Alcohol is not a food group. Respect your limits.
Question: According to FBI and police officers, what is the most common date-rape drug in the US?
No one loves a glass or two of champagne more than I do (okay, sometimes three, but that’s a special occasion), but the truth is that drinking is good fun until it’s not—and finding that in-between spot is different for everyone. Some women get a headache after the second margarita and stop; others can drink cheerfully until they have lost count and consciousness. And while that decision is 100 percent yours to make, we live in a world where alcohol and sexual assault are intertwined. As mentioned earlier in Rule #4, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) states that one half of all reported sexual assaults involve alcohol consumption by the victim, perpetrator, or both.
Dating and meeting people is hard. You’re not in control. You’re nervous about being judged and criticized by others, and you’re being self-critical. Alcohol protects you. Or at least that’s what the first couple of glasses feel like. It’s social armor. And then there is peer pressure, which, contrary to what everyone thinks, doesn’t stop at the end of your teenage years. It continues throughout your adult life. Everyone else drinks! Why wouldn’t you join in on the fun?
The problem is it’s easy to lose control. Of course, no one ever deserves to be taken advantage of—whether merely buzzed or blackout drunk. But women process alcohol differently than men. “If a man and a woman have anywhere near equal the number of drinks, the woman will get more affected and more quickly,” says Sharon C. Wilsnack, PhD, an expert on the effects of alcohol on women. Men are typically bigger than women, but beyond sheer size, men have more muscle, and women more fat, which means alcohol runs through men whereas it stays in women longer. Men also have a more active stomach enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks alcohol down. “It’s more concentrated when it enters the woman’s bloodstream because it hasn’t been metabolized to the same extent it has been for men,” Wilsnack adds.
This higher concentration of alcohol leads to more than slurring words or stumbling around. “High alcohol consumption impairs judgment: so perceptually you’re not picking up the same cues of danger,” Wilsnack explains. “And physically you are often not coordinated enough to react.” Which is why drunk women are at a greater risk for accidents, STDs, unplanned pregnancy, and sexual assault. And yet, alcohol is also a powerful social lubricant—and for most of us, intertwined in dating and romance. “In the early stages with light or moderate drinking, alcohol is an aphrodisiac,” Wilsnack says. “It does make us more relaxed. That’s the hook for most women.”
It’s fine to have two glasses of wine over the course of an evening—but no matter how strong you think you are, four gets most women to a point where it may be hard to speak clearly or walk straight. (In fact, NIAAA defines binge drinking for women as four drinks in two hours or less versus five drinks in that same time period for men.) The key is knowing when to stop—because that buzz we seek on a Saturday evening can quickly turn into something far less fun.
No one has written more thoughtfully on this than Sarah Hepola. Her memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget is a wonderful explanation of how someone can so easily get in over her head using alcohol to help find love. Alcohol became her consent and allowed her to have sex with people she might not have slept with while sober, to avoid feeling lonely. Instead of finding love, she’d wake up massively hungover, tangled up in someone else’s sheets, wondering, “What the hell am I doing here?”
Does this sound remotely familiar? One of the most disturbing trends I’ve witnessed over the last decade is the rise of binge drinking. In 2015, NIAAA reported that of the 60 percent of all college students who drank alcohol, two out of three engaged in binge drinking. And while binge drinking has only risen 4.9 percent among men, the practice has risen 17.5 percent among women between 2005 and 2012.
When I was at college in the eighties, admittedly in the UK, where drinking patterns are different, I don’t remember a single person getting blackout drunk. It wasn’t a phrase you ever heard. Granted, it has become a huge issue there as well as here, despite the fact that the drinking age there is eighteen. In the US, you can’t buy alcohol until age twenty-one—one of the many reasons young women pregame. Pregaming, in turn, is a factor in the rise of binge drinking, which increases a young woman’s risk of sexual assault and physical injury as well as emergency room visits. According to a Washington Post analysis, in 2013 more than one million women wound up in emergency rooms as a result of heavy drinking. Shockingly, the rate of alcohol-related deaths for white women ages thirty-five to fifty-four has more than doubled since 1999.
Part of the reason heavy drinking has become such an epidemic among young women is due, I think, to the pressure women feel to be actively sexual with people they barely know, while also yearning for real intimacy and connection. My good friend, the former president of an all-women’s college, agrees. She told me that her students admitted that they got drunk on purpose before going out on the weekends. When she asked them why, she told me, the general response was “Because I am going to take my clothes off in front of a perfect stranger, and I don’t want to deal with that.” She added, “It’s deeply connected to the type of sex they anticipate happening. In my generation you used alcohol because it got you tipsy and flirty but not blackout drunk, because you wanted to remember it. They don’t want to remember it; they want it to happen and be over with.”
When I was editor at Cosmopolitan, we published several pieces highlighting both binge and sexual drinking on college campuses where cabdrivers would buy and supply a steady stream of beer and cheap vodka to those not yet twenty-one. As we heard from more and more women about their empty and often scary experiences, it struck me that binge drinking was essentially women self-medicating to handle the immediate sexual demands from men—with no pressure for either party to follow up the next day—and the disappointment that it all should be more fun than it is.
As it turns out, alcohol works as both a social and sexual lubricant. “It really does have physiological effects that can be interpreted as sexual enhancement in small to moderate amounts,” Wilsnack says. “But in large amounts, you just get blotto and you don’t feel sexual or anything else. That’s when the assault usually comes in.”
A study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2016 found that while women felt more attractive while buzzed, drinking also could lead them to pick “atypical” partners. That same study found that alcohol made women feel more “adventurous” when it came to sex, and led men to “aggressive” behavior. One man interviewed said, “It feels like you get a lot more primal . . . a feeling of needing something and you’re going to do whatever.”
I know it’s not politically correct to say watch your drinking, but watch your drinking. We are not letting men off the hook here—of course they shouldn’t be taking advantage of you, or anyone—but if you staggered unexpectedly into the road drunk and into the path of an oncoming car, you would be more likely to get run over and the driver would be more likely to get off even if he’s been driving recklessly. So respect your limits and avoid putting yourself in harm’s way. It’s never empowering for either sex to get blackout drunk. David Jernigan, PhD, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of their Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, compares it to walking on an icy sidewalk: “The icy sidewalk isn’t the reason you’re going to fall, but if there’s ice on the sidewalk, the fall is much more likely,” he says. “Alcohol isn’t the reason for the sexual assault, but if alcohol is involved, sexual assault is much more likely.”
Let me repeat: This is not a green light for men to get away with bad behavior. But ultimately you need to look out for yourself.
The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs published a study that found that 82 percent of college students who had unwanted sex were under the influence of alcohol, while another study done by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia found that 47 percent of college-aged women who were raped in that state believe they were unable to effectively resist as a result of their own alcohol use.
Know the facts before you go out and get hammered.
This also speaks directly to the blurry lines around consent. During the summer of 2016, I was sitting in the back of a cab in midtown Manhattan when an advertisement popped on the screen embedded in the back of the driver’s seat. The ad had Zoe Saldana saying, “There’s one thing I give to everyone I have sex with.” She was followed by cameos of a half-dozen solemn celebrities, including Nina Dobrev and Josh Hutcherson, repeating the word consent.
All I could think was, “How have we gotten to the point where consent needs its own advertising campaign?”
Perhaps it is because the dominant public discourse today around sex is not about love or the search to find a lasting partner; it’s about rape and assault. Sex is not this fantastic, blissful experience that launched a million movies and novels and poems and paintings. It is violent and scary. It’s drunken and blurry. Whether it’s Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted of raping a twenty-three-year-old unconscious woman after a frat party, or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where each episode is based on another hideous sexual assault.
And then there are the many ways alcohol is portrayed on the big and small screens, which I can’t help but think influence our attitude about its role in our lives. Take that scene in Trainwreck where Amy Schumer is on the phone with her friend Nikki the morning after she’s spent the night at the apartment of the doctor, played by Bill Hader, whom she has a crush on.
AMY: I slept at the doctor’s place last night.
NIKKI: You never spend the night. What were you, blackout drunk?
AMY: No, I had like two drinks . . . Three, max . . . Four, now that I’m tallying.
NIKKI: Cause you’re on antibiotics or something?
AMY: Oh my god, he’s calling me.
NIKKI: Why would he call? You guys just had sex.
AMY: [answers phone] This is Amy. I think you butt dialed me.
AARON: No, I dialed you with my fingers.
AMY: [to Nikki] He called me on purpose.
NIKKI: Hang up! He’s obviously like sick or something.
AARON: I was calling to say I had a really good time last night and was wondering if you wanted to, um, hang out again.
NIKKI: I’m going to call the police.
There is little to no indication in contemporary popular culture that sex can be fabulous, life enhancing, or fun—or that it can lead to love. The only fun women in movies have with sex seems to be laughing about it afterward with their friends, as they swap their own Amy Schumer–esque experiences. Alcohol is often involved in these scenes, and everyone is laughing whenever alcohol shows up on the screen. Think Bridesmaids when Kristen Wiig gets really drunk on the plane and we all find it hilarious. Or the menopausal Rita Wilson and Ali Wentworth talking about their vaginas closing up over chardonnay in It’s Complicated.
To that point, white wine has become the signifier of female bonding—both on the screen and in real life. When was the last time you went to an event where alcohol was not served? Whether a book club (sauvignon blanc), baby showers (prosecco), girls’ nights out (margaritas or manhattans, depending on the season). And then all the weddings, birthdays, or any other excuse to pop the champagne and officially get giddy. A popular hashtag in summer 2017 was #RoseAllDay. Drinking is a way of showing that you like to have a good time and go with the flow. And getting drunk is a way to reinforce to the world that you are having a good time—even when you are not.
In another scene in Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s character chugs Bandit boxed wine, also known as “binge in a box.” Trinchero Family Estates, which produces the wine, saw an opportunity and promoted the scene on social media, which prompted young women to share photos of themselves chugging Bandit. This is murky territory, as it went against the rules around advertising alcohol—the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, one of the largest US trade groups, rejects ads that “in any way suggest that intoxication is socially acceptable conduct.” The beer and wine trade groups have similar rules, but they are easily broken and, according to Jernigan, not readily enforced. Women are being marketed to specifically; think Skinnygirl vodka (PS, it’s about the same amount of calories as regs vodka!) or Mommy’s Time Out, a wine that comes in white, red, and pink. Urban Outfitters sells a wineglass big enough to hold an entire bottle and etched with the line “Drink until your dreams come true.”
These messages start early and have an impact. “Eightyfive percent of all drinkers in the US started drinking before they were twenty-one,” Jernigan says. For decades, beer was the favored choice among teens, but that has shifted recently. “Bud Light is still number one, but alcopops—Smirnoff Ice and Mike’s Hard Lemonade—are numbers two and three,” Jernigan says. “They are sweet, fizzy, and brightly colored, and have been marketed by the industry for new drinkers who don’t like the taste of alcohol.” The natural segue is from the Skinnygirl vodka of your calorie-counting twenties to the “mommy juice” wine of your thirties. “Sex and the City was a real turning point—those women were rarely without a cocktail,” Jernigan says. “We’re seeing more drinking acts per hour in entertainment today than we’ve ever seen before.”
Binge drinking, as already noted, is on the rise, most noticeably among women. Between 2005 and 2012, the rates for women grew by 17.5 percent, and for men by 4.9 percent, Jernigan says. This is not an area where we want gender equity. The irony, and the slippery slope, is that while women get drunk more easily than men, they are also more prone to suffer brain atrophy, heart disease, and liver damage from heavy alcohol consumption, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Women who drink also have an increased risk of breast cancer,” Jernigan says. “Women are at higher risk for liver, brain, and heart damage than men who drink comparable amounts. There is also a link between alcohol, which is a depressant, and depression and anxiety. For women who have either condition, drinking will only exacerbate it. “Adolescent girls are twice as likely to be depressed as adolescent boys,” Jernigan adds. “And there’s a stronger relationship between depression and substance abuse in girls than boys.”
Yet on TV and in the movies, women are usually portrayed as funny when they get drunk—never pathetic or vomiting, or even if they are, still somehow funny.
In real life, what starts funny can quickly turn to pathetic and scary. Lena Dunham is one of the few writer-directors who tackles alcohol with realism. In the final season of HBO’s Girls, Hannah, Dunham’s character, gets so drunk that she ends up sleeping with the surf instructor she is supposed to be writing about for a magazine article, and then vomits over the side of his bed. Whereas Amy Schumer makes drinking humorous and, in theory, empowering for girls, Dunham shows the flip side of it, the lonely sadness of the drunk girl. Her drinking allows her to fast-forward intimacy with the guy played by Riz Ahmed—they spend that weekend together, and she starts to fall for him, when it is clear all he wants is vigorous and easily available sex. When she mentions that she might rent a place in this seaside town to work on her writing, the subtext is clear—she wants to spend more time with him. So when he says, “Oh, that’s great! You can meet my girlfriend,” her disappointment is painful to watch.
Alcohol hurtles you past the awkward stages of getting to know someone, which you think you don’t need, when you often do. These stages actually protect you and allow you off-ramps along the way that you don’t necessarily notice when you’re tipsy. Alcohol blocks out potential red flags.
Sarah Hepola relates. “At the age of thirty-two, I was the one who was making the jokes about having sex with some guy and not really knowing his name and saying that it was not that big of a deal,” she says. “I don’t think I was out there just wanting to have these sexual experiences. I think I wanted each of those things to turn into more. I wanted a deep and sustaining love with someone else. But in absence of that it was like, this will do.”
And while looking for that, she put herself in danger. Though she doesn’t remember the details, she does recall the bruises the next morning. “I spent a lot of time in my twenties beating myself up for that, thinking, ‘Why was I so stupid?’” she says. “But actually, if you think about how alcohol works, it is not that you were stupid. It is that you were drunk.”
Sober since thirty-five, Hepola, now forty-two, is currently single and can articulate better than anyone I have met the tricky relationship between love and alcohol. The problem with dating, she says, is that there is this idea that women are supposed to just organically find love. “It’s supposed to just happen,” she says. Since it does not “just happen,” alcohol provides the usually false hope that it can help get you there. “Alcohol gave me this sense of confidence I badly wanted and a sense of comfort in my body and a sense of exhibitionism that can really be rewarded,” Hepola explains. “Alcohol gave me access to what I wanted—but then what I wanted changed, because I was drunk.”
Drinking speeds up familiarity, which is encouraged by our culture, where everything else is so sped up. You can join Tinder and go out on a date with someone within two hours. Most likely, you meet at a bar, have a drink, which gets rid of your inhibitions, so you drink to become the witty smart-ass personality you created online. You also want any reservations you feel bubbling up to recede, because if you say no to sex on the first date, then you’re being prim. So you drink away this worry, too, not realizing that you are also drinking away your ability to hear alarm bells if this is not a good situation. Hepola had more one-night stands than she can remember. “It makes you feel good in the moment,” she says. “And terrible afterward.” Just like fast food.
Her sobriety finally helped her understand real attraction. “One of the biggest revelations for me was, ‘Oh, this is what chemistry feels like,’” she says. “You can tell when someone was the right person for you to be with. Whereas before, I would drink myself to that place.” For college students in particular, alcohol has become central to the sexual experience. “It is seen as a lead-up to hookups, and necessary foreplay,” Hepola says.
The culture around pregaming, drinking on an empty stomach, inserting vodka-soaked tampons, and lining up shots, are all risk factors in blacking out. We teach women to cover their drinks so no one slips something in them, but not that the drinks they buy themselves are dangerous. In addition to the host of risks already mentioned, women are more prone than men to blackouts, which is when your brain shuts down because you drank so much. “Drinking has been tied up with these messages of empowerment,” Hepola says. “But drinking to oblivion means you have lost your power, as well as balance and judgment. And then your memory starts to shut down. That is the message that has to be disrupted. For men and women.”
Especially since we can barely get through the week without reading about some horror story that involves alcohol and sexual assault. It’s hard to imagine a more deeply disturbing story than that of Marina Lonina, who livestreamed her friend being raped on Periscope. In her court testimony, Lonina at first claimed that she grabbed her phone to film it as evidence but then got swept up by how many “likes” the video got. Both she and the victim had been drinking—newspaper reports claim the victim was “heavily intoxicated.” The rapist, someone both women knew, had been drinking with them. He was sentenced to nine years in prison, Lonina to nine months in jail for “obstructing justice,” and her friend has become the one in four women who get sexually assaulted each year.
Would the evening have been different without alcohol?
So, how have we gotten here, and how do we reassure people that a robust sex life can be achieved without copious amounts of alcohol? And remind folks that an orgasm will help you sleep far more effectively than any Ambien? And above all, that a good sex life is free? We need a better understanding of the benefits of a good sex life and a road map to finding someone you trust enough to have it with. We know that in an era of Tinder, Hinge, and Happn, finding someone to have sex with is not the issue. As one Cosmo staffer assured me when she dropped off some copy one afternoon, no one has any issues getting laid anymore. Finding commitment is the challenge, and having good sex, sexy sex, sex that doesn’t leave you in need of a hot shower wondering whether to call the campus police, is hard.
So, get out your journal and start taking note of your own alcohol intake:
How often do you drink?
How many glasses per night? Per week?
Why do you drink?
Has anything bad happened to you as a result of your drinking?
If you’ve ever been assaulted, was alcohol involved?
Own up to your drinking. And then do a friend-to-alcohol audit:
Who drinks the most of all your friends? Do you drink more around that person? Is there anything about their behavior that makes you feel uncomfortable?
Who drinks the least?
I’m not saying don’t drink. I get that it’s confidence in a glass—that’s why we all love it. It’s fun, it gives you a great buzz, everybody else is doing it, but know your limits.
What is your tipping point? Is it three glasses of wine over the course of a long dinner? Or two martinis during a cocktail hour? Know the signs before you get up and realize you can’t walk straight or think straight, either. If you can’t trust that your friends will cut you off when you have had enough, then you have to be your own advocate.
ACTION PLAN
It’s simple: Drink and have fun but don’t get drunk. More than three glasses of wine in an hour is considered binge drinking.
Or here’s a radical thought, try SWS. Sex while sober. A study in the Journal of Sex Research found that since alcohol is a depressant, during the sexual act it can actually dampen sexual response in both women and men. In short, your best orgasms happen while sober.