"The Irish aquavitae, vulgarly called usquebag... refresh the weake stomacke with moderate heate and a good relish... both men and women use excesse therin ... not to speake of the wives of the Irish Lords or to refere to it the due place, who often drink till they be drunken, or at least till they voide urine in full assemblies of men. I cannot (though unwilling) but note the Irish women more specifically with this fault which i have observed in no other part to be a womans vice, but only in Bohemia"
Fynes Morrison, early 17th century travellor, in Ferriter (1999)
2 comments:
Yeah those Trinity girls can really put it away
If the female graduates from Trinity working in Geary read this blog, they might take offence...
or take pride in the debaucherous TCD reputation that eschews to mention the lively academic buzz in College Green.
This brings me onto one angle that we haven't really looked at on the health risk behaviour project - the bragging and posturing that usually accompanies heavy drinking in college students. For example, "Jonny had 12 pints last night and he was on his face - I had 15 pints and moved onto Vodka and Red Bulls and there wasn't a hair out of place".
The expression of these kind of sentiments is related to the perception of excessive drinking, but what I'm getting at is omething different - its more the highly competitive, often fictitious (but sometimes real -a and if so harmful) one-upmanship in both the process of consuming alcohol and the recounting of the deed afterwards.
The bragging and posturing could be endogenous to an inherent desire to drink heavily, but I think that they are more strongly associated with over-competitive and semi-destructive impulses, that I think occur just as much in young women as well as in young men.
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