Women... think before you drink
Ladies! Hard day? Have a drink. Great day? Have a drink. Going out? Have a drink. Staying in? Have a drink. Feeling good / bad / tired / bored? Have a drink.
This week a conference in Dublin looked at women and booze — and how we now drink as much as men, and sometimes more.
Girls, Women and Alcohol: The Changing Nature Of Female Alcohol Consumption In Ireland was told that since 1995, teenage girls are out-boozing boys, and the seminer also examined the overall rise in female drinking, and how it impacts on our minds and bodies.
According to Alcohol Action Ireland, four out of 10 women report harmful drinking patterns — meaning their drinking is already harming their physical and / or mental health.
Between 1995 and 2004, there was a 29% increase in teenage girls being admitted to hospital for alcohol-related conditions, compared with a 9% increase in teenage boys.
Middle-aged women are developing alcohol-related ill health and dying more prematurely than their male counterparts, with professional women drinking significantly more than non-professionals.
“In recent decades, Irish women, particularly younger women, have begun to drink more alcohol, more often,” says Suzanne Costello, CEO of Alcohol Action Ireland.
“The shift we have seen in the nature of women’s drinking in Ireland has been influenced by a number of factors, but the main one is undoubtedly how heavily targeted they have become by alcohol marketing and advertising, including the development of many products — often high in alcohol content – specifically for the ‘female market’.”
These facts are here not to induce shame, guilt or fear at an individual level, but to look at the steady growth in the female alcohol market, and how it is affecting our health and well being. Around 57% of Irish women binge drink, followed by 33% of British women, making us Europe’s biggest bingers [source: University College London 2006].
Alcohol is marketed to women as glamorous, sophisticated, feminine, sexy, often placed alongside lipstick, handbags and shoes. “A shot of tequila has just 65 calories,” trills a feature in Woman magazine. “Malt whisky is one of the healthier spirits at just 72 calories.” Forget your liver, just don’t get fat.
“The ‘pinking’ of the market began in the 1990s,” Ann Dowsett Johnston tells me. She is the Canadian best-selling author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, and was a speaker at the conference.
In profit and marketing terms, she says of the alcohol industry that: “There was an entire gender underperforming. The invention of alcopops was aimed to steer teenage girls away from beer towards spirits. The profits of Smirnoff went up. Today in Canada and the US, there is Cupcake Wine, Girls’ Night Out wine, MommyJuice wine, berry flavoured vodkas. These are not marketed at men.”
The infantilised alcoholic drinks are next generation Babycham — traditionally a woman’s drink, like cream liqueurs or a small sherry — with social equality, this has changed.
“Socially, we are equal, but metabolically and hormonally we are not,” continues Johnston. “There has been an overall 30% increase in liver disease in the past decade, and 15% of all breast cancers are linked to alcohol consumption.
“But alcohol is our favourite drug and we don’t want to look at that. This is a public health crisis, yet we have very fuzzy values around women and drinking. You can keep your masculinity and have too much to drink — but not your femininity.”
Johnston says that in terms of social acceptability around drinking, the pecking order is highly defined: at the top end are men, followed by women, mothers, poor mothers, and pregnant women. Conflicting reports around ‘safe’ levels of drinking during pregnancy adds to the overall blurriness, (80% of Irish women drink during pregnancy— the highest rate internationally. I was one of them).
Men drink in groups, openly and socially, while — raucous hen nights aside — women tend to drink more in isolation — the glass of wine at home. But why do we drink so much these days?
Three reasons, says Johnston. “First, there is heavy pitching of alcohol to women. Second, it’s the modern woman’s steroid, enabling her to do the heavy lifting. We come home from work, and we start another day’s work. Emancipation has resulted in complex lives.” In other words, women do a double shift at work and at home , and wine makes it easier / more pleasant / takes the edge off / acts as a reward. Or as the book Great Lies To Tell Small Kids puts it, “Wine makes mummy clever”.
“And thirdly,” says Johnston, “We use alcohol to self-medicate. It’s a lot easier to pop a cork than to seek help for depression and anxiety — which we are more prone to suffer from than men. Alcohol is too cheap, too accessible, and too heavily marketed.”
Johnston’s book is sold in the US as Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, but in the UK and Ireland as Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol.
This is not mere semantics. “We need a public health dialogue about women and drinking,” she says. “We need to know that low risk drinking is 10-11 units a week, with at least one night off.”
That’s 10-11 measured units, and not all at the same time either. When I used to drink, 10-11 units would have been the equivalent of a snack, a few drinks before I ever went out.
When I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, the doctor suggested it might be connected with my drinking, but I still celebrated my survival with champagne and carried on. Madness? Stupidity? Death wish? No. Alcoholism. (I eventually stopped drinking for good almost a decade ago, and with the ongoing input of 12-step recovery, discovered life was miles more fun without it — who knew?)
Another conference speaker, Lucy Rocca, is the founder of Soberistas, a social media site which offers an online forum for alcohol-dependent women to connect and support each other. Lucy stopped drinking at 35 — she dislikes the term ‘alcoholic’, and 12 Step recovery didn’t appeal, yet four years on she remains sober.
“I didn’t want to define myself as alcoholic despite blackouts and not being able to stop once I had started,” she tells me. “It’s a negative word, and I wanted to reframe my attitude to alcohol to one of pride, not shame.”
She mentions a book by Jason Vale, How To Kick Drink, which states that there is no such thing as an alcoholic or alcoholism. “It changed my life,” she says.
Although Soberistas was originally designed for women to share their alcohol-related experiences anonymously — thereby providing support and identification not dissimilar to 12 Step recovery — these days 25% of its users are men.
Rocca has also written several books about alcohol dependency. She says she loves her post-alcohol life, and has never felt better. I relate totally.
But you don’t have to be alcoholic or alcohol dependent for alcohol to mess with your health. Heavens, no. Anyone can get cancer or cirrhosis — you don’t have to be face down on a park bench. You just need to be sucked in by all the advertising, availability, affordability, and the fact that in Ireland, drinks corporations continue to sponsor sporting events, linking our favourite liquid drug with running around outdoors being healthy.
Yet nobody questions the insanity of this paradox — not when there’s so much money to be made from it.
Shouting at individuals to stop drinking so much hardly works when we are bombarded by cheap, ubiquitous, socially acceptable booze — so do we have to develop disease / hit a wall / start losing things (jobs, partners, kids, the will to live) before we wake up a bit and cut down a bit?
“In order to make any meaningful improvements in problem drinking among women it is essential that we tackle the main drivers of of consumption,” says Katherine Brown, director of the UK’s Institute of Alcohol Studies.
“These are the affordability, availability and promotion of alcohol, which have been recognised by the World Health Organisation as the key areas for policy action.
“Interventions that rely solely on changing individual behaviours simply won’t work while we are surrounded by promotions and cheap offers that normalise everyday and excessive drinking.
“The alcohol industry has worked for years to make alcohol products appealing to women, bombarding us with messages that glamorise drinking while ignoring all the negative health effects such as breast cancer. It’s extremely important that women are told about these risks so that they can be empowered to make informed decisions about their drinking.”
Because ladies, alcohol is not your bubbly best friend or your low-calorie medicine. Have too much — and very little is too much — and it’s your biggest frenemy.
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