It turns issuethat us women, us in our 30s and 40s, have been so busy ‘having it all’ this last couple of decades – the career, the family, the fun - that we’ve missed the effect it has been having on our livers.
If you’re a womaninnate(p)in the 1970s as I was, and brought up to remembergender was never a barrier to what you could achieve in life, chances are you have a well-stocked wine rack and eternallyhave a bottle of Bombay Sapphire stashed in the cupboard.
But ‘keeping up with boys’ is taking its toll.
According to experts from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH), more(prenominal)women in their 30s and 40s are dying from alcohol-related deaths than in any generation forwardus.
As the tabloids set about stirring up a lie withof moral panic, pointing the finger firmly at the ‘ladette’ culture of themid-ninetiesand indulging in a bit of good outmodedslut-shaming (look at these hideous drunk women, acting like men, isn’t it disgusting?), they’ve omitted to look upthe fact that men are clam updying from alcohol-related illnesses at three times the rate of women.
Now, I don’t want to servelight of drinking to excess yetsociety needsto understand that alcoholism is not a gender-specific disease; to single out women and suggest it’s somehow more shameful for ‘ladies’ to not be more ‘ladylike’ is, well, just plain old-fashioned sexism.
For where are the revoltheadlines demanding men be more gentlemen-like?
It’s been a long timesince rules of orderput such archaic demands on the male of the species, thothanks to the double standards we live by anyday, men, and many women, have no qualms in heaping shame on any woman who doesn’t conform to the gender stereotype.
We are anticipateto accept that ‘lads will be lads’ and let the boys get on with it, even if they are killing themselves in the process.
Women however, must be given a stern telling off for bodaciousto emulate this behaviour.
The nineties were my formative years and I axiomno reason why I, and my fellow effeminatedrinkers, couldn’t do as the boys did. We studied the same subjects at school and we went on to the same universities, so why not match them wassailfor drink?.
By the seasonI hit 18 I couldn’t be within ten feet of an open bottle of cider lest it glide byme unpleasant flashbacks to an unfortunate incident in the toilets of the Rose and Crown, but that didn’t stop me.
At university, drinking was ingrained in the culture, and the women indulged just as much as the men.
One hall of residence even had a ‘Vom Soc’, which encouraged its members to go out drinking until they threw up. Both female and male students could be seen proudly sporting the relevant T-shirts somewhattown.
But no matter how much I believed I was on an equal footing to my male counterparts, the harsh reality was we were settle downoperating in a male world; a callerwhere in order for a woman to make it, she has to featureon the male traits of success.
Sally Marlow, from the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London, told BBC intercommunicate4′s Today programme recently that the report suggested a “ticking time bomb” of alcohol problems in women, mainly because they were acting like men.
“We had women actuallyout there, embracing male behaviours – one of which was excessive drinking,” she said.
We’ve besideshad women out there breaking down barriers, making a success of themselves in the last 20 years, even in this male-dominated society
In a somewhat unpleasant wringof events it seems, this increasingequationhas opened up women to some of the risks men have facefor some time, but it is certainly no reason to turn back the clock.
So we’re catching up with men in the horrible-deaths-which-could-be-avoided stakes, but the answer isn’t public woman-shaming across the national media.
It is utterly sadthat so many people die from alcohol-related conditions every category– around 9,000 according to the BBC – but we can’t address the issue by simply discouraging women from drinking.
The fact is that there are still a lot more men dying from alcohol-related problems than women, and our screwed-up society finds it quite easy to gloss over the hyper-masculine attitudes that have helped surfacethe way for this problem.
Men can justify their behaviour by, well, just beingmen.
If you’re ‘out with the boys’, anything goes, whereas women are called up and held to account for any behaviour that challenges conventionalconcepts of femininity.
Such double standards won’t help us address the reasons why more and more people are turning to alcohol.
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Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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