“I was but a shot away from what is referred to as a “black-out state.” —Karen Owen

By now, many of you have probably heard of Duke graduate Karen Owen’s Powerpoint Presentation, in which she described in salacious detail thirteen hookups with top athletes at her alma mater. She said it was meant for three friends, but the document quickly went viral.

While some have hailed her as a feminist role model (of the “Do Me” feminist sort, since she initiated the hookups), others have vilified her as a party girl gone wrong.

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan has another take on Karen Owen—while she comes on with swagger, if you read between the lines of her presentation and her subsequent comments, there’s regret, sadness, and ultimately, the sour aftertaste of rejection.

Irin Carmon, who interviewed Karen Owen for Jezebel.com, takes issue with Flanagan’s portrayal of Owen as a “sad, slutty, drunk girl”:

The decade-long hysteria over a “hookup culture,” imperiling young women who have been brainwashed into binge-drinking away their ingrained biological desires for cuddling and babies, doesn’t match any reality I’ve seen or heard of beyond pseudo-concerned trend stories. There are some people who are more interested in casual sex, sometimes; some of them are women, and some of them are drunk at the time, and it’s not a death knell for a committed relationship somewhere along the way if that’s what you want. It’s not that gender inequality doesn’t inform the power dynamics of casual sex, on campus or elsewhere. It’s that it’s hard to believe these handwringers are interested, in good faith, in creating a better environment of safe, enthusiastic consent when they’re so busy ignoring the fact that women like sex too. Or judging us for it.

Whether you see Karen Owen as a feminist icon, a sad woman, scorned, or as a lightning rod for debate about women’s sexuality, there’s still the fact of the booze.

Almost all of her hookups started at a campus bar called Shooters. Most of the time, Karen was drinking. All judgment aside, it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if she never had a sip of booze. Would she still have pursued these hookups sober? Would they have been the same? (Rachel Kramer Bussell wrote a great essay for Drinking Diaries, called “Drunk Sex, How I Miss You (Sometimes, Anyway”).

About the culture college women face, Flanagan writes:

We’ve made a culture for our college women in which they have been liberated from the curfews and parietals that were once the bane of co-eds, but one in which they have also shaken off the general suspicion of male sexuality that was the hallmark of Andrea Dworkin–style campus activism; they prefer bikini waxes and spray tans to overalls and invective. So they have ended up with the protections of neither the patriarchy nor those old-school, man-hating radical feminists.

Maybe they’re all the better for it. Or maybe an awful lot of these young women at our very best colleges are being traumatized by what takes place during so much of this mindless, drunken partying when they’re steeped in alcohol, which brings out the least engaging aspects of their young selves.

I’m not sure I would describe a young woman’s sexuality as the “least engaging aspect” of her young self. Truth is, if you view the Powerpoint Presentation, it seems like most of the time, Karen Owen had fun. She was bursting with desire for these “fine male specimens,” and she fulfilled that desire. Maybe the only way many young women can feel comfortable claiming their desires is by getting drunk. Why is that?

Maybe that’s where the change begins—not with banning alcohol or using Karen Owen’s notoriety as a cautionary tale—don’t kiss and tell. Her story just points to the fact that, when it comes to owning their sexuality without shame, young women still have a long, long way to go.

Then again, most of the guys she hooked up with were drunk, too.

Oktoberfest. Football game tailgating. Drinking games like “quarters” and “beer pong.” If memory serves me, October is a pretty solid drinking month in college. And for some students–particularly the freshmen who are overcome with their newfound freedom–overdoing it is an increasingly growing problem.

Thanks to the the BACCHUS Network, a university and community based network focusing on comprehensive health and safety initiatives, the third week in October is now billed as National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week (NCAAW) at over 900 campuses across the United States.

Through a variety of activities, the national campaign provides students with ideas for alternatives to alcohol abuse and educates them on the personal choice of responsible alcohol use. At CSU Monterey Bay, for example, NCAAW events included a student panel, Gatorade Pong, Parent Night on East Campus, Movie Night, a “No Fear” Dance, Olympics Under the Influence, a Jello Wrestling Tournament, and a late night hip hop concert.

To give further attention to the issue of excessive college drinking, BU Today, Boston University’s online newspaper, chose Alcohol Awareness Week to publish a five-part series called “Alcohol on campus: nearly everybody drinks, so what’s the problem?” addressing several aspects of student drinking. The series provides the facts, the numbers, and the opinions of students, administrators, and experts on drinking–an issue that carries more weight for college kids than most people realize.

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After coming across a recent article in U. Conn’s on-line newspaper, The Daily Campus, we realized it’s time to address this question, this topic, this who’s-going-to-take-reponsibility-for-their-behavior issue of college drinking and sex. College may be far back in the past for some of us, or maybe we (read: you) are still there, but either way, we want to know…

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For a new series of essays (and poems), we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Leah Odze Epstein

I’ll never forget the first night I walked into the Royal Palm—or the Palms, as we called it. “New York, New York” played on the tabletop jukeboxes, reminding me of my favorite diner back home.

“Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it, New York, New York,” Frank Sinatra sang in his velvety voice, luring me in.  “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” This pretty much summed up how I felt about college.

After a high school career of pound-the-books nerd-dom, I’d decided that in college, academics would no longer take precedence (if my parents only knew…). I skipped the first few days of orientation to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert. Then I came in with a bang—greeted by the Leah Ooze sign on the door of my dorm room (my last name’s Odze), complete with a dripping puddle some helpful dorm-mate had drawn.

No matter. As I’ve detailed here at Drinking Diaries, I got drunk for the first time my first night of college. I blacked out, in fact. After that, I got a little smarter, but only a bit. Alcohol loosened my inhibitions, and by the second day, I took up with our helpful OC (orientation counselor). Call him Chaz.

Chaz was a junior, and by about night three, he began ushering me around to all the best campus sights: his apartment, his bedroom, and, when he realized he wasn’t going to get as lucky as he’d thought–his favorite bar.

I was thrilled that some guy wanted me. A junior, at that. And he wasn’t that bad- looking, if you could get past the nervous twitch. He was kind of bohemian and I liked that. I still wore acid-washed jeans, God love me, and pastels. My friend Julie soon put the kibosh on my wardrobe when she raised her eyebrow and said, “Pastels?” When I walked into the Palms, Julie’s words really hit home. From then on, I’d wear black and army green.

Did I mention that none of my fellow freshmen had ventured beyond the campus pub? I felt like a pioneer as I stepped into that smoky air, as if it were coating me with a new aura. Pool balls cracked, pinball machines plinked, but mostly, the place buzzed with constant conversation and beer bottles clinking, as if life at this bar were a constant toast to the fun of it all.

Kids sat four or six to a booth, head to head, at beat-up wooden tables with carvings and graffiti. And the smell. The Palms reeked of the beer that everyone drank—Rolling Rock in bottles, mostly—but also Budweiser and Gennee Cream Ale.

Chaz steered me to the back of the bar. Next to the pinball machines, a bald guy with a thin braid down his back sat cross-legged on top of a picnic table, holding court and smoking clove cigarettes, while people stood around him. One guy wore a beret, which thrilled me to no end, because trust me, no guy in suburban Maryland dared to wear a beret.

Yes, there were other Cornell bars, but as far as I was concerned, those weren’t for me. Let the boarding-school types and the upscale snobs have their chardonnay at Ruloff’s; let the jocks and the grunters line up their penny shots at Dunbars. From the day Chaz took me into the Royal Palm, the Palms–with its “I don’t care if you love me” attitude–was mine.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating (but not much) when I say I ended up there every night, after every party, after every study session or to avoid studying. Any excuse, and I was there, sharing a pitcher with my friends. Afterwards, we’d head to the corner deli to marvel drunkenly at the Potted Meat Food Product.

I met my first real boyfriend at the Palms. It was the one time I walked into the bar alone, over the summer, without the armor of my friends. I can’t remember why, but I walked right up to this guy and asked him if he was Swedish (he was). So was I (half). And that was that.

Years later, I went back to my twentieth reunion. My friend Julie and I made the Palms our first stop, in the middle of the day. I looked at her and said, “Thank God it’s the same.” The jukeboxes, the dartboard, the ceiling tiles, each one hand-painted by a Palms regular. We looked for things we’d scratched into the tables, or that had been scratched into the tables about us. At the Palms, you made your mark, literally, whether by writing on the walls or tables, or painting a ceiling tile. The bar belonged to me and Julie and everyone else who passed through.

The owners hadn’t changed a bit–they’d already aged, long ago, from all the cigarette smoke and beer. They seemed happy to see us, even the guy who’d caught me with my pants down in the men’s room one drunken night, when I had to pee and the ladies room was full. I remembered how he stood there relentlessly, refusing to get out, despite my hollering, holding the door open until I pulled up my pants and exited to the cheers of the growing crowd. Still, I forgave him. The grumpy owners added to the charm, and life in your late teens is so much more fun when you have authority figures to push against.

We visited again at night, and maybe that was our mistake, because once the people filled in, we could see they were all wrong: popular people with their fickle tastes, listening to current favorites instead of classics–“Living on a Prayer” blasted from the CD jukebox.

The crowd spilled out onto a back patio, which I never knew existed. Julie and I opted for the bar, where the crowd seemed older than the table sitters or the people milling around, walking up and down the aisles to see who was there. I almost joined them out of habit, before I realized that all our peers were long gone.

We sat down, and Julie whispered to me, “Don’t look now, but that townie guy’s staring you down.” I glanced over at Grizzly Adams to my left, preparing to tell him I was here to reminisce with my friend, so if he could kindly give us some space, I’d appreciate it, when he said, “Hey, Leah.”

“Um, hi?” I said, not wanting to be rude. I felt like I was back in college, at the dining hall after a drunken night, when a guy I didn’t know would say hi and I’d cringe, wondering what idiotic thing I’d done the previous night.

Well, this guy knew me, all right. He turned out to be the boyfriend. My first love. Sitting next to me at the bar. Unrecognizable, until he opened his mouth. Then, he became the same laid-back guy I remembered, minus the frat-boy attitude, plus a long beard and a tattooed girlfriend.

Different-looking. Southern sounding, even though he was from the North. But underneath, he had the same essential nature. Just like the Palms, which, I reminded myself, still had “New York, New York” on the jukebox, just waiting for someone like me to come along and press play.

Leah Odze Epstein is the co-editor of Drinking Diaries. She also writes middle grade and young adult fiction. You can follow her on twitter at @Leaheps.

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When I reached legal drinking age in the early 1980s, I was 18 and just entering my freshman year in college. Being legal wasn’t nearly the big monumental moment it seems it is today. I mean, we could already drive, and now we could officially drink, vote, and for some, join the army.

In the mid-80s, in response to increasing numbers of drinking-related highway driving fatalities, and with birth and work of MADD (Mothers Agains Drunk Driving), the drinking age was changed to 21.

Perhaps there are less highway accidents since the legal age has changed, but there are a growing number of deaths from alcohol poisoning, and certainly many college kids who are binge drinking and pounding the “forbidden fruit” like there is no tomorrow.

Last winter, 60 Minutes aired an episode about the drinking age controversy, which has provoked great debate since more than 100 college presidents (including those from Dartmouth and Duke) formed a movement to reduce the legal drinking age to 18. Extreme drinking has become increasingly common on college campuses, and students are often consulting You Tube videos which basically instruct underage kids how to concoct potent combinations of alcohol, such as in the “Irish Car Bomb,” where you mix Guiness beer, whiskey and Bailey’s and drink it all at once.

It is unlikely that the drinking age will change, based on the amount of government agencies that are in favor of keeping it at 21. But at least there’s a debate about it, which, I think, is a good thing.

What do you think the legal drinking age should be?