Students have long been associated with irresponsible drinking. Say 'university', think pub crawls, shots and beer pong. It’s all about getting as wasted as possible, as cheaply as possible on supermarket own brand spirits in halls where the stained carpets hold more than their fair share of secrets, before heading out en masse to the union where the faint whiff of bleach is always in the air and your shoes stick to the floor.
However, there’s another, more secretive, more exclusive and, some would say, more sinister drinking culture at some of Britain’s top universities. Oxbridge in particular has a long history of scandal on this front, with the Bullingdon Club at its centre. Former Bullingdon members include politicians, celebrities and law makers alike. Magdalene College in Cambridge is home to the now-banned Wyverns, who get a look in on the headlines from time to time for their naked jelly wrestling and racist chants.
Portrayals of ‘the Buller’ have included films like The Riot Club, which was based on Laura Wade’s play Posh. Not quite a psychodrama on the same scale as the American version, a film called The Skulls%20){href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skulls_(film)%20' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'} about Yale’s not so secret Skull and Bones society starring Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker, but still, it tapped into our society’s fascination, if not obsession, with these elite clubs. The tabloids love a story about their rituals, especially when they include anecdotes about the bad behaviour of important people, and the broadsheets love an opinion piece denouncing their inherent sexism and classism.
However, drinking societies and invite-only clubs aren’t just for boys from expensive schools. Earlier this year the University of Bristol’s elite all-girls’ Scortum was outed after student newspaper The Tab reported how ‘members are handpicked for their looks, who they know and who their families are.’
From my own experience at Oxford I know that the female drinking societies are as selective and surrounded in ritual and myth as the boys’ clubs. They are about comradery but those on the inside do often feel conflicted about their involvement. It’s about belonging, it’s about tradition and it’s about dressing up in inappropriate fancy dress before you stand in front of your peers and drink liquids that are as luminous as they are unidentifiable.
Louisa* graduated from Oxbridge 10 years ago. She was not only the member of a notorious all woman drinking society, she was its ‘queen’. Of the Bullingdon, she says, ‘you knew who they were. Some of them were nice people but, generally they were the exception. They were mostly pricks.’
However, she doesn’t think girls’ societies were all that different. ‘I think they were pretty similar. It’s really all just about social approval and getting laid. It’s about feeling part of a group and going to particular social events that non-members cannot go to.’
‘I guess the major difference between the boys’ and the girls’ societies is that there was an unspoken rule that you had to be fit. You could initiate some not so fit people, but nobody objectively minging. It’s Darwinian for sure, but other male drinking societies wouldn’t want to ‘date’ yours unless you were all fit.’
As to what it feels like to be part of one Louisa says ‘at the time it’s like everything. You really want to get in, then you get in and it’s not actually all that. There’s quite a lot of stress and aggro that comes with it.’
However, she does admit, ‘I can’t lie though, it did feel good to be queen for like 2 minutes.’
As for the infamous initiations, how did they actually go down? The Bullingdon Club’s initiations famously involve anything from burning moneyto allowing your peers to urinate on your belongings and destroy as much of your stuff as possible on the basis that you can afford to replace them. ‘The year I was initiated it got pretty out of hand’, Louisa says. ‘One of the girls almost went to hospital, she cracked her head open and everyone else just left her in the street.’
Other than that she doesn’t remember much, ‘I had to pick tampons out of jelly with pet food in it with my teeth. Then I had to find a guy in a packed restaurant and simulate giving him a blow job on a banana. After that I had to stand on a table and sing on a song in front of almost a hundred people. Someone threw a shoe at me.’
Francesca* graduated this year. She was a member of the same society as Louise but they missed each other by two years. ‘It’s all very light hearted and informal’ she says. ‘We take about six girls every year.’
She says things have been forced to become less raucous in recent years, ‘in my society, a few years before I joined, I think the girl in charge had pushed people a bit too far and people ended up in hospital, so by the time I joined it had calmed down so as not to draw attention from our college.’
For her it was a good experience, ‘it was definitely a positive thing. I enjoyed it. The drinking was way less aggressive than the boy’s drinking societies – no aggressive drinking until you throw up.’ What did people who weren’t in the society think of it? ‘I know that a lot of people who weren’t in it were quite resentful of it’ she says.
On reflection it all makes Louisa feel uncomfortable. Her time at university, in the mid 2000s, was a weird time to be a woman – pre the explosion of branded and socially acceptable feminism and post the birth of ladettes like Sarah Cox and Jo Wiley. Oxbridge drinking societies were hardly bastions of feminism, nor were they sexist in the same way as the boys’ clubs. And yet, a lot of it was as much about behaving in a sexualised way, ritual humiliation and peer pressure as it was about tradition and female comradery. Perhaps it's no wonder that things have 'calmed down' as Francesca reports.
If she had her time again, would she join? ‘I do regret it now. I don’t think I would join, no’ Louisa says. Why not? ‘Because it’s lame. It’s cliquey and lame and I really hate enforced group fun which, essentially, is all it is.’
As we finish our conversation, unexpectedly she says something else. ‘It’s weird and if I had the choice I wouldn’t do it again. But, I did and I think if I ever had a daughter and she went to the same university I would want her to be in it too. As a weird tradition…I don’t know why but I kind of like the idea of it.’
*names have been changed
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.