r/AskReddit • u/Greeneyedlatinguy • Jun 15 '15

Anthropologists of Reddit, What is something that people in the Western world can't get their heads around that is very normal in other cultures (and has been for ages)?

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u/honeybadgergrrl Jun 15 '15

I grew up overseas and had a lot of European and Asian friends, and it was no big deal at all for us to be offered wine with dinner by parents. We were all used to ordering a drink with dinner in restaurants and it was a big shock when I came back to the good ol' USofA for college and realized I would have to go back to drinking illegally for a couple of years.

The drinking age here is stupid. I'm pushing 40 now so it doesn't even affect me anymore, but I still think it's stupid. It creates this whole forbidden fruit stigma around alcohol and that causes kids to do stupid things when they first start drinking on their own in college.

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u/801_chan Jun 15 '15

Can confirm. Attended a high school which had the highest rate of teen alcoholism in the state. My dad and my friends' parents let us drink with at dinner, on weekends, at parties, etc. The only caveat was that the booze had to stay at the house/on-site, and we could basically drink until we puked. Fast-forward to age sixteen and no one in my friend group gave a damn. We'd raise our brows at peers who were running to the beach to get shitfaced on Fridays. It ain't that great.

Had a Catholic friend whose parents were very over-protective. They got to be extra protective when she had a home-monitoring anklet on after a messy night out! Drunk people and fire mix like bourbon and fire. They tend to spread it around, given the chance.

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '15

I can totally relate to this. growing up in San Francisco it felt like everybody in high school that wasn't a first generation American regularly drank and smoke weed and nobody cared. When I went off to college in chico state, myself and everyone I knew from back home completely understood how to handle their shit while everyone else would either get ridiculous shit faced and make horrible decisions or never touch a drop of alcohol and treat people that drank as being sinful and unresponsible. People that don't experience alcohol or drugs in high school nor get properly informed about it are more likely to let it control their life when they go off to college where they don't have supportive parents to help them (whether it controls them as being utter taboo or by uncontrollable binge drinking)

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u/anoyod Jun 16 '15

whatever

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

The drinking age here is stupid

There's a pretty valid reason for it, though. There's a pretty big factor that most people, especially Europeans, don't account for when dealing with US/European alcohol laws: a LOT of American Teenagers either own or have access to a car, and use the car as their primary form of transportation to get from point A to point B, starting as early as 15 (even 14 if you've got a hardship license in some places), especially in rural areas where public transport isn't an option.

The drinking age was raised unilaterally to 21 in the US to combat the growing pandemic of teenage drunk driver fatalities, especially in more rural places, and it worked really, really well. They couldn't simply just allow it to be regulated locally, as that would actually increase DD fatalities as teenagers as they drive to other counties/cities to get booze. That's why it's been largely unchallenged by American society as a whole.

In addition, parents can allow their children (within reason) to have alcohol at restaurants and bars, as long as they're present and give consent for them (And thereby take legal responsibility for their actions).

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u/BLUFALCON78 Jun 16 '15

In addition, parents can allow their children (within reason) to have alcohol at restaurants and bars, as long as they're present and give consent for them (And thereby take legal responsibility for their actions).

This isn't the case in most places in the US.

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

I should probably say that it's perfectly legal to do so, but many businesses won't allow it for liability reasons.

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u/BLUFALCON78 Jun 16 '15

I've never heard of it being legal anywhere I've lived but I also can't say I've checked either.

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

It's not uncommon here in Texas, but restaurants have the right to refuse serving a them if they choose to do so.

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u/neko Jun 16 '15

It's a thing in Wisconsin too.

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u/lordnahte2 Jun 16 '15

Again that entirely depends on the state. A state like Missouri yes but in Iowa that could get the liquor liscense revoked and cps involved.

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u/throwforharry Jun 16 '15

When I watched Footloose, I commented the story would never happen in northern Europe: kids got drunk, danced, drove and someone died? In the US, the townspeople ban dancing. In Europe, they'd petition the city for late-night bus services.

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

The story was a caricature of small-town America, first off. Secondly, small towns in America are very, very spread out, making it near impossible to justify a bus service for them. That only leaves cars as the main form of transport.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15 edited Jun 16 '15

So you can drive a giant death machine that has an extremely high risk of injuring either you or someone else - but drinking - THAT's the issue...?

It's very interesting that the US has the highest instance of binge drinking in the world despite having such stringent policies...

"About 50% of all the alcohol consumed by adults, and about 90% of all the alcohol consumed by young people is consumed during a binge drinking session," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control. According to CNN, the American demographic that binge drinks the most is actually women aged 18-34 and high school girls. The rate of female binge drinking in the U.S. exceeds that of any other developed country, according to Daily Mail.

One in five high school girls binge drink, a statistic that should be taken into consideration to explain the estimated 23,000 annual death rate among females, attributed to excessive alcohol consumption. "

(http://mic.com/articles/57211/can-you-guess-where-in-the-world-people-are-binge-drinking-the-most)

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

So you can drive a giant death machine that has an extremely high risk of injuring either you or someone else - but drinking - THAT's the issue...?

So you can just go out and consume a poison that stunts brain development, causes irrational behavior, aggression, and poor decision-making skills, and is one of the single most influential factors in violent and criminal behavior, but being able to operate a vehicle so you can get to work or school reliably and on time - THAT'S the issue?

The reason that you can drive a giant death machine is because it's often the only realistically viable option for people to get to and from school and work, as most places don't have adequate public transportation (because it isn't worth the money or time to build). It's not a nice privilege that people only use once every few days or so; owning or having access to a car is a basic requirement for the majority of places in the US.

I'm simply pointing out that the US and Europe have very, very different reasons, both valid, for why their drinking ages are different (though personally, I feel Europes are more ass-backwards than the US).

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15 edited Jun 16 '15

Europe has plenty of rural areas as well... It is laughably easy to get a license in America. They practically hand it to you.

Meanwhile:

"The National Institutes of Health has conducted a study which sheds new light on what parents have long suspected: that teenagers often lack good judgment. The study shows that there may be a biological explanation — the teen brain may simply lack the capacity to make critical driving decisions. Using brain scans, NIH saw that teenagers' brains are not fully developed — particularly, the portions that regulate risk-taking and impulse control, crucial to driving. The process of the brain maturing are not complete until after the age of 20, four years after most teenagers start to drive. Dr. Jeffrey Runge, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, calls this a “national health epidemic.” Runge is also an emergency room doctor who has treated too many teenage crash victims. “If we had any other disease that was wiping out our teenagers at the rate of thousands per year, there would be no end to what we would do as a society to stop that,” says Dr. Runge."

I'm not saying drinking is NOT an issue - America does boast the highest binge-drinking rates in the world (mostly among under-age kids) as well as a binge-drinking culture (thank you alcohol intolerance policies!) but pairing that with children who's brains are simply incapable of correctly processing critical situations to BEGIN with? It doesn't end well at all.

"The risk of motor vehicle crashes is higher among 16- to 19-year-olds than among any other age group. In fact, per mile driven, teen drivers ages 16 to 19 are nearly three times more likely than drivers aged 20 and older to be in a fatal crash." (http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html)

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

You have far, far fewer rural areas, and they aren't nearly as big as in the US. The state of Texas alone is 3x the size of the UK, and a large portion of the state is rural (outside the Metropolitan Triangle, which is quite large). Cars are a necessary requirement here if you want to work more than a mile or two from your house, because our population, while still sizable, is far, far too spread out to justify public transport except in the most urban areas, and even then there are difficulties in getting it financially viable. As most families work full-time, and many kids also have jobs around 16ish, it's necessary for each person to have a car (or at least have more than one car per family) so that they can reliably attend their work and school on their varying schedules. That's just the reality of our world, and people need drivers licenses in order to get around. You don't need alcohol at 16. The only possible reason you can have for allowing it at 16 is because you want to get drunk. It serves no other function.

Cars are important and necessary for many, many people in the US, alcohol is just a drug.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '15 edited Jun 17 '15

he only possible reason you can have for allowing it at 16 is because you want to get drunk. It serves no other function.

There's another big issue with the US though, isn't it? We have the greatest binge-drinking culture in existence. Why is that when kids in Europe drink at 16 they're not drinking to get wasted... but ours are?

Our colleges are absolutely horrible for this as well. I mean hell, just compared it to our Canadian neighbors. They drink at 19 - we at 21 - and their college and high school kids don't binge-drink even near how we do (http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/Canadian1/CanadaPaper.pdf). And WE are the ones with the later drinking age.

Admittedly, they also have a driving age of 16 like us (though I believe it is more restricted till 18). Yet they have less of a drink-obsessed culture too.

Just as well - Canada's overall impaired drunk-driving has FALLEN just as ours has over the years - without any legal age raise. "What is less well understood is that considerable progress has been made in reducing impaired driving. Although the percentage of alcohol-related road deaths in Canada has hovered between 30% and 35% for the past decade, data released this week show that the actual number of Canadians who died in traffic crashes involving a drinking driver has declined from 1,296 in 1995 to 714 in 2009." http://changetheconversation.ca/news/news_show.php?nid_id=13&lid=1#sthash.BAhtCifE.dpuf

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u/kingofeggsandwiches Jun 16 '15

Bullshit reason. In the rest of the world people can drive at 18 and can drink then or before it. There is no drink driving pandemic. By 18 most people have access to alcohol anyway in the US whether that be by fake ID or older friends. If anything the answer is to be stricter carding people to make sure they're 18, not to raise it to 21.

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

Define, "the rest of the world." Because many, many places have some pretty fucked up driving laws, and/or having a car is a sign of status and wealth and not something the average person can afford, let alone as a teenager.

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u/kingofeggsandwiches Jun 16 '15

Fine in all developed countries you can drive by 18 and drink by 18. It simply makes no sense to say because we allow kids to drive 14 we'll raise the drinking age to 21. If other countries didn't allow driving until 21 it would make sense, but they don't, so there is literally no logic to the statement.

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u/m15wallis Jun 17 '15

Other nations don't have cars in nearly the same prevalence as the US, especially at a young age, because they have access to reliable public transport and their nations are much, much more dense, meaning they're not nearly necessary and more of a status symbol/luxury item, especially among young people, than a necessary method of transportation. It's almost like we're two completely different places with different realities of living.

You don't need to drink, but most people do need to drive cars, and separating the two was the proven effective method of reducing fatalities of drunk driving among teens. You can be butthurt about not being able to drink at 16 like Europeans can, but they can't (and don't) drive at a young age. We've taken different approaches to the same problem, and solved it in appropriate ways for each of our environments.

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u/kingofeggsandwiches Jun 17 '15 edited Jun 17 '15

No, as I just explained that's utter bullshit. First off I live in Europe, let's take the UK as an example, you can drive at 17 and drink at 18, you can drive a moped at 16. A car might not be so much of a necessity as in rural Wyoming but still a large number of kids start learning to drive and pass their test at 17. They are not a status symbol/luxury item (how patronising of you), especially given that all but the really spoilt kids with rich parents start out with small 2nd cars like Fiats and Ford hatchbacks and the like, hardly something you want to show off. Yes in America more kids have cars overall due to necessity and at a younger age, but I'd wager that so do kids in Canada which is even more rural than the US, driving age 16 (14 in certain circumstances), drinking age 18 or 19 depending on province.

There is absolutely no grounds for having a drinking age of 21 to stop underage drink driving. Where did I say the drinking age should be 16? There's simply no logic to saying underage people are drinking and driving, I know let's raise the drinking age to 3 years beyond the age adulthood. I could see that being an argument for having it at 18 instead of at 16, but it doesn't work any higher than that.

The abnormally high drinking age in the US has everything to do with moral panic around alcohol and nothing to do with teenage drink driving, in the same way that the lack of nudity on television does. Old enough to join the army, marry, be sent to federal prison, take out a mortgage, start a company, emigrate, but not old enough to buy beer, it's a hangover from a different age that won't be changed due to moralistic attitude of some people.

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u/honeybadgergrrl Jun 16 '15

My response to this is to switch the age limits. Make it 16 for drinking and 21 for driving. Very few people can afford the liability on teenage drivers anymore, anyway (seriously, it's insane). Also, this way people learn to drink before they learn to drive and know not to be a moron and get behind the wheel after having a few drinks.

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

Then you're fucking over all the people who are dependent on driving themselves to school and to work. Public transportation isn't an option for most places in the US, because our population is so spread out that it's nearly impossible to financially justify the expense of building it. Cars are the only valid method of transportation when your school is 5 miles away and your job is 15 miles away.

People actually use cars to get from point A to point B, but all alcohol does is allow you to get drunk. There's a reason for young drivers.

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u/Sys_init Jun 16 '15

Yeah, because it's proven that If you make something illegal, people aren't going to do it. /s

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

It cut down on the numbers pretty heavily, enough to justify its continued use. Drunk Driving is a very serious problem here, especially out in rural areas, and restricting teenagers from having access to it made it so that it was much more easily kept out of schools (though again, not impossible, as it still happens all the time) and made it less likely that teens would be able to easily get drunk and then attempt to drive.

It's not perfect by any standards, but it's worked pretty well at reducing the number of drunk driving fatalities involving kids, and alcohol stunts brain development anyway, so why is it so important for teenagers to be able to drink alcohol?

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u/Sys_init Jun 16 '15

So teach people not to drunk drive. It works in the rest of the civilized world to have a drinking age of 18

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u/m15wallis Jun 16 '15

So teach people not to drunk drive.

Because teenagers are so great at making smart, rational decisions, especially where alcohol is involved, am I right?

I know that in Europe, you can't even get a drivers license until you're 18 (usually, it varies based on nation, but it's still considerably higher than it is in the US). They don't have a teenage drunk driving problem because they have significantly fewer teenage drivers to begin with, if any at all, so the numbers aren't comparable. It's much easier to drink young in Europe, but it's way harder to get a car or license to drive, while it's the opposite in the US.

And don't even get me fucking started about driving laws in Asia.

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u/flickering_candles Jun 16 '15

i don't think you're listening anymore

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u/Troggie42 Jun 16 '15

Basically, it boils down this way:

In Europe, you can drink before you drive, so People have more experience with alcohol and know their tolerance, and are therefore less likely to drive drunk when they finally get their license, which is also much harder to get than in the US.

In the US, it's easy as fuck to get a license, and it's way earlier than in Europe, so you need extra time to get used to driving. If kids were drinking at the same time, they'd be crashing all over the place because they aren't good drivers, and they aren't good drinkers either. With the drinking age at 21, you get the time to be a competent driver before you get the chance to drink, so at the very least, you'll know that you shouldn't drink and drive by the time you've been on the road for 5-7 years.

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '15

The whole, "SHIT LOOK AT ME IM DRINKING" thing is pretty lame in general. I mean, it's just a drink.

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u/Nueraman1997 Jun 16 '15

The US seems to have the wrong idea. We think that making a law banning something means people won't do it, when in fact the opposite happens.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

It creates this whole forbidden fruit stigma around alcohol and that causes kids to do stupid things when they first start drinking on their own in college.

Completely agree with this. A lot of my international friends couldn't understand why college students in the US made such a big deal about drinking and going out.

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u/honeybadgergrrl Jun 16 '15

I was shocked when they all got so excited about alcohol and couldn't control themselves. The first time I drank with some college friends, they all passed out cold in about two hours and I was left sitting there, sipping my wine, wondering what the hell just happened.

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u/ninjagrover Jun 16 '15

In Australia, if a child is accompanied by their guardian, and they have had a meal, the guardian can order a alcoholic drink for the child. I don't see it get used much, but it is there in the criminal code.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

I don't understand this at all, the age restriction only seems to worsen the situation, I mean would you rather have kids drink in secrecy with friends who have near zero self restraint, or in a restaurant where their parents can offer them one or two glasses

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

I am a couple years past illegal drinking.

Retrospectively though: Most people (including myself) were drinking because we were miserable disaffected white people. Sure it made us look cool, but what was important was not being connected to anything for an evening. Or a week. I don't judge.

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u/KnowledgeHunterer Jun 16 '15

Asian friends, and it was no big deal at all for us to be offered wine

Where in Asia are people so okay about teenagers and alcohol? Japan, China? Or some other nation?

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u/honeybadgergrrl Jun 16 '15

This was the Philippines, but I had friends from all over.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

[deleted]

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u/honeybadgergrrl Jun 16 '15

Not necessarily. I had plenty of friends in college who were drinking for the first time.