Great research, great writing, depressing as heck topic

 

 

Quit Like A Woman

by  Holly Whitaker

I am humiliated--I had a whole lot to say about this book and had even copied out a quote or two, and somehow I deleted it all. Here's what's left.

It's really really really good. There are whole chapters in here that I re-read just to be sure I absorbed them. One of her big points is this: why is it that alcohol is the only mind-altering, addictive drug that society expects us to be able to use but not overuse? Another: why is it that alcoholism is something that you "have" only after you quit using alcohol? People who admit they have a problem and quit using it are automatically labeled as "alcoholics" and stigmatized as having something wrong with them because they chose to quit using the drug. People assume that those poor unfortunate souls are then doomed to a boring life of strong black coffee, AA meetings, and craving drink.

Not necessarily so, she points out. Or as she would be more likely to point out: not AT ALL. A lot--dare I say most--of ex-drinkers don't want to drink again. And a whole lot don't waste their time in meetings endlessly confessing "and I'm an alcoholic." And they're most definitely not teetering on the one-drink-away edge of disaster.

She's got a lot to say about feminism, too, although to use that word, so commonly said with a sneer, is to weaken her message. AA was developed by men, for men. In the days of its inception there wasn't any notion of "lady drinkers". Yet it remains the only accredited program for most healthcare plans. All its preaching about "giving up control" and "surrendering ones self to a higher power" doesn't work for women, who never had any power to begin with.

And consider smoking. When the tobacco industry needed to widen their market, they invented the story that "cool women smoke" and proceeded to demonstrate that in every insidious manner they could devise. Women were portrayed in movies, billboards, television shows and every other medium, holding onto that insidious cancer stick, asserting their right to be as free as any man and "by gum, smoke if they wanted to!" And of course, they wanted to.

Smoking had its day, and now the day belongs to Big Alcohol. Only we don't call it that. Instead we have "rocky mountain pure spring water" and microbreweries and little local vinyards in every neighborhood. Did you know that most of the little wineries you see on the roadside don't even grow their own grapes? How stupid is that?

But no matter. Big Alcohol has set their sights on making women think that all cool women drink wine all the time. And the American public is swallowing this wine hook, line, and sinker.

And for what, she says? Why does every social event have to be experienced through the fog of partial intoxication? Why do we expect to see a margarita tent at the end of a marathon? During the symphony orchestra intermission, why is the booze line the longest?  Why did we Americans let ourselves believe that a woman with a wine glass in her hand is just a normal woman, asserting her right to take drugs in order to make it through another crappy day working a crappy job for seventy-five percent of her male coworker's salary?

It's hard to argue that advertising is evil. If alcohol ever ducks into the back alleys the way cigarettes did, I'm sure advertising will find equally bad to push. Sugary soda had its day, and bacon. Right now it seems to be water in plastic bottles--even though the bottled water you pay $1.98 for is merely someone else's tap water and the plastic is polluting the planet and our bodies. But advertising only played a small part in our nation's addiction to intoxication, and her book goes into other factors, too.

The only thing she didn't research to my satisfaction is how did historical factors enter into our current obsession. Remember, alcohol was a whole lot safer to imbibe than most water sources in early America--not until the 20th century was most tap water safe to drink. How did we get here?

But that's too much to ask from a book that's already so full of fascinating, depressing and downright scary stuff.