Breaking: College students sometimes drink alcohol to excess.

When I was in a fraternity in college, the house drink was called a Blue Meanie. Its basic ingredient was grain alcohol, flavored with Blue Curacao and Triple Sec, so it tasted like lemonade. It did the trick. A few of those cool red solo cups and you were blotto.

But we knew what we were doing, and it was no one’s fault but our own if we chose to imbibe. And afterward, no matter what we did while under the influence, even if it was occasionally embarrassing (and it was), it was no one’s fault but our own. We were stupid, but we weren’t stupid about being stupid.

Ashton Katherine Carrick is a senior at the University of North Carolina, and she discovered the idea of getting drunk at college, as if no one ever did it before.

I hadn’t known it at the time, but this was my first introduction to the aspirational “blackout.” That is, intentionally drinking with the goal of submersing yourself in so much alcohol that you can’t remember what happened and the only vestiges that remain from the night before are the videos on your friends’ phones. I attended that college for one year before transferring to the University of North Carolina. During that time I never got “blackout,” but I was a frequent observer of it. I’m not naïve; I know that drinking is part of the college experience, you hang out with some friends, you party too hard and sometimes you pass out. But what I saw was something different.

Carrick calls that “something different” “blackout culture.” She goes on to explain the negative forces compelling students to become party to blackout culture.

Small schools are especially conducive to blackout culture. Many are in small towns and have limited social activities. Sports teams are minimally competitive at best, the Applebee’s tends to get old, and the bowling alley becomes insufficient. A general lack of bars and off-campus gathering places means that fraternity houses become the focal point of partying and social interaction.

This is the problem with inductive reasoning, where limited data points produce the wrong answer, which is then extrapolated into the norm for lack of broader understanding. Students at colleges large and small drink too much alcohol. The need to give every misbegotten choice a name to create the appearance of an external influence is new, but drinking to excess must assuredly is not.

But like every new baby is the first ever born to its parents, drinking booze was never a problem until it happened to, or around, you. Why? What caused “blackout culture” to magically appear on campus when Carrick arrived?

Of course, many college students drink, including the scholarship winners, the three-sport athletes and the club presidents. They’re free from their parents, and they feel safe because everything is in walking distance. Drinking on campus is by far the most convenient way to have fun. Plus it’s cheap and accessible. But there’s something else in the mix, something that pushes them from casual drinking to binge drinking to blackout. I think it’s the stress. It permeates everything we do as college students.

These factors are all, no doubt, influences on college students. Their relative influence will vary by individual, but they’re all there. And they’ve always been there. Fifty years ago, same deal. Kids on campus doing the stupid stuff kids on campus always did. Your mother. Your grandmother. If they went to college, they did stupid stuff. Whether they’ll admit it is another story, but they did it. It’s what college kids do.

So the mentality behind the decision to black out boils down to the simple question of why not? No one will stop you. You’re in a familiar environment. You assume that if you black out, someone will make sure you get back home. And most of the time you do get home, which makes it seem a lot lower risk than it really is and allows for it to be repeated every weekend.

You’re on your own, free, likely for the first time in your life, to make your own choices without mommy peering over your shoulder, protecting you from the most foolish ones. No need to explain. Not to mom. Not to readers. Not even to yourself. We’ve all been there, even if we didn’t feel the need to create a name including the word “culture” or spend too much time finding external justifications for doing what kids have done for generations.

The way we as students treat the blacking out of our peers is also partly responsible for its ubiquity. We actually think it’s funny. We joke the next day about how ridiculous our friends looked passed out on the bathroom floor or Snapchatting while dancing and making out with some random guy, thus validating their actions and encouraging them to do it again. Blacking out has become so normal that even if you don’t personally do it, you understand why others do. It’s a mutually recognized method of stress relief. To treat it as anything else would be judgmental.

Exactly. Whether you chalk it up to a rite of passage or childish tomfoolery, it’s a choice kids make, just as they’ve always made, to engage in an activity that often leads to ridiculousness, engaging in conduct that you might never do if sober, but you made the active choice not to be sober, not to make sober choices. It’s funny.

Yet, the next day, too many women decide it’s not funny, it’s not their responsibility for getting shitfaced.* It’s not the most traumatic, horrible thing that’s ever happened to you. You are nobody’s victim. If you “made out” with some random guy, it’s not the random guy’s fault any more than it’s your fault. It’s what college kids do when they get drunk. And then the next day, they laugh about their foolishness and move on with their perfectly normal college lives.

Or at least, we used to. And look back on it decades later with fondness. They were good times, doing the silly things college kids do before we reached adulthood and the responsibilities of raising the next generation of college students.

*There is a significant different between volitional behavior and being drugged without one’s knowledge. The two should not be confused.