“Are the girls trying to keep up with the boys?” asks Edith Sullivan, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “Quantity and frequency can be a killer for novice drinkers. Adding alcohol to the mix of the developing brain will likely complicate the normal developmental trajectory. Long after a young person recovers from a hangover, risk to cognitive and brain functions endures.”
Sullivan, who has done a lot of work with the brain structure of alcoholics, is certain that what is known as “telescoping” is real: “As they develop alcoholism, women seem to develop dependence sooner than men. Drink for drink, it is worse for females.”
“It is the issue affecting girls’ health—and it’s going sideways, especially for those thirteen to fifteen.” This is the voice of Nancy Poole, director of research and knowledge translation at the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health. “And the saddest thing,” says Poole, “is alcohol is being marketed as girls’ liberation.”
Perhaps we’re told too many fairy tales when we’re children. From the time we’re very young, we’re drip-fed popular culture’s notions of what will bring us happiness: being thin, being beautiful, being sexy—all these, we are told, will lead to love and success and acceptance. We already know that unrealistic images of slimness have damaged a generation. Now the alcohol industry is conspiring to drip-feed us the notion that cocktails will deliver us happy endings, rescuing us from the great modern scourges of loneliness, exhaustion, and boredom.
We need a wake-up call. For now, the first job must be jump-starting a dialogue, a fact-sharing mission. Three years ago, when I won a journalism fellowship to investigate the issue of women and alcohol, I was invited to describe my project at a media night at the University of Toronto. “I can only presume that Ann will be taking a look at First Nations women,” said the worldly man introducing me. His intentions were good, but his comment was off the mark.
Last June, I had what looked to be a golden opportunity to pose some questions to Gloria Steinem. The event: a fortieth birthday party for Ms. magazine. I waited in line for my chance, but my audience was short. “Alcohol?” Steinem looked dismissive. “Alcohol is not a women’s issue.”
Perhaps not in the past—but times have changed. Whether it’s a matter of escape, empowerment, or entitlement, alcohol has become a women’s issue. When it comes to risk, environment and policy are key drivers of our behavior. For now, our only choice is to take a hard look at both, and face the facts. The alcohol business, like the tobacco business beforehand, has taken aim at the female market, and scored. Risky drinking has become normalized, and not all young women will mature out of it. In fact, many—like myself—may mature into it.
Here are the questions we need to be asking. Has alcohol become the modern woman’s steroid, enabling her to do the heavy lifting necessary in an endlessly complex world? Is it the escape valve women need, in the midst of a major social revolution still unfolding? How much of this is marketing, and how much is the need to numb?
As a culture, we’re living in major denial. It’s time for an adult conversation. It’s time for the dialogue to begin.
THE ALCOHOL INDUSTRY TAKES AIM AT THE FEMALE CONSUMER
Ingredients in Bitch Fuel: vodka, gin, rum, peach schnapps, and lemon-lime soda.
—SERVED AT RULLOFF’S, ITHACA, NEW YORK
For me, drinking was always deeply sensual. From the very beginning, I loved it all. The sound of a cork sliding from the neck of a bottle, the glug-glug-glug of the first glass being poured, the tingle on the tongue, and the feeling of my shoulders relaxing as the universe seemed to say: unwind.
I loved the peaty earthiness of Irish whiskey under moonlight, the sharp nip of Pinot Grigio at day’s end. I have a particularly fond memory of sipping scotch in the Oak Bar of the Plaza hotel in New York on a snowy evening with Jake. Another: drinking a flute of champagne in the lobby bar of the One Aldwych hotel in London. More than once I sat in a Boston Whaler at sunset, dressed in lumberjack plaid, toasting the beauty of a day’s end, supremely happy as the world evolved as it should.
It is no coincidence that my favorite drinking memoir is the late Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story—a book I read and reread as my own drinking escalated. Wrote Knapp: “For a long time, when it’s working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.”
For more than two decades, I more or less forgot that this substance—let’s name it by its clinical name, ethanol—had caused me endless sorrow and heartache in my younger years. For years, I rarely abused the privilege of drinking—and yes, I saw it as a privilege. And when my drinking caught up with me, I was as surprised and sorry as anybody could possibly be. I had promised myself I would never be outfoxed by drink.
I loved Knapp’s book for many reasons, but one of the most practical was the little questionnaire halfway through the book, the twenty-six questions put together by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence to help you decide whether you’re in trouble. Knapp published her own answers, which I always thought was exceptionally generous—I felt such solidarity with her when I saw her answering “yes” to such tough questions as “Have you often failed to keep the promises you have made to yourself about controlling or cutting down on your drinking?” and “Have you tried switching brands or following different plans for controlling your drinking?” Most of all, I liked that she included the following helpful tip: if you answer yes to questions one through eight, you are in the early stages of alcoholism, which typically lasts ten to fifteen years; if you answer yes to nine through twenty-one, you are in the middle stages of alcoholism, which typically lasts two to five years. I have a dog-eared, annotated copy of her book, with my own answers marked in the margins—the early stages in 2002, and the middle stages up until my sobriety date in 2008. I am eternally grateful that I didn’t make it to the third and final stage, where the questions run this way: “Sometimes after periods of drinking, do you see or hear things that aren’t there?” and “Do you sometimes stay drunk for several days at a time?”
I often turned to the questionnaire in Montreal, and near the end of my stay, to the underlined portion of page 33 in my copy of the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous: “To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink for a long time nor take the quantities some of us have. This is particularly true of women. Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years.”
New sobriety is a fingernail-on-the-blackboard experience: many things can set you off. Restaurants walled in wine, movies with up-close-and-personal drinking shots, driving by your favorite liquor store. Billboards. Magazine ads. Just about anything. Alcohol jumps out of cupboards, into your line of vision: it has no end of tricks. You reach for ice in a friend’s freezer, and there it is: a Tanqueray bottle, chilling for cocktails, taunting you.
In my case, one thing bothered me more than most.