Women Love “MommyJuice,” Much As Our 1897 Selves Loved Dollar-Fifty Heroin From the Sears Catalog
At the New York Times, Irin Carmon reviews Drink and Her Best-Kept Secret, two new books that raise the alarm about women drinking more alcohol and doing it more often: statistics Carmon suggests should be “observations, not an agenda.”
One trouble with declaring an epidemic of female drunkenness is that until the very recent past, the private habits of women were poorly chronicled. Johnston turns in part to gauzy memory to make the case that female alcohol consumption is the negative byproduct of modern complexities and the pressure for women to be “perfect”… But were [women in the past], all in all, “fundamentally happy”? And were they less eager for a fix when they could get it? I’m not convinced.
Even during a time of more rigid gender roles, Glaser notes, women were the “principal users of opiates, which were available over the counter and by mail order. In 1897, the Sears, Roebuck catalog offered a kit with a syringe, two needles, two vials of heroin and a handy carrying case for $1.50.” Today’s MommyJuice and Happy Bitch, wines marketed to women, seem prim by comparison.
Carmon sensibly resists alarmism and writes, “Like anything involving women and regret, alcohol use seems to inspire a desire to rescue.” She also spends some time on Gabrielle Glaser’s study of how “the American story of addiction and recovery was shaped for and by men,” suggesting that Alcoholics Anonymous is “structurally and functionally unsuited to many women.”
Even when the organization did open the tent to women, it did not effectively address their motivations for drinking, nor did it make allowances for “differences in the way women and men recovered,” Glaser writes. “A.A.’s 12-step approach instructs drinkers to surrender their egos to a higher power, but it doesn’t take a gender-studies expert to know that women who drink too much aren’t necessarily suffering from an excess of hubris.”
[NYTimes]