Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back” was recently published by Alcove Press. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and X. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
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The number of women ages 40 to 64 who ended up at the hospital after abusing alcohol almost doubled during the pandemic, according to a study of insurance claims published this month in the journal JAMA Health Forum.
This research comes on the heels of a study published last year that found alcohol-related deaths are rising fastest among women. In 2022, researchers found that the rate of having five or more drinks at a time grew twice as fast among women ages 35 to 50 as among men over the previous decade.
It’s clear: American women are increasingly abusing alcohol — often with devastating outcomes. To address the problem, our society needs to reckon with how it treats women as well as the disturbing way we talk about alcohol.
As Celeste Yvonne (her pen name) writes in “It’s Not About the Wine: The Loaded Truth Behind Mommy Wine Culture,” for many mothers (including in the past herself), “wine is just the undertone of something far more nefarious and disturbing: a cultural crush from the pressures of the mental load of motherhood, the increase in mothers returning to the workforce without appropriate support systems, and the societal expectations to do it all ourselves (and make it look easy).”
Research published by Pew Research Center last year again confirmed what we all already know: Among heterosexual couples, even when the husband and wife earn similar amounts of money, men devote more of their time to leisure, while women spend more of their time on housework and caregiving. What’s more, women who work in service jobs often get their schedules at the last minute, when it’s too late to make arrangements for their children’s care. And, in the United States, child care can cost more than college, putting it out of reach for many families. So it’s easy to see why some moms such as Yvonne might turn to alcohol to help handle the pressures of the gargantuan workloads and stressors they shoulder.
Of course, these are just the start of the challenges women are up against in our society. There have been astounding increases in domestic violence against women in recent years. At work, women on average earn just 84 cents for every dollar earned by men and are up against endless stereotypes about why they’re not leadership material.
When people have a difficult day, what do they often say? They joke about having a drink. “Anyone who’s been on social media in the last ten years has seen the memes: ‘Mommy needs wine.’ ‘I wine because my kids whine.’ You can buy infant onesies that say ‘I’m the reason mommy drinks’ on Amazon,” Yvonne points out.
It’s on all of us to stop sharing and laughing at this dangerous message. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “all alcoholic drinks, including red and white wine, beer, and liquor, are linked with cancer. The more you drink, the higher your cancer risk.” The study published this month in JAMA Health Forum reminds us of how alcohol can cause other potentially deadly outcomes for women, including liver disease and heart and gastric problems.
The imperative here is for our society to rethink its unrealistic expectations and outrageous treatment of women — and stop telling women to solve their own problems with an addictive, potentially deadly drug. As I’ve said before, addressing the real challenges women — especially mothers — are up against in our society requires employers to stop expecting overwork and men to do more household work and caregiving, for starters.
It requires social structures such as an adequate childcare system and resources for women who need to leave abusive homes. And it requires our society to acknowledge and rectify its shocking biases about women in (and out) of the workforce.
Women who are struggling with alcohol abuse also need better support. In “Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink In a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol,” Holly Whitaker explains why traditional methods of quitting drinking didn’t work for her — and might not for many women. Drawing on work by author and educator Carol Lee Flinders, she explains that such programs are often designed to change the way men are socialized to think and act.
Men often enjoy the freedom to act on their desires, so most treatment programs therefore teach people to resist their desire to drink — but women in our society often don’t have the privilege of indulging in their desires in the first place, so the message doesn’t resonate.
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“What healed me wasn’t obliterating my sense of self, silencing myself, or denying my desires or body, or closing myself off more from the world — it was the opposite that saved me,” Whitaker writes.
It’s time for our society to take a hard look at the social structures and expectations that are causing women to abuse alcohol at such alarming rates. We all also need to stop sharing jokes and memes that suggest it’s humorous for people of any gender to deal with the stresses they’re up against by imbibing carcinogens.
And treatment programs need to speak to the ways women are socialized to think and act, rather than assuming what works for men will also work for them. Alcohol is increasingly killing women — there’s nothing funny about this.
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