Drinking, feminism and the end of partying

Posted at 12:00 PM Dec 16, 2008

By Andrea Grimes

Last week, New York blamed various waves of feminism for the ever-increasing myriad numbers of female drinkers partying like the boys--whatever that means:

"It's a more maverick form of feminism, sure, and perhaps misguided--something akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated. But the paradox of a woman exerting her power by making herself, to one degree or another, incapacitated does not read as a disjunction to most of the women I spoke with. On the contrary, a woman's control over her life--and the decision of when and how to lose that control--seems to be the point."

I'm not sure where to start with someone who equates enjoying drinking with participating in something as patently awful, insulting and demeaning as Girls Gone Wild, but I will say this: deciding when and how to lose control in one's life is precisely the point of feminism, and it has absolutely nothing intrinsically to do with drinking. The favorite, infamous evidence to the contrary, of course, is the Jezebel "Thinking and Drinking" debacle. But the fact that a couple of feminists got hammered on television and acted powerfully stupid isn't representative of anything except what it actually was: a couple of drunk girls yammering and making bad jokes. Let 'em have their wine, will you?

But wait! Maybe they don't want any at all. Strangely, the elitist New York media folks can't get their stories straight when it comes to alcohol. Today on Proof, the New York Times booze blog, Susan Cheever pronounces partying dead after telling a story about a falling-down-drunk dinner party she once attended. But:

"That dinner party was almost 10 years ago; it was the last time I saw anyone visibly drunk at a New York party. The New York apartments and lofts which were once the scenes of old-fashioned drunken carnage -- slurred speech, broken crockery, broken legs and arms, broken marriages and broken dreams -- are now the scene of parties where both friendships and glassware survive intact. Everyone comes on time, behaves well, drinks a little wine, eats a few tiny canapés, and leaves on time. They all still drink, but no one gets drunk anymore. Neither do they smoke. What on earth has happened?"

Well, Cheever, I have a few ideas about what happened. Firstly, you aged ten years, which means you and your friends aren't as spry as you used to be. Secondly, you got treatment for alcoholism and went sober. Thirdly, nothing happened at all! Everybody is still getting hammered, injuring themselves and others in the pursuit of the perfect drunk. One needn't worry.

So which is it, guys? Are we all behaving like slutty lushes, or are we teetotaling squares? Pick one and get your overarching trend stories together already.