The New Pariahs : Drinking Drivers, Smokers and Swingers Targeted in Sudden Turnaround of Attitudes

If he chose to be so crass, his bedpost would be ragged with notches. Among a certain circle of women he’s known as “Marathon Man.” Lots of them love him. And that’s the problem.

As one of his recent love interests pointed out: “Any woman in her right mind would be afraid of this guy. . . . It’s bad enough that I slept with him six years ago. I wouldn’t do it again if he were the last person on earth.”

In the last few months, she added, “every single woman I know has been running through her list.” And the skillful seducers at the top of the charts are getting scratched off quicker than you can say: “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

Hot on the heels of the Me decade, the 1980s held promise as an age of giddy abandon. But “Saturday Night Fever” has new connotations now. And the studs and femmes fatales aren’t the only folks whose habits--once tolerated, even glamorized--are now increasingly scorned. Almost overnight, it seems, smokers, drinking drivers and sexual adventurers have become social pariahs.

Change Quite Sudden

Attitudes have changed far faster than most sociologists ever figured possible--in the views of those who see themselves as sudden outcasts, “behavior fascists” have abruptly imposed “life-style apartheid.” But how?

After all, the modern war on cigarettes has been escalating since the surgeon general’s 1964 report on smoking and cancer. America has had its crusaders against the evils of demon rum since the Colonies were established, and preachers have railed against casual sex for at least a couple thousand years.

Attitudes appear to have shifted most abruptly when crusaders stopped focusing on protecting people from themselves--and took up the theme that they were also hurting others.

Anti-smoking forces, for instance, scored many of their most decisive victories in the last few years, when the issue changed from smoking per se, to concern about secondhand smoke and health costs; the campaign against alcohol abuse has been on a roll since Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s first passionate warning that drunks are killing us and our kids, and so-called promiscuity has declined most substantially only since AIDS transformed philanderers into potential assassins.

“There’s no question that some smokers are feeling like social pariahs,” said John F. Banzhaf III, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).

Anti-Smoking Push

Banzhaf is in a good position to assess the shift in public attitudes toward smokers. Twenty years ago, he was instrumental in securing equal time for the first anti-smoking messages on television. Such public education has brought about gradual changes in attitudes in the last two decades, he believes.

But he thinks change has accelerated as non-smokers have become more disgruntled. “The attitude the public has toward the behavior is often more important than health factors,” he said. “Why do people go on diets? Not to live longer, but because fat is out, thin is in.”

In his 1981 book “The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking, Driving and the Symbolic Order,” Joseph Gusfield, professor of sociology at UC San Diego, concluded that society’s concern with drunk driving was largely symbolic and that the public remained unwilling to view drunk drivers as criminals.

Recently, however, Gusfield has modified his opinion. In part because of the “enormously greater amount of attention” paid to drunk driving in the last several years, Gusfield now suspects that social mores may have changed more rapidly than he had previously thought possible.

In terms of sexual mores, the “earthshaking phenomena” of AIDS (and herpes before that) has abruptly cut off the casual encounter, said Neil Smelser, professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. Giving the cold shoulder to potential partners who might be at risk is “just rational behavior on the part of people who are frightened,” he said.

Smokers

“People in this country are trying to be holier than thou,” said designer Neil Stewart, 36, as he sipped red wine and stared across the smoke-filled bar at the Gingerman Restaurant in Beverly Hills. “It reminds me of the school ground. There’s always a ‘Fatty,’ and he’s doomed.

“American culture wants to categorize everyone: ‘We don’t smoke so you shouldn’t.’ . . . There are more people in America trying to make money off (changing) people’s bad habits than anywhere in the world,” Stewart added.

Robert Rosner is one of those people. “1984 was a good year for me because I got called Big Brother a lot,” said Rosner, who is executive director of the Smoking Policy Institute, a Seattle nonprofit organization that helps businesses implement policies restricting smoking in the workplace. “I’d get asked, ‘It’s 1984. What’s next? Coffee? Additives? Sugar?”

Rosner said he doesn’t personally care whether people smoke. But, he added, “The issue is that people should not smoke if they share an airspace. . . . It’s the difference between trying to run someone’s life and concern about your own.”

There’s little doubt that Americans have become concerned.

Last year, two out of three Americans believed that smoking indoors was harmful to non-smokers and nine of 10 favored no-smoking sections in public places, according to a poll conducted for the American Cancer Society and the American Heart and Lung associations.

And last month, the House voted to ban smoking on all airline flights of two hours or less. Ten states and 260 communities now have laws restricting smoking in public places, and 30% of the nation’s corporations limit employees’ smoking on the job, according to Business Week.

As for why employers seem increasingly to view smokers as pariahs, Banzhaf of ASH pointed out that it’s a matter of economics. He cited estimates that the health costs to a company can be as much as $5,000 per smoking employee.

Snowball Effect

Naturally there’s a snowball effect to all this. As fewer people smoke, psychologists say, it becomes less socially acceptable to do so and easier to implement anti-smoking regulations--and that compels others to abandon the habit.

“When one interviews smokers who want to quit, what we see now is people saying things like: ‘I’m aware that people look down on smokers,’ ” said Jan Hitchcock a psychologist with Harvard University’s Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy. “. . .They’re worried about what other people think. They feel besieged and beleaguered.”

Advertising and image are also tied up in determining which habits are happening and which are declasse . Thirty-two percent of the adult population smokes (as compared with 42% 20 years ago) but that figure is now much more heavily weighted toward the blue-collar worker and the poor, Business Week reports. And that may be increasing the spiral of aversion.

“People in higher socioeconomic classes are not smoking as much, so people who aspire to higher classes are not smoking as much,” Hitchcock said.

Drinking Drivers

Thirty-five-year-old Dennis Jewell knows as much as anyone about changing attitudes toward certain types of alcohol-related behavior. “I don’t think it ever sunk home that (drunk driving) is a serious crime,” Jewell said in an interview last spring at California State Institution for Men in Chino, where he awaited transfer to another prison to serve out a sentence of 77 years-to-life for killing five in a family in a collision--the stiffest drunk driving-related sentence in California history.

Cultural mores on intoxication in general began changing with the health and nutrition movements of the ‘70s, specialists say. “Increasingly in the business world and in social situations, becoming intoxicated, becoming the clown, is less accepted than it used to be,” said Jim Mosher, associate director of alcohol policy for the Trauma Foundation at San Francisco General Hospital. Shifting attitudes are also reflected in recent policies at sports stadiums cutting off beer sales or reserving areas for non-drinkers, Mosher said.

But the battle against drunk driving, launched by Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980, is the most heated front in a war being waged by a loosely knit coalition of groups concerned with the broader issues of alcoholism and public health.

478 New Laws

At least 478 laws related to highway safety and alcohol were passed by state legislatures between 1981 and 1985, according to the National Commission against Drunk Drivers. As of last year, 43 states had adopted laws making 21 the legal drinking age, while 42 states have minimum imprisonment provisions for second-offender drunk drivers and 17 have such provisions for first offenders, MADD reports.

But attitudes and behavior are distinctly different, and sociologists point out that statistics on drinking in general show only a gradual decline and that those on drunk driving are open to interpretation.

“Cultural change is (usually) slow, but we’re seeing some interesting things currently,” said Thomas Lasswell, a professor of sociology at USC.

By some indications, attitude changes have been greatest among younger people. On college campuses, the term “designated driver” has achieved a prominent place in party vernacular; flyers for parties often carry the acronym “EAABs”(Equally Attractive Alternative Beverages), and many fraternities and sororities now sponsor “dry rushes.”

From such well-orchestrated peer pressure is the new pariah born. Earlier this year, a UCLA student at the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity admitted in an interview that he had driven after drinking, “because I spent all my money on drinks and didn’t have enough for a taxi.”

“You’re a dirt bag,” an eavesdropping frat brother said.

“If someone’s drinking these days, they have some fear about what’s going to happen,” said Lawrence Wallack, assistant professor of health education at UC Berkeley, who has been doing alcohol-related research for 14 years. But Wallack argues that whatever drift there is toward ostracizing drunk drivers is being counteracted by such things as television commercials that bombard young viewers with shots of race cars roaring about as beer jingles blare, or of men professing their lust for “fast cars, fast women and good beer--not necessarily in that order.”

The Promiscuous

It’s the premier sexual cliche of the mid-’80s: “You’re not just sleeping with her (or him) you’re sleeping with everyone she (or he) has slept with in the last seven years.”

AIDS now surpasses cancer as the most feared disease in the Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas, according to a Los Angeles Times poll last month--and nearly one in five of those polled said they’ve made major changes in their lives accordingly.

Eighty percent of college women and 65% of college men report they have become more selective choosing sexual partners, according to a poll reported in the current issue of Glamour magazine. Fear of sexually transmitted diseases has led 75% of singles to avoid casual sexual encounters such as one-night stands, and 36% said they are abstaining from sex with new partners altogether, according to another poll, released in July by Abbott Laboratories.

In an age when “lots of lovers” translates into “multiple exposures,” some experts contend that the attitude change reflects an existing drift toward conservatism in general--that America is once again embracing premarital chastity and marital monogamy. Others doubt that the apparent trend signifies a return to a Victorian morality. For one thing, lust has always tempted folks to lie.

Equilibrium Sought

Also, “after any period of license in any culture, there’s always a swing back (until) a culture reaches a state of equilibrium,” said UCLA social anthropologist Alexander Moore. “The time of sexual license occured for good technological reasons--we had convenient contraceptives and the control of venereal disease. I’m not at all sure that the movement for sexual license has spent itself. . . . There are still a lot of people in this country rebelling against sexual puritanism.”

“The person who will become the pariah is the person who’s careless. Not the one who has frequent partner changes . . . ,” said Ira Reiss, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and author of a number of books on sex including “Journey Into Sexuality” in 1986.

“It’s likely we’re going to become more pragmatic. That’s quite different from saying we’ll have a dramatic change in behavior back to the conservatism of the ‘50s. It’s much easier to get people to pursue pleasure than to deny it.”