Confidence is a wet T-shirt

One word I heard again and again, oddly, was "confidence." As they psyched themselves up for wet T-shirt contests or debated whether a given guy was worth flirting with, a lot of women told me that they saw spring break as the proving ground for their attractiveness. "If I can be considered hot here, I'll be hot anywhere," a rather morose woman sitting on a bar stool in a bikini and high heels told me. "I'm here to get confident."

That's sad, but it's not exactly irrational given the context (no one was there, after all, to participate in a chess tournament). But the more women I talked to, the more it became clear that hotness was, for them, the largest factor in the equation of their self-worth. When they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives, they spoke not of jobs or grad school but of looking good, of having the right equipment and experience to ensure a place in the raunch-obsessed pop culture they'd come to see as the real world.

And why not? These days, miniskirts the size of cocktail napkins are considered appropriate mall attire for 14-year-olds. Local newscasters seem to regard see-through shirts as proper on-air attire. And illiteracy appears to have spread to the point at which parents can put a T-shirt on a 2-year-old without noticing that the words "Future Hooters Girl" are printed across the front. With girl power like that, can we really blame these women for seeing their sexuality as their only currency?

Of course, despite the fact that an estimated 170,000 kids are expected to descend on Cancun this season, there are many more who have better things to do than pass out on the beer-stained floor of Congo Bongo. But every March, when the spring drinking statistics get trotted out like so many vodka shots lined up on a bar, I'm reminded of how much they reveal about everyday life. Revelers may tell themselves that whatever happens in Cancun stays in Cancun, but in some ways, the party never ends.

I'm feeling less confident already.

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mdaum@latimescolumnists.com