This New York Magazine piece about how feminism turns you into a lush has come in for a lot of criticism, but I haven’t seen anyone point out the article’s most glaring, painful-to-read flaws. First and most obviously, the entire piece treats the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) as some kind of objective brain trust, filled with people thinking new and Important Thoughts on the relative merits of those substances called “drugs.” But CASA is a prohibitionist organizaton. When CASA publishes gems such as “Non-medical Marijuana: Rite of Passage or Russian Roulette?”, nobody cracks open the report wondering “Gosh, I wonder what they decided?” This is an organization that compares the smoking of a joint to a game with a 17 percent chance of death, and proceeds to deem this comparison worthy not of a mere footnote but of a report title. As my colleague Jacob Sullum notes:
In a 2002 report that attracted wide publicity, CASA issued “a clarion call for national mobilization” against “America’s underage drinking epidemic,” claiming that “Children Drink 25 Percent of Alcohol Consumed in the U.S.” Not only did these “children” include 18-to-20-year-olds (a.k.a. “adults”), but it turned out CASA’s estimate was off by a factor of more than two.
Thus we are treated to the following tidbit in the NY Mag piece:
“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.”
If the rate of drinking on campus is “astronomical” relative to rates of drinking in other settings, in what sense is the campus setting norms? The rate of drinking on college campuses is clearly aberrant. I live next to a Midwestern University. My undergraduate neighbors drink Miller Lite at 7am on Saturday mornings so they can be drunk enough to watch and enjoy a football game in subzero weather. I do not expect that this behavior will continue into their 60s. I suspect that it is context dependent.
I doubt the author of the article chose to subtitle her piece: “Should gender equality extend to drinking?” But it should be mentioned that this framing — so popular among stories alleging increased girl-on-girl violence and drug use and sports-related injuries — is annoying. I happen to have a female body. It does not follow that my every vice is part of some misguided attempt to achieve gender parity. I had a beer last night, and I have to say, it wasn’t a particularly gendered experience for me.
The author’s friends drink a lot; being young and single in New York, like living in a house with a couch on the front porch in a Midwestern college town, is a context in which someone is likely to drink more than the average person. I’ve always felt that people were more willing to grant the concept of life stages for men than for women; that dude crumpled over in the frat house is just going through his few years of drunken stupification; but the 24-year-old woman in an LES apartment who’s had a few too many Martinis– well, she’s ruined.
My friends and I (who all attend a school in the Midwest and have done the entire “drink a lot in the morning before a football game because it’s really cold” thing ) even have a prefabricated justification for this clearly context-dependent behavior: “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m an undergraduate.”
Not to totally ignore all the important bits (good post though), but, what does LES stand for? Google has been unhelpful.
LES = Lower East Side (of Manhattan)
Ah, now it all fits together. Thanks!
Ay — Bloody — Men. I went to college in the early 1980s, at the University of Texas at Austin. UT is always listed in the top 3 party schools in the country, and turns out somewhere north of 10,000 graduates per year. If we all kept up our college consumption, the streets of Dallas and Houston should be littered with Texas Exes winos. Since that’s demonstrably untrue, I presume that most people do what I and my friends did — quit drinking so much when we got jobs. Since coming to work drunk or badly hungover pretty much immediately results in getting fired, most people learn better very very quickly. College students drink because they have the opportunity. Once that goes away, the gigantic overwhelming majority of us don’t make the effort to drink anymore.
Here’s the main reason most of us out grow our binge-drinking early twenties. . . . hangovers get worse as you age! Unless you are really committed to the project of becoming an alcoholic, biology will force most people to make more moderate choices. Of course addiction is a real thing for some – but with a few exceptions, almost all of my 20-something drinking buddies (once they had to get up every morning and go to work) learned to keep the partying in check.
When will victim-feminism join the post-racial world and move beyond the identity politics of the 70’s. . . .
Despite the fact that the article cites biased organizations like the CASA, the main point of the article is that historically women have been seen as advocates of temperance and the Prohibition. My take-away from the article is that we’ve come a long way, baby– from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to current popular images of women as alcoholics, like Karen Walker from “Will & Grace” and Bridget Jones. For example, the article says:
“For the bulk of history, women have skewed toward the teetotaler end of the spectrum; not until the middle of the last century did a burgeoning relationship with alcohol coincide with Second Wave feminism and a general impulse to close the gender gap across the board. “As women ‘immigrated’ into the culture that was once unique to men,” says Grucza, “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 trend is so pronounced that in Britain, home to the Bridget Joneses of the world, public-health officials launched an ad campaign picturing a grizzled man in drag (or a very mannish woman) with the caption: “If you drink like a man, you might end up looking like one.” But no public-service announcement is likely to turn back this tide, especially among the very young. In the 12-to-17-year-old demographic, there is no gender gap at all. These girls are drinking as early and as often and as much as the boys.”
I see the same changes happening with mainstream images of promiscuity — take a look at Sex & the City.