The Rawness

New York magazine has an article on the rise of binge drinking among today’s generation of young women. It basically asks whether notions of gender equality should extend to binge drinking.

[M]ore women are drinking, yes—more than 48 percent acknowledge having had at least one drink in the past month (up from 42 percent in 1992). But beyond that, the women who drink are drinking more. The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined. At the same time, men are reining in their drinking, meaning that the gender gap of alcohol consumption is narrowing all the time.

This increase in drinking among women also includes a sharp increase in binge drinking as well, defined by the CDC’s website as follows:

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is defined as a pattern of alcohol consumption that brings the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level to 0.08% or above. This pattern of drinking usually corresponds to 5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on a single occasion for women, generally within about 2 hours.

The article gets better when it starts listing specific examples.  I cringed with recognition of these types of boozy babes:

I’m out drinking one Wednesday night when I run into Gail and Melanie, two women in their early twenties who are well on their way to what my grandmother would call “past precious.” It’s their third bar of the evening, or rather they were here earlier, they left to go to a beer garden a few blocks away, and now, at 2 a.m., they are back. Both are tall and slender, both wear red dresses with their dark hair pulled up, and the bartender has been slipping both of them freebies here and there throughout the night when they weren’t being offered drinks by other eager men.

“They were like, ‘Oh. You want another beer?’?” Mel says, rolling her eyes about a group of guys who tried to get their attention earlier.

Gail laughs. “They totally admitted they were going to be outdrank by us.”

“He was like, ‘I didn’t drink until I was 21,’?” Mel continues.

Gail arches her eyebrows in disbelief. “This is how we grew up,” she says, nodding in the direction of her drink. “I’ve been drinking since I was 13, you know? We went into my friend’s liquor cabinet and mixed everything together, whiskey, vodka, rum. I remember after that being like, ‘Alcohol is really fun. I want to do it again.’?”

Mel agrees. “I started drinking at a house party when I was going into eighth grade. I ended up throwing up Doritos in the bathroom. Not that that was fun, but from there, I was like, ‘I’m curious.’?”

Then comes the stats. None of them are surprising based on things I’ve seen or anecdotes I’ve heard, but to see them all compiled in a few short paragraphs even gave me pause…for like all of a second.

One-third of all women in the U.S. have their first alcoholic sip before they enter high school. Almost half of high-school girls drink, and more than a quarter binge drink. Then throw in college. For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

“I’m pretty sure college was a great time,” my college roommate likes to say, “but I remember none of it, sadly.” Not incidentally, we started college at the tail end of the nineties, the decade that invented the alcopop, otherwise known as “chick beer,” and MTV Spring Break. If the alcohol industry was conspiring to attract drinkers like us, it succeeded. The rate of frequent binge drinking increased by 124 percent between 1993 and 2001 at all-female colleges. When Amstel Light began marketing directly to women, its sales volume reportedly went up by 13 percent. Suddenly, alcohol commercials weren’t just of the big-breasted, mud-wrestling lineage. A Dewar’s ad from the era showed a lovely young woman donning her work clothes while a bare-chested man slept in the bed beside her. Tagline: “You finally have a real job, a real place, and a real boyfriend. How about a real drink?” I didn’t have any of the above but thought Dewar’s would suit me just fine.

That was back when the industry was just warming up. Dr. David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, believes that the real onslaught—and its effect on the beverages women consume—didn’t reach critical mass until the turn of this century. “For decades, we’ve assumed that the beverage preference for underage drinkers is beer because it’s cheaper,” he told me. “Boys are more likely to drink beer, but starting in about 2001, the girls shift. They are decisively more likely to drink liquor. This shift in beverage preference is a really big deal because it takes a lot to change the beverage preference of a group of people.”

The change could not have happened without a calculated effort. At a time when the number of cable channels and their appeal mushroomed, alcohol ads appeared during thirteen to fifteen of the most popular shows among teenagers and increasingly in women’s magazines, where according to Jernigan, in 2002 girls 12 to 20 saw 95 percent more ads for alcopops than women 21 and above. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors. “How many guys are going to drink a strawberry vodka?” Jernigan asks. “There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.”

Not that marketing should get all the credit for a woman’s relationship with drinking. Once an introduction to alcohol is made, the affair usually flourishes all on its own.

Given that modern feminism automatically equates gender equality with progress, so long as it’s in an area that men reap benefits from (for example feminists don’t really seem to be clamoring for the chance to get on the front lines of a raging battlefield oddly enough), it’s no surprise that today’s vapid feminists of the Jezebel.com and Feministing.com variety view women increasingly engaging in the hard partying and harder drinking lifestyle traditionally associated with men as some sort of gender progress.  Similarly many feminists, especially those of the Sex & The City variety viewed females embracing male-style revolving door urban promiscuity as some sort of gender progress also in the late 90s.

To see what all the recent waves of feminism from the second wave through to the Sex and the City wave to the Suicide Girl wave have combined to create, take for example the following horror story from the article:

Jezebel.com, a Website that is an avatar of a certain of-the-moment brand of feminism appealing to women too young to remember the heyday of Ms. magazine. Jezebel is very pro-alcohol. Last summer, the site stirred up controversy when a well-respected media personality invited two of its writers onto her Internet show “Thinking and Drinking”—typically a classy, semi-Socratic affair—and the younger women got so visibly shitfaced and the conversation so disturbing that some critics referred to it as “The Night Feminism Died.” (When asked why she didn’t prosecute her date-rapist, one of the young women, woozily clutching her can of beer, answered, “Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”)

The onslaught of criticism that followed, however warranted, failed to take into account the fact that, for better or worse, drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.

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.

Reading about this trainwreck interview is one thing, but really, actually seeing it in action is a whole other level of clusterfuck to behold:

“Daddy, are you proud of me? That college education really paid off!  Look Mom, progress!” 

I’m kind of torn on seeing chicks like this be so candid.  In some ways it’s good because it shows the other side of the gender war that the media likes to overlook.  We only see men behaving badly stories but not women behaving badly.  I know a lot of women may read this and tell me, “Oh, they’re exceptions,” and maybe when taking the whole country into account that is true, but in NY and the other U.S. urban centers, these type of women have become the new norm, especially in the 18-34 age range.  When I was younger, had a lot less game and even less standards, these types of chicks were a godsend because they meant easy banging with mininal skill and effort.  What young guy with raging hormones and little patience wouldn’t love that?  But as I got older I realized these women are really just the equivalent of slapping a great paint job on a shitty car: sure it’s more than a lot of other people have, but it’s still nothing to be especially proud of.  And if you have any sort of standards or self-respect, you realize your shitty car with the nice pant job only impresses people not worth impressing, which makes it an even emptier feeling after a while.  Or even worse, after a long enough time lowering your standards and fucking slutty drunks, lowered standards go from being your last resort game to being your A-game.  And sure enough you become one of those low-class losers who are not worth impressing. 

When you lower your standards on a regular basis and only bang women you don’t respect, you think you’re getting over and proving something, but in actuality it sends a message to your subconscious mind about who you are.  Just like you are what you eat, you are what you fuck.  And since you’re fucking trash, your subconscious mind starts to absorb the message that you must be low value as well, and as a result starts influencing your conscious behavior accordingly.  Thus you start lowering your standards on how you look (slovenly, sloppy, unkempt, unimpressive, bland) and you lose all self-respect (desperate chasing of women, putting up with crap you shouldn’t, hooking up with unattractive women just because you’re both drunk and the opportunity is there).  That’s why so many of the guys who regularly hook up with the types of chicks like the two Jezebellers in the video above, the hipsters they deride and mock, look like unshaven slobs (lowering their standards for themselves) and regularly are at ease with making spectacles of themselves (no self-respect).  That’s why hipsters reach the point where they eventually feel no shame looking like the botched drive-by abortions found on Look at This Fucking Hipster website or are proud to be written up for engaging in crap like this or this for example.  It’s also why I started turning dow n one-night stand opportunities with stumblebum broads who were incoherent and sloppy, even if they were hot.  It was just tacky, unenjoyable and embarassing when I brought home a girl who was excited about sleeping with me, but by the time we got to more intimate settings she was nodding in and out of a stupor while taking off her own clothes.  So I’m drunk, my hormones are exploding like a volcano and my dick’s hard enough to cut diamonds and crack walnuts.  What do I do?  If we’re both drunk is it rape?  If we both start having sex and she seems awake and responsive in the beginning but at some point she becomes semi-conscious and out of it because her liquor intake is catching up with her, do I stop stroking or would that be rape?

The recent movie Observe & Report actually has such a scarily accurate scene, where [SPOILERS] Seth Rogen and hard-drinking Anna Faris go on a date that culminates in the type of sex I just described (and lived a few times).  He’s pounding away at her at the end of their date and she looks passed out drunk.  Slowly it hits him that she may not be conscious any more and he might be raping her.  He slows down and then stops, unsure what to do and slowly feeling disgusted by himself, wondering if he is a date rapist.  And Anna Faris’ character immediately slurs, without looking up or opening her eyes, “I didn’t tell you to stooppp motherrrfuckkerrr….”  Like, is it rape if she was conscious and slurs something that rhymes with “Yerrssh” when you started fucking but sort of kind of passed out before you finished?  When you actually start having to ask those types of questions, it’s time to raise your standards. Real men need at least need a little bit of a challenge in order to feel proud of an accomplishment.  And it’s scenarios like this, which are much more commonplace than older generations know,  that probably cause the girls to be so nonchalant toward their “rapists.”  Because these women are fully aware of how grey and vague the issue of consent is in such mutually drunk and debauched scenarios, especially when slutty behavior is thrown into the equation.  Shit, one of them even wrote a column for Gawker.com titled Slut Machine and had a blog called One D(ick) at a Time, so I don’t think I’m out of line calling their behavior slutty.

One interesting thing about the videos above and the Whimpster piece is how the women who date hipsters seem to hold them in total utter contempt and scorn them.  When I see hispter couples I see this emasculating scorn dynamic going on too.  What girls like the Jezebellers in the video and the woman who wrote The Whimpster piece don’t get is that yes the men they date are tools, but these men are tools that they created.  They have this love-hate relationship with hipster men.  They date them because on a social level they like them for being enlightened enough to accept their batshit crazy and ill-defined form of reactionary feminism and they accept their desire to be equal to men and they aren’t intimidated by a “strong,” defined as abrasive, narcissistic and shrewish in their world, woman.  Plus these men have no desire to be macho and try to lead them or ever pull rank on them or ever try to boss them around and take charge forcefully.  So these guys are the perfect complement to their socially constructed sense of identity.  Yet on a primal, unconscious level, they hate them because women are genetic hard-wired for hypergamy (meaning they don’t want a man who is equal in status but one who is higher), are hard-wired to seek out leadership in a man (meaning they don’t want a man who gives them 50% of more input on everything and is too democratic) and are hard-wired to respond with a dripping crotch to displays of machoness and assertiveness, because it satisfies their primal need to feel protected and secure (meaning on a primal level they don’t like guys with the same height, weight and muscle tone as them).  So for all those reasons, they don’t respect these men even though they are a perfect fit for their social side and they even grow to hate them with time.  Yet since the guys these women do respond to primally and hormonally to are socially forbidden to them by their religion of radical feminism, and more importantly, would have no tolerance for their radical feminist ways in return, they are forced to deal and make do with the type of hipster men that are cool with their radical feminist religion, even if everything else from their subconscious primal mind to their hormones to their genes utterly loathes them.  (And with time this hatred will start to surface on the conscious level too)

So look at the videos and read the Whimpster piece again.  They date and fuck these guys, yet appear to hold them in utter contempt as well.  One girl is basically calling them out for being nonassertive, but says that at least the way they rape is more acceptable because it’s not the macho kind of rape a frat boy would do.  Who is she complimenting and who is she insulting with this train of thought?  Does she even know?  It’s funny in a fucked up way, but it turns out even the way hipsters rape, using surreptitiously slipped drugs and inebriated and deranged (by feminism and college) targets is passive-aggressive.  But the irony is, they created the Whimpster and then want to punish him for having all the traits they continually reward and none of the “frat boy” or “macho” or “traditional” traits they openly deride every chance they get.  Yet they want to turn around and bash them for being exactly what they encouraged them to be, and continue to engage in the exact same behavior and subscribe to the exact same beliefs that encouraged them to be that way.  Because the alternative idea, that radical feminism sold them a bad bill of goods that created more problems than it solved for them, is impossible for them to even consider because they have devoted so much of their identity and so many years and resources to the ideology.  This is what’s known as a “sunk cost fallacy.”  Marshall McLuhan once said about humans “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”  It works for this context as well: yes these guys are tools, but these women shaped them, and now these tools are shaping them back, and the vicious circle that has been started is turning out to be a pitiful race to the bottom.

Huffingtonpost.com, a site for smelly granolas I never expected to link to in my lifetime, has some of the best highlights in print form:

These Jezebels recommend birth control methods:

Moe: Pulling out always works for me”
Tracie: “And I know it’s an irresponsible thing to day, but it’s (Pulling Out) The Most Fun Way Not To Get Pregnant”

The Jezebels on sex with total strangers:

Tracie: “People are always saying it’s not safe to go home with strange men, blah, blah blah, like Mr. Goodbar whatever”
Moe: “What’s gonna happen?’

Lizz You could get raped”

Moe: That’s happening too, but you live through that.”

Lizz: “Sometimes you don’t”

Moe: “That’s true if they have weapons.”

The Jezebels define the “rapists of our generation”

Tracie: “I live in Williamsburg, there aren’t very assertive men there”
Moe: “The thing about the rapists of our generation, is that they all use drugs, they all have some sort of drug they use on you, so it’s good to feel, and I don’t know if this has happed to me or if I just drink too much…

Moe: “It’s really hard to prosecute them (rapists), so you should try to avoid them at all costs.”

Tracie: “I once paid someone to rape me once.”

Tracie: “Well, I didn’t pay for it, I had a magazine pay for it

Tracie: “I moved here when I was 18 and you think you would encounter more rapists in a big city like this, but, I don’t know, I just haven’t.”

Moe on sexual regret:

Moe: “I guess, I like, regret being date raped”
Moe: “It seems like in terms of bad sexual experiences, that you have, the worst ones are in, always seem to be in countries where sex is not accepted. That is the good thing about New York, I’ve never has any problems with anyone here.”

Moe: “I guess third guy, I ever had sex with, date raped me, and I got very mad at him, but I wasn’t gonna fucking like turn him in to the police and fucking go through shit..

Lizz interrupts: “Why not, you see that’s the problem, why not, I am just curious?”

Moe: Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”

Tracie on why she has not been raped

” I think it has to do with the fact that I am like, smart”
“I don’t hang around with frat guys”

Moe on how she felt about her rapist:

“I always felt very like, safe around this guy even after he date raped me”

Moe on what women can take home from reading their blogs

If any of you guys use the pullout method, but you read you know, anything I wrote about Ben Bernanke, or you know, what ever, at least y’ll go to the grave with your syphilis, slightly informed, that’s all I care about

I suggest that the next writer who chooses to do a piece about the popular meme of how today’s urban young adult men are stunted man-children who refuse to commit actually take the time to learn about the boozy train wrecks they’re refusing to commit to. The marriage stats will make a lot more sense then.

By the way, Tracie Egan really did pay someone to rape her, as you can read here.  Believe it or not, I don’t hate the article. It’s well written, honest and indirectly confirms a lot of my beliefs about radical feminism that a radical feminist would never admit if I asked her directly. If you don’t believe my recurring theories that women don’t really want to be equal in power to a man in a relationship, or even worse more decisive than the man, check the opening paragraph where she describes why she wants to be raped:

I blame my recurring rape fantasy on the fact that I’m a feminist. I’ve never made any bones about getting boned in exactly the fashion that I want. But as a girl, my equipment can be trickier to manage, therefore I need to be a boss in the bedroom to ensure I get worked the right way. It gets really tiresome always being the one in charge, and don’t shrinks say that people usually fantasize about the opposite of their reality? I guess that’s why I find myself wishing that my typically sugary-sweet sexual encounters were sometimes peppered with assault. I decided that the best way to forfeit that control—while still holding on to a modicum of it for safekeeping—would be to hire someone for the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted a male whore to rape me.

Kind of like how when a person who loves food denies himself food too long he ends up wanting to destructively binge on it at some point, I guess when your ideology causes you to avoid assertive males too much, you end up going to an extreme to find assertiveness, like rape. You can read her blog here, where she used to regularly chronicle her promiscuous lifestyle and sexual exploits, at least until she announced she was engaged to be married last Fall. You can also read her take on the fallout to the above interview. To her credit, she’s a fantastic writer.

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