Girl Drink Drunk
A little while back, I was at an event-planning meeting with about a half-dozen of people from the wine and liquor industry.
Looking at a menu, the guy who was sort of mostly in charge said: "And we can have a choice of drinks, like Old Fashioned whiskey drinks for the men and then fruity drinks for the women."
I interjected: "I'm sure you mean the other way around, right? Most women I know drink straight bourbon."
The restaurant owner then chimed in: "Yeah, like me and my girlfriend. She likes to drink spirit-forward drinks and I always go for tall, refreshing drinks."
At that point, the sort-of-in-charge-guy openly laughed at the restaurant owner who had confessed his love for "girl drinks." And, with that, we carried on with our meeting.
How did sweet, pink drinks come to be women's domain? When did drinking become a gendered activity? Why would it be so laughable for a really gruff man to sidle up to a bar and, in all seriousness, order a Cosmo? I've given quite a lot of thought to this topic. It's easy to blame Sex and the City, since the show gave that famous pink drink a serious boost and it would fast become associated with independent, urban women. Of course, it also sealed its fate. The drink became too mainstream to be cool and, eventually, indelibly identified with a show that took a turn for the worse when the writing grew lazy and hackneyed.
We can, for example, pin down the precise moment that the Cosmo was irretrievably lost. That would've been when, in the second film version of the TV show, Samantha uttered the phrase "Lawrence of my Labia." That line forever killed any chance of anything associated with that film (or the ethos it represented) holding on to any dignity and/or cultural relevance.
But the idea of "girly drinks" existed long before Carrie Bradshaw. I can remember a Kids in the Hall sketch called "Girl Drink Drunk," in which Dave Foley's character, while his boss is drinking scotch and sodas, gets wasted on blue drinks and over-the-top tiki cocktails served in pineapples and coconuts and adorned with parasols.
Foley simply explains that he never much liked the taste of alcohol.
Well, that doesn't make him a girl; that makes him a human. Although I joke that, as an Italian, I was switched from milk to wine at the age of two, we are all averse to the taste of alcohol as children, what with alcohol being a poison and our bodies being pretty good at trying to avoid poisonous substances.
That's actually part of the reason we've made it this far.
In 1931, incidentally, a scientist working for DuPont discovered that some people seem to taste things differently which led to the idea of the "supertaster," who has less tolerance for bitter than other people. This is a biological trait, not a cultural one. It also appears that, while representing maybe 20 per cent of the entire population, supertasters mostly all tend to avoid alcohol and women outnumber men roughly two to one.
Can this somehow account for the pervasive cultural stereotype that women mostly prefer sweet drinks? Well, given the small percentage of the population and that people's physical taste buds provide only part of the picture, I don't think so.
It's my feeling that women being dismissed (as bartenders and patrons) for their supposedly immature palates and pandered to in the market place is a cultural phenomenon. Men own fine wine; women drink bad Pinot Grigio on girls' night. Until recently, there were no female sommeliers and it would have been shocking for a group of suits in a white tablecloth restaurant to turn to a woman for advice on picking a bottle to go with dinner. It's fine, on the other hand for a woman to refill a coffee in a greasy spoon or a diner. A sommelier might earn $100 if he sells a group on a particularly expensive wine, whereas that coffee refill might earn the waitress a quarter.
Men like strong and hoppy craft beer. For women, there's Chick Beer, a premium light beer with 97 calories and 3.5 grams of carbs per bottle. I wish I was making that up. Brown liquor is marketed almost exclusively to men, with some of the most sexist and horrifying commercials produced since 1950s car commercials. When I last went to Kentucky, I was told by many people that bourbon's next frontier is women. In almost the same breath, they said that most companies were investing heavily in flavored (a.k.a. sugar added) whiskeys.
Although almost all distillers and industry experts have witnessed women drinking, enjoying, critiquing and, in some cases, even making whiskey, the marketers have decided it might be best to wade in to the second sex's market segment with honey, cherry and cream-flavored brown liquor.
I can't prove that this is wholly a cultural creation. But it's hardly the first time we've seen taste used as a tool to beat down a segment of society to keep it out of higher-paid positions and even conversations about the finer things in life. Women were once told they weren't smart enough for the works of John Milton or John Locke and should content themselves with novels.
Then their frivolous tastes were critiqued and their penchant for novels was taken as evidence they had weaker minds—a classic vicious circle. It took radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft to articulate what we now take for granted, that women are just as capable of reading political philosophy as men.
Women were the original brewers, tavern-keepers and distillers. Madame Clicquot Ponsardin and Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery both made valuable contributions to the evolution of champagne. Somewhere along the line, though, women were edged out of the industry, their role minimized and their "natural" tastes mocked.
Some women may well prefer fruity cocktails. And, hey, there's nothing wrong with a poolside Pina Colada. But I know hundreds of women who, like me, are also fans of smoky mezcal, peaty scotch and spicy gins.
So, next time you say you're going to get girl-drink drunk, maybe do it with a bottle of Lagavulin. I know I will.
Additional Resources
National Geographic - Are You a Supertaster?
Chicago Tribune - Madamme Pommery
The Smithsonian Mag - The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry