The silly season is wrapping up, and with it those few extra hangovers and a little Extrovert's Remorse™. Social clumsiness aside, summer in Australia is a fine time for hedonism en masse. For women, however, our culture of festive excess often comes tinged with judgment and stereotyping.
![Women who like a tipple are judged and condescended to far more than men who do the same, writes Maeve Marsden.](/web/20170115075022im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/p/5/k/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtp0x0.png/1484084607529.jpg)
January is plagued by the annual boost to the diet industry, but this year it's women's relationships with booze rather than food that piques my interest. I'm not here to claim that alcoholism or binge drinking are OK, but if we look at alcohol in its social context, the way society reacts to men's and women's consumption of it is downright sexist.
Last year we saw the Royal Australasian College of Physicians make a Senate inquiry submission suggesting that all women of a "reproductive age" who consume more than two standard drinks a day be subject to "routine screening and early interventions".
Then there were publications like The Conservative Review blaming "modern feminism" for the fact American men and women now tend to drink at approximately the same rate. Others offered more balanced reporting of the same study; but across the board, women reaching equality in this particular arena tends to be seen as an inherently bad thing and, more frustratingly, the "fault" of feminism.
The Daily Mail queried whether alcohol abuse by "educated women" represents "the dark side of equality". The Guardian pointed the finger at marketing, warning that "women's bodies do not tolerate alcohol as well as men's". On the other side of the coin, this Quartz essay claims women drink because of the patriarchy; a less sexist response, perhaps, but still one that places the gender of the drinker at the centre of the question.
Hand-wringing over women engaging in problem drinking is not new. A lot of contemporary coverage blames "wine o'clock" culture but, historically, it was gin that got the sexist moral panic machine going.
During the 1700s, England experienced a period of mass consumption of alcohol now known as the Gin Craze. In a move aimed at increasing grain production (and providing a local alternative to French brandy), laws were relaxed for the distillation of gin; and the juniper-scented floodgates opened. Coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and mass movement into cities, many women took up gin selling at a time when fewer women worked. Once the government realised the dangers of unregulated alcohol production, there was a serious crackdown, both in policy and propaganda.
But as far as public health awareness campaigns go, the response to the Gin Craze was typically gendered, positioning women as its main target. Printed in the London Post, the famous Hogarth etchings Beer Street and Gin Lane paint two very different pictures: Gin Lane centres on a fallen, syphilis-ridden woman obliviously dropping her baby. Beer Street, on the other hand, is populated by cheerful, hat-wearing gents.
During the crackdown, women accounted for more than 70 per cent of arrests, despite only representing about 20 per cent of illegal gin sellers. Although evidence abounds that male gin drinkers and sellers engaged in various crimes that harmed children (and women), the most famous tale of the time is of Judith Dufour, who was accused and convicted of killing her child and selling its clothes to buy gin. Despite the horror of her alleged crime, the focus on stories that centred on fallen women and ruined mothers is a classic gendered response. When in doubt, demonise women.
Centuries later, gin is still considered a woman's drink, a tear-jerker, "mother's ruin". Men's drinking, on the other hand, is normalised – despite the violence that often erupts when they do it in close proximity to each other.
Of course, in Sydney, the culture of booze-fuelled male violence was used to justify blanket lock-out laws that have strangled the city's nightlife – yet there was little effort to analyse or address the gendered drinking behaviour at hand.
Ironically, it's women who have historically been excluded from drinking by law; but it's little consolation to women bemoaning Sydney's dying nightlife now to tell them that as recently as the 1960s they wouldn't have even been able to enter pubs without a man to accompany them.
This segregation excluded women from a key aspect of public life, and a number of protests occurred in Australia in the 1960s and '70s. My favourite involved Merle Thornton AM and Rosalie Bogner who, when refused service at Brisbane's Regatta Hotel, chained themselves to the bar.
Our feminist history is littered with campaigns for political or workplace representation, and rightly so. But equality must also include more "frivolous" pursuits like participation in the arts and cultural life, and our rights to our bodies and our choices must transcend moral imperatives. We shouldn't apologise for women reaching "equality" with men in the drinking stakes, as if women are somehow less informed health-wise or should be more inherently well-behaved and risk-averse than men.
A few drinks can bring out the extrovert, can make a woman a little more outrageous, a little louder, perhaps a little less likely to acquiesce to sexist social norms. An outspoken woman is a dangerous thing, whether she is chaining herself to a bar or slamming her fist on the table to make a point.
And while the image of the feminist as teetotalling puritanical prohibitionist is pervasive – some of us like to swing from the chandeliers.
Maeve Marsden is a writer and performer, currently co-starring in Mother's Ruin: A Cabaret About Gin at Sydney Festival and touring nationally.
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