Of all the campaigns women have fought for equality, reaching parity for alcohol abuse would be our most joyless victory. The gender pay gap still exists, but since 2013, Australian women have been abusing alcohol at the same levels as men. In the decade to 2007, the number of young female Australians diagnosed with symptoms of alcohol abuse increased by 27,000.
It’s not an isolated phenomenon: similar statistics are reported in other OECD countries. Although Australian and American alcohol consumption rates are dwarfed by the thirst of Eastern Europe, liquid joy brings misery to many; in Australia, every day, alcohol abuse kills 15 people and sends 430 to hospital. The Australian Bureau of Statistics identifies alcohol abuse as one of “the more prominent health risks”, short and long term, faced by the community, exacerbating mood and anxiety problems and chronic conditions caused by injury, compromising a person’s ability both to work and to engage in family and community life.
These dangers are hardly unknown to women. In April, the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (Fare) returned a poll in which 75% of Australians “believe the nation has a problem with excess drinking”. So why are women, already burdened by systemic disadvantage, embracing further risk?
There’s a belief that some women are abusing alcohol as a form of self-medication for the gendered variations of depression and anxiety. As a young woman, I justified my own drinking in the same simple terms in which I remember relationships with deadbeat boyfriends: it was numbing, it seemed fun and it was there.
The relationship I had with alcohol saw plenty of wild, fun times, but at least as many spills – some significantly more dire than a splashed cabernet on carpet, though that, alas, happened far too often. Less frequently, there were careless broken bones; more frequently, stumbles, bruises, stupid arguments, circular conversations and always, always hangovers, heavy with the shifting weight of headaches, nausea and shame.
I grew older, the hangovers grew longer, and the nights became both bleaker and less memorable; by my 30s I just lost enthusiasm for it. My last drink was no rock’n’roll finale of piss, sex, vomit, blood and/or property damage, though more than once I’d given that show some fine rehearsal.
No, a friend had come round to help me install some shelves; we celebrated our DIY-well-done with mugs of cheap white wine. The booze hit my mouth with an acrid burn, and my stomach buckled like I’d necked a cup of paint. For the first time, and the last, I left my drink unfinished. Sometimes, love just ends.
In the wake of the American revelations on binge drinking, my Guardian US colleague Jessica Valenti suggested ladies for whom alcohol is a source of unhappiness may want “to swap the bourbon for a bong”. As someone whose flirtation with marijuana expired some years before my breakup with alcohol, I’d suggest such women may find it a rewarding experiment “to try out being sober for a while”.
There are certainly arguments in support of marijuana’ compared to liquid depressants. But even as a best-case scenario, there’s still impaired memory and concentration, greenouts, headspins, munchies, stumbling around, talking total nonsense, listening to Frank Zappa’s Billy the Mountain on repeat, and, well, being high. Mind-altering substances remain just that. From my own experience, I can tell you that, after the initial strangeness of leaving the pub before closing wore off, the great discovery of living drug and alcohol free was that I much preferred my own mind un-altered.
I am no prohibitionist, and decades socialising around both drug and alcohol safe-users and abusers affirms my conviction that decriminalisation and harm-minimisation are the only sensible priority for drug policy. At the beginning of my experiment with sobriety, even I never really believed I’d give alcohol away forever.
Six years later, my personal rewards have been so satisfying that there is little to tempt any return to my old chemical fog. Everyone responds to both to substances and sobriety with nuance: after the first few clean weeks, my own first noticeable response was an improvement in energy, then in remembering names, then the return of internal arithmetic.
With months, my concentration span increased, my formerly crippling episodes of depression grew less frequent and more manageable, and over the years, my ability to learn and process information has rapidly expanded with a memory I trust is reliable. Most recently, I realised my reflexes were back. Confidence comes from improved judgment, and my days start brightly for the lack of confusion, vomit or pain.
If increased cognition, strength and energy sound like useful attributes for activist feminists fighting an unfair society, you’re dead right. Historically, there are solid and interchangeable links between the old temperance campaigners and the suffragettes. The temperance-leaguers in America may have been responsible for bringing about the legalised disaster we know as Prohibition, but with many who were also responsible for bringing women the vote, none could deny that they got a lot done.
I celebrate the women who can enjoy alcohol, or cannabis, without negative effect – and all men and others, too. My humble suggestion applies specifically to those women tasting more pain than joy in the drugs they’re consuming. Sobriety is no less a rewarding way to live your life for being less discussed. In Australia, 80.5% of everyone over 14 is drinking, 35% of whom merely with the intent of getting drunk: a chosen and deliberate sobriety may indeed be the most radical pleasure of all.
