Bitch Beer
I never much cared for HBO's old show, Sex in the City, because I thought it presented a portrayal of women that claimed to be feminist and liberated but was, in fact, quite the opposite: It showed women behaving just as shallowly and stupidly as men do and called it progress. One of the small ways in which I thought this was true was the show's depiction of its female characters throwing back Cosmopolitan after Cosmopolitan. As a result of that portrayal, thousands of New York women began doing the same and still do.
In my experience, most women who drink a couple of Cosmos are, basically, drunk, and some are well on their way after just one of the potent concoctions. Cosmopolitans contain quite a lot of alcohol, even though they don't taste like it, and due to their generally lesser body weight, most women are more affected by the booze than men are. That's just my anecdotal observation, but I think it's true.
And—though this part was not in my experience—it seemed to me that the result of that imbibing was that women were more likely to have casual sex they'd later regret. In other words, a show that was supposed to be all about women's sexual strength was in fact encouraging them to drink until they lost their judgment regarding matters sexual and otherwise. This did not strike me as a good thing; though you'd never have learned it from Sex in the City, the world can be a dangerous place, and men can behave badly, not least when women are drunk. In the most extreme example, I wonder if
Immette St. Guillen was drinking Cosmos.
(That suggestion is certainly not to blame the poor woman for what happened to her—only the killer can be blamed for that—but to suggest that it is unwise for a 5'3" woman to be alone, drunk, in a bar at 4 A.M. Things shouldn't be that way, but they are.)
Now the University of North Carolina at Wilmington has conducted a study about men and women's drinking habits that seems to confirm my surmises. As
InsideHigherEd.com reports, some college students have taken to calling fruity liquor drinks "bitch beer," meaning that those drinks have become to women what beer is to men—with a serious dose of misogyny thrown in.
Among the study's conclusions: Many women underestimate the potency of liquor-based drinks and as a result are often drunk well before the men with whom they are socializing. And what women do when they are drunk tends to differ from what men do. Many male college students reported that they needed to be drunk in order to dance; many women reported that being drunk made them more likely to have sex with men they didn't know well. (This falls into the realm of the obvious, but still, it's nice to see it confirmed.)
And many bars exploit these truisms, by, for example, letting all women in free of charge—or just letting women wearing skirts in for free.
As readers of this blog will know, I'm generally skeptical of attempts to divide men and women by character traits. But surely we can look at how they are divided by physical ones, and differing reactions to alcohol seems a worthwhile line of inquiry.
