out from homebrewed meads and beers to people taking wine classes, developing tastes for good scotch and good port.

Fast forward a bit to now. The crowd has changed, as all crowds do. We're older and dare I say it more mature or adult if you prefer. More of us have houses and families and are more secure than your typical just-out-of-college type. And more of us have gone to the point of enjoying drinking-qua-drinking again. I don't see people going out purely to get blitzed but I do see pitchers of mojitos, custom martinis in volume, and more than a few blenders of drinkables being enjoyed at parties these days.

I didn't drink at the party I went to Friday, but I did note more than a few empty bottles and a certain level of comfort with alcohol in the party scene that wasn't there a decade ago. The edges of defensiveness and snobbishness around alcohol that I'd sensed in the past seemed to be absent.

Interesting bunch of folk we are.

Comments

[coraline]

i've been finding this fascinating, since i've been trying to deconfound the "me discovering drinking" from "actual social trend changes in one social group" from "shifting who i socialize with over time", so it's very interesting to hear about evidence of that middle one.

i'm certainly happy with where i've ended up, regardless of which factors have shifted to get me there though.

[dpolicar]

Interesting.

As a non-drinker, I hadn't especially noticed that alcohol had stopped being part of social gatherings, though I've noticed more events in the last few years that are defined around alcohol exclusively (eg, wine-tasting and scotch-tasting parties).

[chillguru.livejournal.com]

i feel like this is a fairly recent shift, as i've noticed it in just the relatively short time (4-5 years) i've been hanging around this crowd. whenever i first showed up, i definitely felt the 'looking down on drinking" sentiment as it was in stark contrast to the fairly libatious crowd i formerly hung out with.

i certainly don't require or expect alcohol at social events, but i'm a little uncomfortable with a staunch anti-drinking sentiment.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

It's quite the opposite for me. I seek out non-drinking social events because they feel safer. A party centered on alcohol (even where it's "let's taste good scotch" rather than "let's get drunk") is not a party I want to attend, even if I enjoy the company of the same people in other circumstances.

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree, although I think there's still a higher-than-national-average degree of connoisseurship involved, although that may be less snobbery and more alpha-geeking. Both in the sense that many of the emergent drinks-of-preference are still crafted, such as mojitos, rather than merely poured into a shotglass, and in that it is in the geek nature to attempt to perfect anythign that does not successfully run away.

I'd always suspected that the original attitude crept in from BDSM events, since "No booze whatsoever at (play) parties!" is a very New Leather trope. But a lot of my social set is BDSM-positive, which presumably is not true for everyone in "our crowd".

[coraline]

it is in the geek nature to attempt to perfect anythign that does not successfully run away.

...and some of the things that do :)