Kate's Public Writing Paper

There’s drunk and then there’s dangerously drunk.

On Second Street in Harrisburg I have seen:

• girls puking in bar bathrooms
• hooking up with guys in restaurant coat closets
• older women dancing with 20-year-old men

But I never imagined that girls would be falling from buildings. Sometimes when I go out with my friends in downtown Harrisburg, I feel like I am in some parallel universe where girls think they can do anything after the perfectly mixed drink.

I remember the first time I saw one of the cages at Eclipse and thought “Aren’t those for strippers?” But no, they are for the average partying woman, even the occasional underage girl on special nights. But no men allowed in the cages. So even when I was in high school, women were already being told that it’s okay to be wild and crazy. Go ahead and jump up in that cage and dance up next to four other girls. The men will just sit back and watch.

For guys, the Hardware bar is like something out of a dream with the scantily clad girls serving you all night long, taking breaks to shake it on the bar, and then pulling you up to pour shots down your mouth just in case you weren’t drunk enough. One expects to see these exact images of the girls when you walk into that type of a bar, they are given ready-made identities as super sexy girls who only get super sexy by shaking it for the boys and consuming alcohol.

And the average girls on the floor watch these symbols of sex and confidence all rolled into one nice little package, and start to shake their hips a little faster, raise their voices a little louder, and drink a little faster. Then they stumble out onto the streets and look for some way to prove that they too can be wild and crazy. Just walk next door and into a new bar, and there’s a whole new crowd of young people to impress.

The frame that exists in the party scene of downtown Harrisburg is vastly different from the frame that exists in the safety of home. When my mom heard about the young girl who jumped from the building, her first intuition was to imagine that it was me. But she knows me and knew that I would never do something so dangerous. However, the parents of both of the girls reacted in a way that suggested they never believed that their daughters would engage in such risky behavior. Therefore, the way that the girls acted around their parents must have been more reserved, and the way they acted around their friends was influenced by peer pressure.

While most of us would never consider mixing tall buildings and alcohol, it’s a different world downtown than it is in the safety of home. Somehow girls need to find a way to be sexy, fun, and confident without the binge drinking induced stunts.