When I started at university in Cambridge, there was a whole new language to learn, along with making new friends, attending tutorials, and figuring out where things were in a new city. There were DOSs (director of studies), quads (short for quadrangle, a kind of internal courtyard), pigeonholes (where students’ mail is left for them) and something called swaps.
A few weeks into term, about twelve other first-year girls and I received invites in our pidges to a swap with the boys’ drinking society at our college. It turned out that a swap (also called a ‘crew date’ at Oxford University) was a dinner that usually happens between drinking societies or with their invitees. I’d heard rumours of drinking societies before I went to Cambridge – they sometimes attract the attention of the national press after all – but I hadn’t realised that pretty much every college has them, many of them very old, complete with traditions and sometimes even a specific uniform like a tie.
If I’m honest with myself, it felt exciting and a little bit special to be invited. Only a select bunch of fresher girls were chosen, looking back mostly white, thin, privately educated girls, and we got ready together, going past the Porter’s Lodge in small groups to avoid suspicion. It was only at the swap itself that I began to feel uneasy.
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We went to the dingy basement of a restaurant that I would later find out was infamous for hosting swaps – a few restaurants in Oxford and Cambridge were rumoured to make good money off drinking societies, tolerating raucous, sometimes downright anti-social behaviour that other establishments wouldn’t. It was too loud to hear anyone speak, and the boys were more focused on drinking games and chants of ‘chug!’. I mostly talked to the other girls, anyway – I couldn’t help but think we’d be better off hanging out in one of our rooms.
I went on a couple more swaps with boys from other colleges, but I never felt totally comfortable, and sometimes I was scared. One time, another fresher called me uptight because I was sitting with my arms crossed. I’d later go on to find out years later that he’d been convicted of sexually assaulting another student. More run-of-the-mill was just a general embarrassment at the entitled behaviour I saw and the gross boasting of the boys (including the claim from a pair of drinking society presidents that they’d recreated David Cameron's rumoured performing of a sex act on a dead pig’s head – something the former PM strongly denies).
So when I was invited to the equivalent girls’ drinking society at my college, it initially seemed like a welcome alternative. Perhaps even an antidote to the toxic masculinity associated with men’s drinking societies and their traditions, like Caesarean Sunday (named after Jesus College’s men’s drinking society), where students get drunk and fight on Jesus Green.
When there’s a huge problem with sexual assault and harassment on British campuses, a group of young women supporting each other and not adhering to sexist ideas of how young women should behave is understandably appealing. As Cora, a former drinking society member who is now in her late twenties, says, “There’s something subversive and intoxicating about women behaving badly. It’s attractive; the idea of finding a sense of community and belonging.”
Most of the members of the girls’ drinking society lived in one big house in the college grounds, where they hosted our initiations. Although a lot less extreme than the boys’ initiations, where they supposedly had to have a ‘designated driver’ to look after them because they were expected to throw up from alcohol, I still didn’t like them. One of the two presidents tried to get me to do a shot of tequila with an insect in it. I said no because I’m a vegetarian, but she made it clear she found that lame.
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I stayed as part of the drinking society for most of the rest of my time at uni, but I began to feel increasingly conflicted. I wanted to hang out with my friends, but as a bi woman, I began to find the whole setup overwhelmingly heterosexual. Cora, who realised she was queer after uni, says, “There were very strict gender norms and expectations based on gender.” On swaps, it is customary to sit boy/girl/boy/girl. Although the drinking society I was in was fairly casual and sometimes non-binary people came to our pre-drinks, it still felt like a very straight space with an implicit goal of same-sex hook-ups.
Debs (30), who wasn’t a part of her college’s drinking society, says, “I found it problematic in terms of its cliqueiness. It was overwhelmingly posh and made up of girls who were what you’d consider conventionally attractive and femme-presenting.” She also points out that the boys’ drinking society in her college had sway over which girls were asked to join the female equivalent, and that the relationships between single-sex drinking societies are often intertwined.
Lucy, a former president of a historic girls' drinking society, believes one reason she was asked to be president was that her boyfriend was president of the college’s male drinking society. She never enjoyed organising swaps and remembers crying on several occasions. In hindsight, she feels “neutral” about drinking societies but insists her favourite aspects were always the pre-drinks, where it was only girls.
Her biggest regret is just how much she drank at uni. Georgie, a gay man in his mid-twenties, who has always been sober, including at uni, felt he would never fit into drinking society culture as “the whole purpose of being there is to drink”. For any student who doesn’t drink alcohol, whether for religious, cultural or personal reasons, a society based solely around drinking is exclusionary. Although he felt more welcomed by the women’s drinking society than the men’s (I never met any openly queer men in a male drinking society), Georgie says, “basing any social activity around alcohol had a much bigger impact than the gender binary element on me personally.”
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Tellingly, when I speak to Morag, a current social secretary of a sports society at the University of Edinburgh, she’s at pains to explain that she plans socials that aren’t based around drinking as well as finding ways to include non-drinkers at socials where there is alcohol. But when a society is based solely around drinking (and arguably outrageous behaviour too), there’s no other shared interest that’s uniting its members. I vividly remember waking up in bed early after many nights out, my heart pounding and my teeth furry with sugar after drinking so many VKs and Jaeger Bombs that clubs would give as a perk to drinking societies.
Looking back, Cora feels “The girls-only space was safe for some women and less safe for others.” Although she contrasts girls’ drinking societies with the “real violence” of men’s ones, she questions whether they were disguising or replicating harmful behaviour by dressing it up as ‘empowerment.’
This preoccupation with ‘girls behaving badly’ is reflected in the appetite for feminine rage and women’s wrongs that’s in vogue across different forms of media – there’s an implicit idea that perhaps it can provide a kind of atonement for centuries of male violence and subjugation. In my book, These Mortal Bodies, I wanted to present the allure but also the dark side of sisterhood and women-only spaces, especially when they exist in such privileged spaces. Cora notes that in girls' drinking societies, “there was a bit more irony and discussion about the problematic nature of them.” But self-awareness alone doesn’t get past their elitist, binary behaviour or the fact that girls behaving badly is not always as liberatory as it might seem.
