What’s more “American” than the extreme tradition of indulging in excessive levels of shopping, eating, and drinking from November to December only to spend the first month of the new year repenting our sins and going “dry?”
“Dry January” is the tradition of starting the new year off sober and while I normally scoff at that thought, especially during my birthday month and #CapricornSeason, but this year I am joining the crowd.
For once, my timing could not be better.
A new CDC study finds that women of all ages and backgrounds are drinking and dying of alcoholism in greater numbers than they were two decades ago, but did we really need a federal agency to break the news to us? Apparently so.
According to the study, men and women are drinking and dying more from alcohol-related causes and more frequently. But while men are nearly three times more likely to die of alcohol than women, this gender gap is closing and fast. From 2018 to 2020, women’s rate of alcohol attributed deaths increased by 14.7 percent, while men’s went up by 12.5 percent.
In her MSNBC article, associate professor of history, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela analyzes how aggressively alcohol is marketed to women and how it’s linked with female empowerment. Petrzela writes that by framing “libation as liberation,” and pairing it with “historical ignorance of the insidious obstacles women face,” is how we are able to survive in a sexist society instead reimagining it altogether:
It’s an American tradition to sell individual women ways to induce a chemical calm rather than actually address the larger systemic imbalances that produce their stress and anxiety. In the 1950s, doctors prescribed Valium (known colloquially as “mother’s little helper”) to anxious homemakers who were told their unease was a symptom of psychological maladjustment rather than a rational response to the constraints of an unequal society.
Petrzela goes on to point how today recreational cannabis products “make the same promise to ease the unremitting pressures of womanhood,” so how much have things really changed? In short, the patriarchy still wins. It’s just the packaging that’s prettier.
This “Dry January,” I’m jumping on the hot wellness trend that is sobriety, even as Americans continue to drink.
Stay tuned for how it goes…