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.
