Blurring out VK’s won’t stop us drinking them

The humble VK. The iconic symbol of a night in a Student Union. For Fresher’s drinking too many and then doing something you’ll regret the next morning is a rite of passage. Yet this week saw Leeds University Student Union night Fruity take the bizarre step to blur out images of VK’s from club photos, and no one really knows why.

A spokesperson for the Union told The Tab, “We have policy in place to promote responsible drinking and therefore we prefer not to use images that show alcohol consumption and brands. Removing part of the bottles was an odd editing choice made by our photographer and we agree it doesn’t look great!”

The disappearing VK trick

Is this a further stop to protect students from themselves?

Okay we get that you have to promote responsible drinking but lets be honest here, a photographer’s decision to blur out any resemblance to an alcopop will do little to stop drinking. It’s not necessarily the photographer to blame for this, he was probably confused by the many rules the Union has over such advertising and probably feared that breaking them could cost him.

If he was confused then that shouldn’t be a surprise, on the one hand the union has a policy not to promote alcohol brands yet it chooses to do it anyway through it’s promotional materials for the night in question. Now that’s the Union going against it’s own apparent policy, which it has been doing for years now.

A policy against alcohol brands, but you advertise them?

The Union has already taken steps to curb the irresponsible drinking of VK’s, they already don’t let you take a straw with one so you can’t strawpedo it. However it could easily be argued that the Union encourages it, the main reason why everyone loves Fruity so much is because it’s cheap. Cheap drinks encourage excessive drinking by their very nature, although I’m definitely not advocating raising the prices of drinks in the Union. They’re already suffering from price increases, potentially because of certain political events (but let’s not get into that).

I don’t want to appear to be advocating irresponsible drinking, that is not my intention. There are however better ways to promote responsible drinking than the pathetic attempt to blur out alcopops.

So next time you get your club photo, hold your VK with pride. Stand up to the system.

The VK is the Holy Grail of student life and should be treated as such.