Click here for your worst drunken nightmare
by Koren Zailckas
From Glamour Magazine.
Permission requested from the author.

In the good old days, a night of drinking too much would leave you with a headache and some ugly memories. Today it could mean waking up to find photos of yourself – passed out or naked or worse – all over the Internet.

I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Syracuse University in New York when I woke up one morning with a fierce hangover and a business card in my jeans pocket. Confused, I turned the card over in my hand. It had no name, no title and no phone number.

The only thing that was printed on it, in bubbly blue font, was a Web address.

I typed the URL into my Internet browser and found a whole gallery of pictures that had been taken at the bar where I'd been the night before. In one photo, a girl from my English class was downing a shot of tequila. In another ~ a boy who lived in my dorm poured draft beer over his roommate's head. And there, in the center of the page, was a picture of me kissing my best female friend.

All at once, I remembered the man who'd taken it. He was a middle-aged joe, wearing a cable-knit sweater, a black baseball cap and sneakers. He'd called himself a "promoter", yet he hadn't been carrying free CDs, T-shirts or club flyers, just a camera and a fat wad of money. And the only thing he seemed to be promoting was drunkenness. Every 10 minutes, he'd peel $20 bills off the top of the stack and buy a round of drinks for the crowd. As my friend and I got tipsier and tipsier ~ he told us we were pretty, grabbed us by the shoulders and forced us together, saying, "Kiss."

In the picture, we looked dead on our feet. My cheeks were as round and red as hothouse tomatoes. I was half laughing and half recoiling. My friend's eyes were rolled back into her head.

I'd been a waster for much of my youth. I had my first sips of alcohol when I was 14, and my stomach pumped two years later after a night of drinking straight vodka, tequila and Kahlua at a friend's weekend party. By college I drank rum by the half-liter bottle, until I couldn't squelch the impulse to unload my secrets to strangers or sob or pass out wherever I happened to be standing. Finally, at the age of 23, I gave up alcohol altogether, having realized how much dignity, friendship and romance my drinking had cost me. Now that I'm sober ~ I feel relieved that the embarrassing picture of me kissing my friend has vanished into cyberspace, and deeply lucky that my drunken debauchery didn't get me into even more trouble.

But what was a shocking experience for me back then is a common concern for young women now. With the ubiquity of binge drinking in the U .S., college-age women are becoming part of a new fetish: "real-life" drunk girls splashed all over lewd and often pornographic websites. Most sites offer hundreds of unnerving photos of inebriated women having sex or displaying their bodies for the camera in the kind of gritty, messy, disturbing way that comes with being semi-conscious. Many sites appear to mix in some fake footage as well, with professional porn actors having sex on sets decorated like dorm rooms. But most of what these sites advertise - college girls who are, as one site puts it, "a bit shy, but as the night goes on, open up (literally) and get really wild" - is delivered exactly as promised. Imagine your worst drunken nightmare, posted on the Internet for all the world to see.

A sign of the times?

Type "drunk girls" into Google and you'll get more than 9 million results from porn sites with names like Dead Drunk Girls, Party-girl, Drunk Campus Girls, Drunk-Amateur Girls and They Drunk. One of the trendsetters in the genre is a site called - brace yourself - College Fuck Fest, which launched in 2003. As Glamour went to press, the CFF site featured raunchy footage of university parties in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, Texas and Washington. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Micah Coy, CFF's "events planner," and his cameramen spent so much time at off-campus parties that "it felt predatory," says UCSB Associate Dean of Students Carolyn Buford. "Young people have always made mistakes while they were drinking. That's nothing new. What's new are Internet companies that turn a profit on those mistakes."

There are also new gadgets that have made it possible for amateurs - from the fraternity brother to the campus bartender to the guy in the dorm room next door - to catch women in compromising positions with minimal time, cost and technological savvy. Handheld video cameras get smaller and less expensive every year, and camera phones are even more affordable and pervasive. "It used to be that girls could carry cameras in their purses, but guys had nowhere to put them," Tommy O'Leary, a 20-year old student at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, explains. "Now we can carry picture phones in our pockets. I know lots of college guys who bring their cell phones to parties and bars for the purpose of taking pictures of intoxicated girls that they can picture-message to their friends."

While some photos are taken without the subjects' knowledge, others are clearly a spontaneous collaboration between lascivious guys and very drunk girls. According to the College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, 44 percent of college women binge drink (defined as consuming four or more drinks in a row) at least once in a two-week period. And in a survey conducted by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 46 percent of 15 - to 24-year-old women reported being concerned that they "might do more, sexually, than they had planned because of alcohol or drugs."

Meanwhile, with starlets like Tara Reid, Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton getting mentions in the tabloids every time they dance on a bar top, our culture seems to have elevated partying to performance art. "We've seen a shift toward exhibitionism," says Robert Thompson, the founding director for the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, my alma mater. Nowadays, bad behavior seems to result in good publicity. "Pamela Anderson's sex video boosted her career. Paris Hilton's video launched her into superstardom," notes Thompson. But as some drinking women find out, it's one thing to be a celebrity who can turn an unguarded moment into a cash cow. It's another thing entirely to be a civilian, make a foolish decision in a split second and wind up paying for it for years to come.

The night that changed her life

Kate* is a 21-year-old business school student who speaks softly, smiles cautiously and tugs at the cuffs of her velvet blazer when she feels nervous. Three years ago she got drunk and did something she regrets so deeply that in conversation, she still refers to the incident as "everything." As in. "Before everything my life was pretty normal." Or "After everything I changed as a person. It affected every single aspect of my life."

That night three years ago, when Kate was a freshman at her local community college in California, she went to a party at her boyfriend's fraternity in a barn-red, two-story house. She had a part-time job, a solid relationship and a stable family life. "I was happy," Kate says. "But I don't think I was really sure of myself. I used drinking to become more confident."

The party turned out to be sponsored by a triple-X website. As Kate walked through the frat's door, she says she signed a video-release form that a representative from the website handed to her. "I signed because I assumed they wouldn't let me in unless I did," Kate says. "I was also curious. I wondered what I was going to see."

What Kate saw were a man and a woman who appeared to be porn actors having intercourse on a couch in the fraternity's living room. A group of 60 students huddled around the couple. Guys hooted and hollered. Girls covered their mouths with their hands and shrieked, "Eew!" “I could only watch for a minute," Kate says, shivering. "It was disgusting. At one point the man was drinking beer out of the woman's genitals."

Kate found an old high school friend in the crowd and spent the next few hours drinking beer and mixed drinks from plastic cups. Time careened by, and they got drunker and drunker. Sometime after midnight, Kate and her friend teetered into a bedroom, where a whole throng was mugging for two young cameramen. People pushed to get the attention of the camcorders. Boys kissed girls. Girls kissed girls. Girls lifted their shirts to reveal their bras and dropped their jeans to bare their thongs. The room was noisy with garbled shouts and laughter. Kate and her friend held one another's cheeks and kissed for the cameras. "From there," Kate says, "things went way too far." Cameramen helped strip the two girls of their clothes and then filmed them as they had oral sex on the floor.

When sober, Kate had been shy about her sexuality. With her boyfriend, she was usually too embarrassed to make love unless the bedroom lights were off; she'd never fooled around with a woman, let alone in front of a crowd. But drunk, Kate felt groggy and uninhibited. She lay beneath her friend and followed stage directions that the cameramen shouted. She moaned when they told her to. She straddled when they yelled, "Spread your legs!"

Looking back on that night, Kate says liquor blurred much of her memory. She dimly recalls that one camera was pointed at her face, while the other was positioned inches from her crotch. She vaguely remembers two more girls kissing her neck, in an effort to join in. But only the image of her boyfriend kneeling over her and begging her to stop stands out in her mind. "I just looked up at him and said, 'I can't," Kate says. "In retrospect, it was a weird thing to say. But that's how I felt. Between the booze and the crowd, there was no way to stop. I cheated on my boyfriend in front of his face."

After the girls finished and dressed, a cameraman gave them each a $100 bill. ("I'll never forget the size of his billfold," Kate says. "He must have been carrying a few thousand dollars in cash.") Then he drove the girls to an unmarked pink-stucco office building, about a mile from campus. The cameraman led the girls through a tall blue gate and into what Kate presumed was the website's office. Inside, he photocopied their driver's licenses and had them sign a second video release. Kate was still extremely drunk, so much so that after she left the office at 3 AM she forgot her $100 bill and her license in the cab she took home.

The next morning Kate awoke hung over and panicked. "I felt sick to my stomach,” she says. "I pictured everyone I knew, watching the video on their computers and having an oh my God moment." Sure enough, after the website posted the footage the following Monday, word of Kate's video spread at lightning speed - within two weeks most of her high school class, many of whom also attended the community college, had either seen the video or heard about it. "My friend seemed almost proud," Kate says. "I think she liked the attention. Girl on girl is more accepted than girl on guy. And a lot of guys thought it was hot."

While her friend talked up the video, Kate kept it a secret from everyone she could. She felt so guilty about having cheated on her boyfriend that she suggested they break up. (Their relationship lasted six more months.) "I felt inadequate, disgusting, unworthy to live," Kate says. "I was sure no one would ever want to be my friend or have anything to do with me." Shame also kept Kate from confiding in her parents. "I knew how disappointed they would be," she says. She stayed enrolled at the same college but moved out of town, feeling "extremely paranoid that everyone was out to get me." Kate began to drink alone, excessively, but found it only added to the pain. "I felt pushed to the edge," she says.

In the year that followed, Kate hit rock bottom. She threw away the journals she had kept since she was 10 years old ("so no one would know anything about my past"), paid her bills and tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists and drinking bleach. After Kate's suicide attempt, she spent a week in the hospital and a month in a rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, where she says she took actions that finally helped her heal and move on with her life. "Through the 12 steps, I learned to forgive myself," she says. "They taught me to stop dwelling on the past and start focusing on the choices that would make my life better in the present and the future."

In spite of the devastating effect this trend is having on women like Kate, CFF's Coy, for one, denies that he and his cameramen push girls to perform: "So many people try to blame me for the parties," Coy says, "but I merely document the events that happen at them." In reality, CFF cameramen can be seen directing the action in some of their own videos. In one, they stand over two young women, encouraging them to moan louder and touch each other more explicitly.

But why are women drinking to the point of oblivion to begin with? College-age women say peer pressure from their female friends can be overwhelming, but that’s not the only explanation. “Some girls like the attention they get when they drink and act wild,” says Sasha Martinez, an 18-year-old psychology student at Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York. “It doesn’t really matter to them that it’s negative attention. It only matters that they’re getting noticed." Twenty-one-year-old Theresa Carvalho, a student at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, believes that girls "use alcohol to give them the courage to act out fantasies they aren't brave enough to try sober, whether hooking up with another girl or being videotaped."

Can women be protected?

Of course, liquid courage tends to evaporate by the time the sun comes up, at which point it can be impossible to erase evidence of the previous night's debauchery. The Video Voyeurism Prevention Act makes it illegal to photograph or videotape anyone's naked or barely covered body without their consent, but only if the pictures are taken in a setting where the victim has a "reasonable expectation of privacy," like a dressing room or locker room. "That's a real flaw in the law," says Robert Ellis Smith, attorney and publisher of Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter devoted to legal privacy issues. "It doesn't protect women's privacy in places like bars and restaurants."

Some women are finding success in fighting back anyway. Last April, Anna-Claire Whitehead, a 21-year-old international affairs major at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, went to an annual block party held outside a long stretch of townhouses. Whitehead and her friends stood on a porch, surrounded by thousands of other students, drinking. She wasn't drunk, but she was entertained by the chaos, watching college boys break-dance on the hoods of moving cars. Suddenly one of her female friends came up behind her and pulled the hem of her dress over her waist, exposing her underwear. "I wasn't mad," says Whitehead. "But I was concerned when I looked up and realized that a man with a video camera had filmed it."

A friend told Whitehead that the cameraman was filming for a student-created website called jmaddy.com. Along with campus news, local weather and bus schedules, the site posts videos and still photographs of students' weekend parties, including a page called Frank's Nasty Pics, which is devoted to snapshots of drunken students - some flashing ample amounts of skin, some completely naked. Whitehead, afraid the photos would be leered at by her male classmates, cornered the cameraman. Without knowing her actual rights, she bluffed and told him she would take legal action if she saw the footage on the website. In reality, she had no "reasonable expectation of privacy," but her ploy worked. The revealing shot was never posted, and Whitehead credits her success to the fact that she was sober enough to confront her nemesis.

Sixteen-year-old Noelle* had a lot to drink the night she was photographed having sex with her boyfriend at a keg party at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in June 2004. The couple snuck into a bedroom upstairs and peeled off their clothes. Just as they began to have sex, Noelle noticed a pale motion in the bedroom window. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a man, sitting in a tree and snapping pictures with a digital camera. "He had already taken three or four pictures before we stopped," Noelle says. "While I was stumbling naked to the window to close the blinds, he clicked two more shots."

Two weeks after the party, Noelle received an ominous e-mail from a high school friend who'd found her image while surfing for porn. The subject line read, "You're naked, just thought you should know." Inside the body of the e-mail was a link to a site where Noelle found pictures of herself just underneath a heading that read, "I met this hot slut at a college block party and took some shots of her in action." Noelle says, "I was mortified when I saw them. I started crying and my hands shook. I felt my pulse, fast as hell, in my head."

The webmaster's e-mail address was listed on the site, so Noelle set up an anonymous Hotmail account and wrote to him. In her e-mail, she said she knew who he was and where he lived (even though she didn't), and she threatened to contact a lawyer unless he removed her pictures immediately. The webmaster didn't respond, but Noelle says he took the photos down a week and a half later. "I'll never know if he posted them on another site or if he got rid of them," Noelle says. "But I felt like I accomplished something."

Says privacy expert Ellis Smith: "Stand up for your rights. Any woman who has been photographed engaging in sexual activity in a private residence - even during a big party - has legal recourse under the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act." Also, he adds, people who are 18 or under who are photographed in a sexually suggestive way would have the law on their side if the pictures were published - good news for Noelle should those photos ever resurface. Even so, Noelle advises girls to watch their backs so they never need to duke it out in court. “If you’re going to drink, be alert,” Noelle. “These guys may not ever lay a hand on the women they film, but they still violate us.”

© Koren Zailckas is the author of Smashed:Story of a Drunken Girlhood.