Food & Drink

No, ladies, it’s not men ‘making’ us drink

Ladies, if you get home from a long day at work, get your kids to bed and unwind with the latest HBO show and a glass of wine, know that it’s not your fault you’re having a drink.

No, you are blameless for succumbing to the enjoyment of a substance humans have been drinking for centuries.

Your boozing is the fault of the patriarchy.

It’s the patriarchy when you get together with your girlfriends for mojitos or have a Scotch with your dad. There it is oppressing you when a happy occasion calls for champagne. You can’t see it, but it’s holding you down while you drink a beer with your burger.

That’s what a viral piece by Kristi Coulter argues, anyway. Newly sober, Coulter looked around and noticed that her fellow women were constantly sloshed.

Like everything else that is difficult about being a woman, that you enjoy a drink is the fault of men.

According to Coulter, we drink because men don’t always listen to what we say and because some of them can be jerks at work, as if men always listen to each other and never behave like jerks to other men.

We drink because the patriarchy pressures us into being a “24-hour woman” and because we’re expected to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let him forget he’s a man.

Apparently men don’t have the same 24-hour schedule for their manhood.

Blaming the patriarchy doesn’t help explain why men drink at a higher rate than women.

A 2015 study by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that 56 percent of men drink vs 48 percent of women.

And according to the Centers for Disease Control And Prevention, men are almost two times more likely to binge drink than women and have nearly double the rate of alcohol dependence.

Hand-wringing about women drinking more than they used to is misplaced, too. Women are drinking more not because the patriarchy oppresses them but because the patriarchy includes them.

They’re having after-work drinks with their co-workers in what used to be a boys-only club. Women face a lot of pressures, that’s true. But it’s not “society” applying those pressures, it’s often women themselves.

There’s article after article about women trying to have it all. I’ve written such articles myself.

We want to be perfect mothers, perfect wives, perfect friends all while excelling at our jobs and looking amazing. We feel like failures when we don’t win at all of that. It’s a tough haul.

It’s not the patriarchy judging us, or forcing us to judge each other. It’s not men telling us we have to try having it “all.”

When have men ever complained they can’t “have it all”? When we ask about a woman who is particularly successful at life’s juggling act “how does she do it?” we hope to mimic her ways ourself.

Men, meanwhile, as Kyle Smith once wrote in the New York Post, consider that overextended, striving woman and think “I don’t know why she does it.”

And the fact is that a woman actually trying to have it all, despite knowing how ridiculous that is, doesn’t have time to drink the way the women in Coulter’s article drink.

I enjoy an alcoholic beverage very much. I’m a bourbon girl, myself, and after a long day of working, taking care of my three children, prioritizing my husband, thinking about going to the gym, trying to maintain friendships, I simply don’t have the time to get into the bourbon as much as I’d like.

What I took away from Coulter’s piece is that apparently other women have a lot more time to socialize than I do. I could blame the patriarchy for that or I could work on making plans with my friends more often. There are solutions to problems that don’t involve blaming men.

Women should look into those first.

From HeatSt.com