The Last Word On Nothing

When I was in my 20s and we liked to be out professionally drinking after a day of professionally working, a study made the news – I have no idea which study, by whom, or exactly what it said because I only heard about it through the bitter complaints of my friend. She was a fast-rising corporate lawyer who could reliably drink the other associates at her firm – or partners, or senior partners, or clients, or whoever, male and female – absolutely under the table. It was her superpower, and in her view did a lot to redress her grievances about being 5 foot 2. Being able to hold her liquor really set her apart when an evening began to devolve and other people started to make bad choices. It translated into a lot of respect at work – a strange but not infrequent category error. 

So you can imagine how it landed for us when scientists said women should only be drinking half as much as men. “Is there *nothing* that women can just HAVE?” she texted me. The dramatic overstatement was tongue-in-cheek. But I felt the same resentment. 

Many years and conflicting scientific evidence later, I’m not drinking anymore. It had nothing to do with the hamfisted messaging about alcohol’s harms, nor was it a result of problem drinking (I was always an embarrassing lightweight). The hangovers just started to be more un-fun than the drinking was fun, no matter how much or how little I drank. This is apparently a common complaint when you get old and decrepit. So about a year ago I decided I was done.

It was good timing! If I had opted to do this ten years ago, I would have been faced with a pretty bare cupboard. In those bad old days we had O’Douls, widely understood to be a meagre mercy granted to people who wanted to control their drinking but didn’t want to be infantilised by sipping a glass of milk when everyone else was brandishing their fancy big-kid beverages. There was also nonalcoholic champagne or sparkling cider, usually deployed by preggos who weren’t “out” yet (speaking from experience).

But in 2021 and 2022, if you’re not drinking, the world is your oyster. There are enough people looking for alcohol-free varieties that the market has exploded with all kinds of creatively named and colourful options. In 2021, nonalcoholic beverages raked in $331 million, up a third from the prior year. (The culprit is allegedly Gen Z, which incidentally is also accused of killing the wine industry, driving them in their desperation to consider launching ‘Got Milk?’-style industry adverts. Is there a word for something predestined to become a meme?)

And yet, despite big markets full of big numbers, a general awkwardness lingers around not drinking. No matter how pretty your nonalcoholic beverage, people want to know why.

Many think pieces and trend pieces have emerged over the past couple of years to help people address the social consequences of “not drinking without an excuse”. If you’re not an alcoholic, on antibiotics, or pregnant, we just haven’t quite settled on how to process your decision.

People have tried to establish a label for the new demographic. With mixed success, to use my driest British understatement voice: you have your choice of ‘teetotal’, ‘sober’, ‘sober-curious‘, and ‘NOLO’ (my favourite pet peeve – an acronym that doesn’t quite work. It allegedly stands for no or low alcohol).

Among the best of the new sobriety genre is an article by Sarah Wood, who wrote incisively in New York Magazine that we need to change the language around sobriety. “’Sober curious’ worked in the beginning,” she wrote, “but not when I became certain that I was done drinking for good. “Nondrinker” was then the most accurate term, but it felt silly to define myself by what I’m not.”

I also think the language around not drinking needs to change, but I don’t know if we can do it until we change the language around alcohol. 

Consider my friend’s resentment at being told that we weren’t allowed to drink as much as the boys: alcohol is saturated in entitlement language. 

Think about it. You come home at the end of a long day and you crack open a beer or a Pinot Noir and it’s your reward. You earn your drinking badge by ageing into it – it translates into being a fully vested member of society. Being allowed to drink with boys is also kind of ritualistic for women. Women drank very differently before they entered the workforce than they did after they began to be accepted into male corporate drinking culture, competing to be seen as competent and hard enough to keep up. Proving yourself in these bonding rituals can translate into a fungible benefit at work. People are suspicious of people who don’t avail themselves of this entitlement. 

Against this backdrop, my friend and I were hardly alone in getting assy when someone revoked our alcohol card. In 2016, in the UK, health authorities released new guidelines recommending men halve their alcohol consumption to be in line with women. You should have seen the tabloids. “Government SLASHES alcohol intake for men to six glasses of wine a WEEK” fumed the Daily Mail. Like they were about to launch Law & Order Special Wetherspoons Unit*.

A follow-up study found that there was zero response to the new guidelines. People simply decided to move on as if nothing had happened. (Incidentally so did the alcohol industry – they refused to update their labeling, and in a hilarious reveal, one marketing company got sniffy that it hadn’t been consulted before the authorities released the new guidelines.) 

Put simply, if alcohol is such a major pillar of your society and culture and sacred rituals of belonging, you won’t talk yourself out of those big expectations with a magic word.

Against all this, there will be a temptation to go with something a bit more identitarian. It will be a bad idea. Even if you somehow come up with a silver-bullet identitarian label for sobriety, things could go quite badly wrong. Consider the cautionary tale of another group of people who wanted to defend themselves against getting razzed for their choice not to drink.

In the 90s at clubs and bars, you used to see some kids with big Xs sharpied on the backs of their hands. They called themselves Straight Edge and for them, not drinking and not drugging was its own form of being hard, of inhabiting a coherent identity that revolved around being present in the moment and not fuzzed out of reality. Somehow this talismanic X warded off the jeering jerks who asked if you have to call your mommy to stay out late just because you didn’t want to drink shitty beer out of a plastic cup. As with so many identitarian things, however, the problem for Straight Edge kids was mission creep. This movement started in the hardcore punk scene and it started from a nice idea, but like all good things got swiftly flushed down the toilet of the purity spiral. (It wasn’t long before nobody could simply enjoy a show without being inebriated anymore; apparently you had to buy the whole identitarian identikit. You had to be a judgmental prick who didn’t eat meat. Or, in more unfortunate scenes, apparently the judgmental pricks became… white supremacists. I don’t know the whole story of this; maybe there are still people calling themselves Straight Edge without any of that other baggage. My apologies to them, but I think it’s fair to say that fairly or not, the term straight edge has now been tarred with some fairly uncomfortable associations.) Anyway it all escalated really quickly.

So now I just don’t tell people I don’t drink. I bring a can of something colourful and creatively named and wait for someone else to do the hard work of, you know, rewriting the entire Alcohol Cinematic Universe.

*US people: Wetherspoons is like if you combined Dave & Busters with TGI Fridays with Hooters but without skimpy clad waitresses or games.

Image credits

Nik Frey (niksan), CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5, via Wikimedia Commons