Legitimate Thoughts: Banging under the influence.

Whiskey dick, beer goggles, Greg Sgammato—call it whatever you want, there are many words describing the juxtaposition of drinking and sex because as everybody knows, when the weekend comes and class is out it’s time to down a few drinks and go home with someone for the night.

Bullshit aside though, alcohol is a depressant and makes you feel relaxed. The great Benjamin Franklin himself was quoted saying that “beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” So why not be happy? Part of the appeal of drinking aside from honoring our equally alcoholic forefathers and toasting cheers to a week of hell done and a week of hell to come is that alcohol serves as the friendly mediator, breaking down the twin barriers of social awkwardness and moral inhibition. When we drink it not only becomes easier to court someone but there’s also a good chance that the courtee is also drunk. In these situations, alcohol makes the proposition of sex less a game of blindfold chess and more a matter of whether both of the participants can walk back to a designated destination.

For guys, the appeal of this is obvious: it cuts out the hassle of having to pretend to care about a relationship and the protocols of a thing called “courtship” if they want to sleep with a girl, it gives them an excuse to think with the other head, and, as many a study has shown, girls become more submissive when intoxicated while men conversely become more emboldened. So score one for the men. (Women that are reading this you know you’ve met assholes and you know this is true, don’t judge me.) This isn’t to say that girls don’t also have their reasons to mix drink and sex or this whole article would be pointless. Though less obvious than a guy’s reasons, on top of the relaxing effects of alcohol and not having to deal with whiney boyfriends, girls also find drinking appealing since it gives them a convenient excuse to be promiscuous and not be considered slutty by society’s biased standards (Girls, I’ve got your backs.).

Like with any drug, alcohol enhances the sensual experience and makes it feel like you’re Captain Ahab killing Mobey Dick while climbing Mt. Everest and having sex—wait, maybe I’m thinking of the wrong drug…—, better yet, it can also sometimes double as an amnesiac so you don’t even remember just how stupid you acted, but even if you do you can always blame it on the alcohol like that stupid Jamie Foxx song. Alcohol also causes what we affectionately know as “beer goggles” which means our perception of another person’s attractiveness gets skewed exponentially the more we drink. This means that there’s the double-edged sword of having the equal chance of either spending the night with an Adonis or Aphrodite or of spending it with a Moby Dick. In other words, our f-t is significantly reduced which drastically increases our hunting grounds for the night even if we’ll probably regret it in the morning. For those few hours though, when we’re crammed into various seedy basements bathing in the sweat of the people next to us, we can feel like lions in a field of sheep.

Onward: while there are some obvious advantages to drinking and sex there are also some rather blatant disadvantages before, during, and after the act. For starters, while it’s great when both parties are drunk it’s miserable to be slobbered on or harassed by a drunk when sober. But what if this doesn’t happen? Well, there’s still a chance of whiskey dick which means your gun can’t be loaded and there’ll be no firefight that night. Which kinda sucks after all the work to get someone.

Of course, there also the just-fell-off-Mt. Everest hangover and realizing that last night you were actually banging Moby Dick, as well as the infamous walks of shame in the morning when everyone has sobered up and hypocritically judges you for not being wise enough to walk back before everyone was up and the general lead slabs of regret that some of us feel after our protective ethanol-based big brother has disappeared, to list some more. There is also the awkward post-sex conversation a few days later when one or both parties admit to having been extremely intoxicated, driving the other party to feel like a grown-up pedobear.

But as the wise Hank Moody from “Californication” said: A morning of awkwardness is better than a night of loneliness.

Disclaimer: This in no way reflects how I actually feel.

--Touch