There’s no factual information to come away with here. This is purely a “journey, not the destination” essay.
HOWEVER, Tl;dr: headlines are often not written by the same people who write the article, but they can substantially alter your prejudices about how you go into a piece of writing.
In my daily routine of trawling through theme-specific meme pages, I came across a very out of place article. A girl, looking to be in her 20’s posted the following article, as it was tangentially relevant to a reference the page members would all get: http://qz.com/762868/giving-up-alcohol-opened-my-eyes-to-the-infuriating-truth-about-why-women-drink/
Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink
That is an enticing, clickbait, title, isn’t it? It stoked my prejudices. “Let me guess, upper-middle class sorority girl approaching 30 realizes her friends are immature, hashes it out in writing? Doesn’t Elite Daily have that as a weekly column?”
Read the article; hate along with me? That’s what my instinct is for these kinds of things. I think somewhere along the lines that became the idea. Clickbait is reality TV in written form: you read it for the sense of superiority. A woman opens up an article with “I’m newly sober”. Which means she just got done going through some variety of personal Hell. And instead of sympathy, I’m annoyed with her. In retrospect, I realise I’m an asshole. Also, she and I were set up–but we don’t find that out ‘til later. I’m reading this article with a thesis in mind: “I know the reason women drink”. That was what I was promised would be revealed. By sentence 2, we have a reference to whole foods, and by the end of the first paragraph, there’s a reference to her pharmacy that sells growlers of beer. This completely reinforces my preconception that this woman is in a social class different than mine, probably a different ecology. I don’t go to Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. I didn’t even know they had pharmacies that sold beer on demand. This woman does not live in the same world I do, but she has the temerity to think that she knows why women in my life drink? Fuck her!
She talks about a party sponsored by her work. She sees alcohol everywhere. When you just walk out of Hell, the Devil will try his damnedest to pull you back in. Your perspective on reality gets warped. I’m sure it sucks. But I can’t sympathize. That’s not a moral judgement, I mean literally, I lack the life-experience. I can only empathize. And I do in an abstract sense, sure. But honestly I don’t feel anything. I don’t know her. Her pain doesn’t mean anything to me; there’s not enough space in my brain to care either. I’m not here to sympathize, I want to get back to that thesis.
“That’s the summer I realize that everyone around me is tanked. But it also dawns on me that the women are super double tanked — that to be a modern, urbane woman means to be a serious drinker.”
Ah-ha! That sounds like we’re getting back on track. Women and drinking—those are the watchwords. You read the paragraph, and depending on how much crap on the internet you read, the woman-only message might bait you. It grabbed on commenter. “It’s not just women who do this; it’s men too!” It’s not an unreasonable interjection, really—although the commenter in question was being kin of a presumptuous dick about it. There is a sizeable volume of editorials on the internet coming from (mostly young) women about how life is horrible for women in the modern day, falling under the protective aegis of feminism. 2nd-wave feminist Camille Paglia summarizes poignantly the general criticism that can be levied at these articles: https://youtu.be/KlYR1isM2o8?t=35m30s
So a “here we go again” eye-roll is not out of line. But she’s not stuck with that line of thinking. Off to the next paragraph. 3 women she knows on Facebook (who don’t know she’s quit drinking) suggest she have wine. “Why do they need to drink? …there’s no easy way to be a woman, because, as you may have noticed, there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe you drink a little. Or a lot.”
So again, sounds like we’re going to get something lining up with that thesis again. Women drink to deal with sexism in the culture? Is that what’s coming?
“The year before I get sober, I’m asked to be The Woman on a panel at the company where I work.” She then tells an anecdote about how the panel had the insipid job of patting themselves on the back on behalf of the company for respecting women’s diversity and synergy, or some business bullshit about respecting women that no actual human takes seriously. That’s gotta suck.
“I could tell the panel organizers this is why you never have just one of us up there. I could buy myself a superhero costume and devote the rest of my life to vengeance on mansplainers everywhere.”
That sentence did not help her credibility on avoiding the whole “whiney bourgeois internet feminist”—“mansplain” is a red flag. But buried in the delivery is a point anybody who’s worked long enough can relate to: what do you do when your company is being fucking stupid? You want to call them out on it, but you know it won’t work, and you can’t afford to rock the boat… so fuck it, get drunk.
“I round up some girlfriends and we spend hundreds of dollars in a hipster bar, drinking rye Manhattans and eating tapas and talking about the latest crappy”
Again, killing her ethos by so well describing a lifestyle that I am not privy to. She is not in my class. How can she speak authoritatively on it? Fuck you, rich sorority girl!
She moves on to her next paragraph. “Do you remember the Enjoli perfume commercial from the 1970s?” No, I can’t say I—wait, 1970’s? Okay, if you remember something from the 70’s, then you’re at least like 45. And so this was the point my image of a smart-dressed sorority girl evanesced. This is not another dime-a-dozen late-20-something chick bitching on the internet about boys and life. This is a middle aged woman. I’ve been scammed! All right, who is this woman? *Googles name
Oh, hey, you know that company she worked for? You’ve heard of it: Amazon. She’s been in management with the company for a decade. She has a blog, too: http://www.kristicoulter.com/about/
So this wasn’t a one-off article for Quartz. Well, let’s go back to the essay as the author intended. She let Medium have first crack at it: https://medium.com/@kristicoulter/https-medium-com-kristicoulter-the-24-hour-woman-3425ca5be19f#.xqcolh9xd
Notice two things: the pictures are both of pools; the title is “Enjoli”. That was the title the author chose. That’s a personal title. No editor would have okayed it, because nobody under 40 would even have a clue what the fuck the article was a reference to, and those who did would still have zero enticement to read the article. That title is a purely personal one. It’s not at all uncommon to have headline writers at publications independent from the authors. Arguably, there’s an art to condensing an article into a headline, and writers can be trusted to take an ax to their own work to distill down a catchy headline.
Where this article works is as a stream of consciousness. It’s a cathartic article. The author may even think she has a real thesis in her essay, but she doesn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that from an artistic perspective. But Quartz either didn’t know how to sell that angle or didn’t want to. What does sell is “women explains what’s wrong with society”, and that’s what the headline turned into. Quartz’s target demo of yuppies and young people doesn’t give a shit about dealing with a midlife crisis and recovering from alcoholism. I clicked to feel superior to sorority girls, dammit!
But if there’s no actual thesis to be teased out of this article for deliberation, then all my critiques of her arguments going on in my head were misguided. The arguments aren’t crafted arguments, they’re the author trying to get a hold of her thoughts.
Here’s the most highlighted segment, according to Medium: “Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body?”
This is pretty boilerplate internet feminism. And Medium’s target demo eats that shit for breakfast. But here’s the thing, our author is well into her middle ages. The argument is no longer right or wrong, it’s an anachronism; it makes no fucking sense if you take it at face value. Somebody who’s been working at a company like Amazon in management for a decade is not making 77 cents to the male dollar. I have zero issue believing she has a hundred anecdotes about workplace sexism, and hell, I’d read an essay about all those. But she’s not talking about that. Because she’s trying to forget about Amazon. It’s not in her bio; it’s not in the essay, despite the fact that people would find the name-dropping enticing. She might be tech-savvy enough for Uber, but she is not speaking for the first world women in her age bracket when she references fear of an Uber driver. 45 year old women have their own cars, and don’t usually go out to party on weekends downtown (although given her past with alcohol, she may have a skewed perception). Someone who was a manager with Amazon for a decade is not walking down the part of town alone where people who harass you on the street exist with any real frequency. And why would a (presumably) financially stable middle aged women give a shit about abortion? I mean, I totally get having political opinions, but that can’t be a relevant concern for her. She’s not going to not be able to finish high school and not have a place to live if she gets pregnant. She mentions it again later in the article, too.
Again, the next couple paragraphs stroll through the “alcohol is everywhere… why is it everywhere?!” mood. And then “why do women make so many fatuous fucking comments about wine?”
“The longer I am sober, the less patience I have with being a 24-hour woman. The stranger who tells me to smile. The janitor who stares at my legs. The men on TV who want to annex my uterus….
And then I start to get angry at women, too. Not for being born wrong, or for failing to dismantle a thousand years of patriarchy on my personal timetable. And not for enjoying a glass of wine, alone or with their girlfriends… But for being so easily mollified by overdrinking. For thinking that the right to get as trashed as a man means anything but the right to be as useless.”
These are non-sequiturs. And that’s the neat thing about stream-of-consciousness—it makes for boring-ass novels, but good reading in autobiographies. The stranger and the janitor are some of life’s annoyances. They are not unique to the 24-hour woman. The men on the TV? They can’t hurt her. These people, these men are annoying. Also, the women are annoying. But if every woman is a 24 hour woman, why can these annoying bitches make it work?
“I couldn’t afford to be a 24-hour woman. But it didn’t stop me from trying till it shattered me.
I am very angry with women that summer and then I’m very, very angry with myself.”
And back to the titular paragraph:
“I blame that [Enjoli perfume] bitch for a lot. For spreading the notion that women should have a career, keep house, and fuck their husbands, when the only sane thing to do is pick two and outsource the third. For making it seem glamorous. For suggesting it was going to be fun.”
It would of course be fatuous to blame the commercial, or even commercialism for her state–and I don’t think she necessarily means to, to be fair. It’s the human condition of the modern man—and thanks to second-wave feminism, the modern woman, too:
You are free. You have your needs pretty much provided for. You can do anything you want. Well, not anything, but basically anything. “So, uh, like, any advice?” Not really. Oh, I mean, you gotta go to college, I’m pretty sure. Other than that you’re on your own. Oh, and so ergo it’s also 100% on you to ensure your own happiness, so if you’re ever unhappy, that completely on you.
My favorite drinking song is “L’Ivrogne” (the drunk) by Jacques Brel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJxmjw4Pv_Y
Coming just after ironic comments by the singer is the line in the chorus, “Mais j’ai mal d’être moi”, “But it hurts to be me”. Concluding with, “friend, refill my glass”. Drinking to take the edge off the world’s stupid bullshit is a thing. But drinking because “it hurts to be me” is another. And I think that’s what our author hit. She had the successful corporate job she thought would make her happy—people told it would be a good aspiration. But now she’s middle aged, no kids, and not just sick of life’s bullshit, but it hurts to be her. The drinking was keeping her afloat. Until it wasn’t. So now what? I mean, I don’t have an answer. She appears she still has processing to do.
But she ends with a tease of the proverbial imagining of Sisyphus happy: “It is so nice on this side of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I can’t believe I get to be here.”
(That explains the pictures of the pools heading the articles.)
She’s doing writing now. She’s unestablished, hence publishing on Medium (they don’t pay authors), and aside from a few essays, things are all forthcoming. I don’t know if writing a novel is the female equivalent of getting a new sportscar; I don’t know if the change will be lasting. I can’t say how she’ll turn out. There but for the grace of God go us?