Women and alcohol

More women are drinking, and the women who drink are drinking more, in some cases matching their male peers. This is the kind of inequality nobody was fighting for. Alex Morris explores this in Gender Bender.

“You just adjust what you’re saying,” ... “Sometimes I’m like, I’m an alcoholic. Sometimes I’m like, I just drink a lot. Workaholic. Alcoholic. Workaholic. Alcoholic. How do you know if you have a problem?” She takes a sip and shrugs.

I don't have anything against women that drink. I fall into the demographic of women that drink and drink often. I barely drank in high school or college. I started drinking in my mid 20s and my tolerance has grown since then.

I started drinking as a way to socialize both in and out of the workplace after college. When I began to work long hours in a high pressure male-dominated environment, I started to drink more.

I drank in part because I was overworked and overstressed. When I'm short on personal time, I tend to party harder to compensate for my lack of free time. I loved the rush of working under intense pressure, drinking and partying until I was so tired my eyes couldn't stay open, forcing myself to get up after 3 hours of sleep, still hung over, only to repeat the process. Being that busy and exhausted allowed me to avoid thinking about how I didn't have a life besides work. I didn't have to reflect on whether I was "happy." The rush of always being on the go, of always being under pressure, of always being extremely busy, of always having yet another crisis to solve was addictive. I loved the sudden clearheadedness and certainty I had for every decision I made. It helped me feel like I (and my job) made a difference in the world.

Then again, I'm always at my best in emergencies and under extreme pressure. The more I'm overscheduled and stressed, the more I want to take on more both professionally and personally. If I worked 14 hour days, I'd start training for a marathon. If I worked 12 hour days and was training for a marathon, I'd start volunteering at a local elementary school once a week. If I worked 12 hour days, was training for a marathon, was already volunteering at an elementary school, I'd start swimming every other day just to see how far I could push my body. See the pattern? People (me) with personalities to tolerate extremes are attracted to jobs that demand those extremes. Short of doing drugs, which I have neither the interest or aptitude for, drinking heavily was the fastest and most socially acceptable way to burn the candle at both ends.

Then, there was the matter of gender and environment. In a male dominated environment, drinking was sometimes the only thing I had in common with my male counterparts. I had no interest in sport spreads, gambling or golf, and my co-workers could care less about windsurfing, sustainable agricultural practices or the latest Barbara Bui collection. So, we drank because that was the one way we could all show how big our BSDs were. Sometimes, I won. Sometimes, they won.

While the reasons I started drinking are similar to some of the reasons women drink in Morris' article, I wouldn't have kept drinking if I didn't like it. Fortunately for my liver, I no longer drink for any other reason than because I want to, and I try not to drink to excess. As Morris points out, there's nothing wrong with women that drink. It's just notable and somewhat unfortunate that women feel they need to drink in order to fit in with their male counterparts.

However, even without the pressure of fitting in with male counterparts, women have started drinking as much if not even more than males. Statistics have shown an increase of women that binge drink, which is unhealthy. But, while it's true that binge drinking isn't good for you, the general American definition of binge drinking for women is 4 or more alcoholic drinks in a row. Four (or more) drinks in a row seems like a normal night out with the girls, so perhaps I'm proving Morris' point. Which probably also explains why I don't think increased number of women drinkers is a big deal, although I do find Morris' article interesting.

Excerpts I found interesting:

That more women are drinking, yes—more than 48 percent acknowledge having had at least one drink in the past month (up from 42 percent in 1992). But beyond that, the women who drink are drinking more. The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined. At the same time, men are reining in their drinking, meaning that the gender gap of alcohol consumption is narrowing all the time.

“As women ‘immigrated’ into the culture that was once unique to men...they picked up a lot of the same mores and attitudes and behaviors and ideas about what is socially acceptable that men had previously held. We call this acculturation—people adopt the drinking attitude and behaviors of the dominant culture.” Which explains why researchers have found that women in the demographic closest to being dominant (young, white, middle-class, educated) are leading the charge in terms of increased alcohol consumption.

The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

The rate of frequent binge drinking increased by 124 percent between 1993 and 2001 at all-female colleges. When Amstel Light began marketing directly to women, its sales volume reportedly went up by 13 percent. Suddenly, alcohol commercials weren’t just of the big-breasted, mud-wrestling lineage. A Dewar’s ad from the era showed a lovely young woman donning her work clothes while a bare-chested man slept in the bed beside her. Tagline: “You finally have a real job, a real place, and a real boyfriend. How about a real drink?”

...Alcohol ads appeared during thirteen to fifteen of the most popular shows among teenagers and increasingly in women’s magazines, where according to Jernigan, in 2002 girls 12 to 20 saw 95 percent more ads for alcopops than women 21 and above. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors. “How many guys are going to drink a strawberry vodka?...There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.”

Drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated... You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.

But the paradox of a woman exerting her power by making herself, to one degree or another, incapacitated does not read as a disjunction to most of the women I spoke with. On the contrary, a woman’s control over her life—and the decision of when and how to lose that control—seems to be the point.