How Young People Killed Fun
Photo courtesy of Jirka Matousek
by Larry Plates
I’m no curmudgeon. University is meant to be a fun place to be free from tyrannical parental control, but some students have been given an inch and taken a mile (if not ten). Drugs, meaningless sex and excessive alcohol have turned the student bodies of the United Kingdom into a Clockwork Orange style gang of immoral, selfish hedonists.
Nights out are where this behaviour is most obvious. Men and women will have sex without a second thought (some even before reaching the privacy of the bedroom). The streets are littered with louts sporting tousled hair and overpriced sportswear: all of them swearing, urinating and vomiting as they stalk the dingy streets of major UK towns and cities.
I dare not comment on how the female sex dress (but thank god I’m not any of their fathers). I would never suggest any girl to be unclassy, but screeching in the street covered in cheap VK and caked in make-up certainly isn’t my idea of class.
But why bother presenting yourself appropriately? It is now possible, thanks to Tinder, to post a few hand-picked images and succeed in enticing others into short penetration-centric relationships where both jump from partner to partner hoping not to catch feelings or indeed something far worse.
Monogamy is unfashionable and many will play the field. Semantics are the tactic of those afraid of commitment as relationships become a casual ‘seeing somebody’. If a better suitor appears during a night of heavy drinking or feverous swiping, why not? Romance used to be simple; two people would meet and get familiar with each other (not a euphemism). These days I doubt many of those engaged in one night stands even know the name, course, age or place of birth of the person they have had sex with. I challenge those who have had a one-night stand to see if they could have answered these basic questions.
Things worsen as, instead of facing the ugly truth that they are not as virtuous and pleasant as they once thought, people resort to more substance abuse and meaningless sex to mask the decaying humanity behind this horrific lifestyle.
If you go to a house party (something I now seldom do), be prepared for a grating soundtrack to accompany your warm beers and single sentence conversations. Does anyone find this fun or is it just the result of a pack mentality approach to cutting costs? What happened to a quiet pub night, a poker evening or a pleasant whiskey in good company? Even pub crawls have even been infected by sycophantic students. A pub crawl used to mean a few friends touring the establishments of a given place and having a good laugh. Now t-shirts must be donned in order to have racial slurs and phalluses scrawled across your chest by your fellow pub crawlers. Challenges and forced introductions are mandatory and, as you dismount a lamppost, try to hold back waves of sickness having downed a bottle of cheap white wine and struggle to think of an interesting fact about yourself. You may realise that it simply isn’t an enjoyable way to spend an evening.
Worse than the proud exhibition of disgraceful behaviour are those who take things to a criminal level. The several cases of drunk driving charges met with small fines and minor bans show us that the law, the university and the student body as a whole are unable to effectively condemn dangerous and selfish conduct. If a student ploughs their car into someone, that blood will also be on the hands of those who continually excuse this behaviour as ‘being young’.
I hope that one day these students will look back in shame at the way many conducted themselves. However, I doubt that age will bring with it any self-awareness. Instead the future teachers, parents and role models of the world will be condemning the next generation by raising it to copy their outrageous behaviour.
