My Life: Sports, Deviant Acts, Drinking Essay, Research Paper
I think that I shall attempt to be original on this topic. Just joking. The worst act of deviance that I have taken part in to my recollection was underage drinking. Before I start talking about this particular act of deviance I would like to say that it was a blast and I would gladly do it again. Also I did know this act was one of deviance, I believe most people know what they are doing when they break the law and I particularly did about this act. My parents and I had talked about underage drinking on several occasions and how there would be plenty of time later in my life to party and get drunk.
In the beginning I never drank or even really went to any “parties” until I was a junior in high school. So here it is my junior year. It is my first year not playing football in the fall. I wrestled in the winter and played baseball in the spring. This being the first time in my athletic career that I hadn’t been involved in a sport that was in season. Being the popular individual that I was the all of the hot girls in school persuaded me to start partying. This was enough for about the first month of class. Then I eventually began to start drinking and doing various other activities that include girls. I never used any illicit drugs or anything like that, but my life pretty much consisted of drinking and having sex. I do not consider having sex a deviant act, but the drinking was illegal so I do consider it a deviant act. Now that the foreground for this act has been laid let me talk about the night that the deviance became known to my parents.
It was a cool, breezy, slightly rainy Friday night. I believe it was our fifth football game of the year. It was a home football game against whom I cannot remember. Anyway that is unimportant. I wasn’t even going to go out that night but we started official wrestling practice in three weeks and we did not have another home football game that year. I remember this night very vividly up to a certain point. So I will try to keep all the good detail in this paper. Ring, ring. I answer the phone at 5:30 p.m. thinking who could be calling me. I have no plans for tonight so this is weird. The person on the other end is a girl I know from class named Tiffany. She says that she is having a party at her place before the game and that everyone is going to Melanie’s after the game to keep drinking. I wasn’t going to go, but then Tiffany reminded me that Heather was going to be there and that she was horny and thought that I was hot. This convinced me to go out. I arrived at tiffany’s around 6:30 p. m. and we started off with shots of Malibu, I know I was a wimp, and Rumple Minze. This was a very bad idea. We continued this up until the game started at 8. I would say that there were about ten to twelve of us at Tiffany’s. Another guy, named Marc, and around ten girls. When we got to the game we were pretty drunk. We sat, we saw, we left when we were down by two touchdowns with around five minutes to go. With our pathetically potent offense this was not enough time for us to score more than fourteen points.
We go to Melanie’s and start drinking Miller Genuine Draft. How I ever did that I have no idea, I hate that beer. So around 9:00 to 9:30 everyone else starts to show up. It is a night full of drinking and me having fun with Heather back in Melanie’s parent’s bedroom. Sorry that you have to hear all of this. But the entire night was an act of deviance. There we are around 2 a.m. and there is a knock on the door. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the cops, and we are stuck on the second floor of an apartment contest. I decide to act brave; I grab the cds that I brought to the party to listen too, and then proceed to jump out of the window. I would say that around nine or ten people followed me out the window at this point. We all start running across a field towards a very busy ninth street. In the middle of the street I trip and drop all of my cds. They go everywhere. There I am running around in the middle of the street, no idea why but there was an unusually high amount of traffic for that time of night, between cars trying to pick up all of my cds. Eventually I get all but one of them and proceed to run two miles home. When I get home that is when everything hits the fan. To start off with I am an hour late for curfew. My mom asks me if I am drunk. Of course I say no. Then I proceed to trip and fall over the change from a wood floor to carpet, I hit my face on the floor, my nose is bleeding all down the front of me, I mean it is just gushing blood, and all I can do is laugh about it. So at this point my mom and dad lecture me for hours and attempt to decide my punishment. I end up getting grounded for two weeks and my dad makes me work the sectional swim meet in four hours. It was hell.
This behavior was deviant due to the fact that it was breaking the law. The three sociological theories of deviance that apply to this behavior are differential association, labeling theory, and anomie theory.
Differential association states that deviance is learned through interactions with other people. It is obvious that prior to this year I did not party or participate in alcohol use, but when I no longer played football I started hanging out with people that did do these things. I feel that by hanging out with individuals that would drink and party I learned that it was ok for me to do the same. So this theory does apply to the act of deviance that I partook in.
Labeling theory states that people are labeled into what kind of individual they are, and that individuals live up to this label. In this case the people I hung out with were considered partiers, and so was I, even though I did not party. All out of season athletes were considered to be hell raisers in the town I grew up in. Since I was an out of season athlete people assumed that I went out and drank and partied. I can see how with everyone thinking that I was partying that I would decide to go out and do it even though I wasn’t. So once again this theory can explain the deviant behavior I was partaking in.
The third and final theory that explains this behavior is anomie theory. In this particular deviant act we were partaking in innovation. We knew the goals of society (be age 21 to drink), but we rejected the means to achieve these goals (we got beer illegally and drank it). This is a perfect example of innovation as it pertains to the anomie theory of deviant behavior. So yet again for a third time, and sociological theory of deviance explains my behavior.
In the end all three theories of sociological deviance that I talked about explain the deviant behavior that I was partaking in. I feel that the one that fits the act the most is differential association. The reason that I feel this is that I do not feel that I would have participated in this behavior if it was not for the individuals I was hanging out with at the time.
I hope you enjoyed my story and I hope that you are not disappointed that I have not partaken in any more deviant acts. Believe it or not I am one of the good guys. Scary isn’t it? Muuuaaahhhhhhhh