A space for women and girls to share their experiences and perspectives
Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink
Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink
I'm newly sober and dog-paddling through the booze all around me. It's summer, and Whole Foods has planted rosé throughout the store. Rosé is great with fish! And strawberries! And vegan protein powder! (Okay, I made that last one up.) At the office, every desk near mine has a bottle of wine or liquor on...
qz.com




I don't know. I find this article to be really frustrating. Presenting heavy drinking as the way women cope with being women sounds really short sighted to me and undermines the complexity of...well...existence.
...and substance abuse...
I hate this attitude. Ugly women are made to obsess over the beauty they don't have - and beautiful women are made to obsess over the exact same thing! I am ugly myself - ugly enough that I am middle aged and have yet to be in a relationship. But I am a very good friend, I'm funny, intelligent, hard working, passionate, and - most important of all from my own viewpoint - I have learned how to like myself despite all variations on outside pressure to feel unfulfilled if I don't achieve the beauty standards a woman is 'supposed' to meet (and of course, god help her if she meets those standards and is then proud of them!) This whole "ALL women are beautiful!" bullshit is just a way to shove us back into the hole of low self-esteem we're all trying to fight our way out of. It's just another variation on "all women are bad drivers" or "all women can cook" or whatever other list of traits someone keeps in their heads of what obligations we who were born with a vagina are expected to meet.
RE: the rest of the article, I agree with Kittxn that I think this is a bit overly eager to lump all women's drinking problems into one problem. I think it would have come off better if she'd written it from her point of view, as these are things she's discovering about herself, not about women, because otherwise it just gets added to that checklist above: "all women drink because _". It pushes into invisibility any other reasons women drink (which of course run the rainbow of reasons between "because they enjoy it" to "because of other problems that are not 'she's a woman'"). Still, it does have some other good points in it. That enraging three-guys-one-woman panel. And her point that there is a lot of pressure on non-drinkers to drink. I've never liked alcohol, and the amount of people who've pushed drinks on me as if I can't possibly be happy without a drink in my hand is annoying. I'm out with you. I'm participating. When I say "I don't drink", why turn it into an argument? That should be enough.
Honestly though as a picky eater, I think it's much more related to people's inability to keep their damned noses out of other people's food choices, because believe me, the same aghast looks were directed at me until I learned to stop mentioning that I am a picky eater. Now I just blanket-politely-decline eating at people's homes without explanation. Because, again, "no, thank you" should be all the answer they need. I still have one friend who knows I'm a picky eater, who I have explained my "I never eat at people's houses, it's easiest just to always say no", who frequently brings up the subject again, and again, and AGAIN, and every time I have to shut her down quite rudely in the end to make her stop. I don't understand why, when I'm perfectly willing to come over for a movie night, or to go out to dinner somewhere, or to go shopping together, or to do a thousand other activities, this is still a problem that she - or others who've done the same thing - can't let go. But it's definitely a variation on the sort of pressure I feel from people when they find out I "don't" drink.