Main Edition
US
FR
'Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male.' Image credit: How to have sex.
Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? The energy rising lightly in your solar plexus and making your cheeks ache from smiling; and how time would drop away, so that there was only now, tonight, this? And what a thrill it all was? I still remember, just about. And I did so this week as I read various handwringing responses to the question of why British teenage girls are allegedly getting bladdered so often.
A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organisation last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th.
Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioural manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honour of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early.
Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the piss at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs. Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.
In short, few seem to remember how much fun it can be to be a drunk teenage girl (or just a drunk teenager, full stop). Unlike the discourse around male drinking, there is little mythologising of female drinking culture to leaven the relentless doom mongering. We don’t have our own Lucky Jim, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, or Bertie Wooster. At a push, we have Dorothy Parker for our finer alcoholic moments and Jean Rhys for all the others.
Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamourising cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeA thoroughly reasonable take and a fine antidote to the puritanical, pearl clutching, nanny state enabling, vapor catching scolds. Brava!
People around the world have been making beer for many thousands of years. There’s a theory that agriculture began for the beer; bread came later. Maybe they were just sipping from little cockle-shells, but I doubt it.
A brief history of my own drinking:
Being given cheeky nips of whisky from my dad’s glass when I was about 8 must have been my first taste of alcohol. I though it was exciting in an unmanageable sort of way and couldn’t imagine drinking any more than that wee smudge.
Drinking the “s–t mix” (i.e. a plastic bottle containing all manner of alcoholic beverages that some friend or other had concocted by skimming off a little from our parents’ drinks bottles, but not so much they’d notice) in some dark alleyway or in the cemetery (so respectful) of the little Yorkshire town where I went to school, thinking a) it was horrid, but b) I was cool and that this was necessary to have friends. (I also remember being very, very cold as I was busting out the classic British girl move of not wearing a coat on nights out so you didn’t have to pay for the cloakroom – if you ask me this is just as worrying a trend as the alcohol consumption.)
After I could drink legally: many, MANY Archers and lemonades. While wearing many, MANY sparkly butterfly clips in my hair: this was the late 90s after all.
First 2 years of university; did not drink a drop
Erasmus year in Munich, trying desperately to understand law lectures in German and failing. Hit the drink in response, notably cocktails and Glühwein, drunk in the smart Schwabing district and on Christmas markets respectively.
Spend rest of my 20s thinking I am a hybrid of Carrie and Miranda from SATC and drank many, many Cosmos (not in Manhattan, but in Vienna which was a good approximation, I thought)
Mid 30s; alcohol tolerance drops off a cliff.
Christmas 2024, age 42: spend a whole day in bed after consuming half a glass of Belgian beer.
THE END (maybe.)
Ha! There’s no ‘bottom of the glass’ for someone whose glass is always half-full!
Hopefully.
@unherd, can we please out the downvoters?
One drink helped a shy 17 year old. The first drink is still the best. Women carry a huge weight in society, so a relaxer helps.
If teenagers don’t drink, they find the buzz through illegal drugs. Drugs containing who knows what, from who knows where – and in who knows what quantity. Drugs distributed by criminals make criminals out of children, contribute no tax, make people poor, and keep them poor.
I agree about drink and shyness as you’ll see from my comment. But I’m a bit confused as to what this huge weight is that is specific to women. And what relationship does it have to shyness?
Alcohol in my teenage was socially irresistible. Alcohol in my twenties and thirties was a way to have fun. Alcohol in my forties and fifties was an all pervading social lubricant. Alcohol in my fifties became something to be seriously appreciated in expensive wines. Alcohol in my early sixties worried me as I saw the lives of more friends and relatives badly damaged ( and even ended) by it and my concerns about my own possible addiction grew. In my late sixties I stopped taking alcohol . It was surprisingly easy. I found that I appreciated the whole of every day with no part muddled or obscured by alcohol. It also occurred to me that I had too little time left and too aged and neglected a constitution to risk losing any more time or experience to the confusing and limiting effects of alcohol. Now well into my seventies I wish I had made that choice in my twenties. My life has been a lucky and rich one, but I believe it might have been even better without the drug of alcohol being so present in it. I too look back on the joys of youthful discovery with a grateful smile – but I am no longer sure that alcohol was a benefit . It could have been a gross deception – as my smoking of tobacco most certainly was.
These are merely my personal reflections. Others’ lives will differ!
Perhaps it needs to be approached with more care, and more time for your body to recover, even when young.
Older people who are still getting plastered all the time is a bit sad. Not just for the health risks, but because they seem not to have found any real fulfilment. Their lives have been about work, money and booze. The work stops, and only booze is left.
I had managers who scived off for a three hour lunch break and came back drunk every Friday. Thoroughly useless managers they were but no system in place to check them out.
As an orphan I never really drank. I just could not afford it. I am really glad about that to this day.
Cheers, Kathleen.
Trebles all round!
In the 1970s we were lucky, off to the pub most Friday nights from the age of 15 onwards, publicans turned a blind eye in those days providing you behaved yourself, which we did, we were there to socialise not get drunk. The place was full of boys and girls from the local high schools + a few parents and even teachers. Happy days. What did I drink ? Cinzano and lemonade, G and T, Rum and Coke, cider, Pernod and blackcurrant.
It’s interesting that the tightening up of the laws around teenage drinking seems to have led to much more drunkeness. I suppose because it has made the drinking of alcohol a private affair instead of one that used to happen openly in a pub alongside adults of all ages.
There used to be a song back then, “Give me one more rule, and I’ll break it . . .”
The price of beer in the pub overtaking g the price of beer in the shop was an all round bad thing.
David, exactly what I was going to say. I remember the time well, when the price of beer in a pub was roughly the price in an off licence. We went to the pub all the time.
Nowadays youngsters get drunk on spirits before they leave home.
I thought that sounded familiar and I was right. You do realize those lyrics are from the theme to Laverne and Shirley, right?
I did’nt realise that, they’re not quite the same, I think the band I knew all those years ago must have created their own rather more edgy, rebellious version. London 1979 when bands played in pubs.
Ah, well there were a lot of iconic TV theme songs in that age that would hold up against what was playing on the radio then, and certainly hold up against the junk kids listen to now, and that was one of the better ones. The Cheers theme remains one of my all time favorite songs period. As a 90’s kid I watched a lot of late night reruns and that was one of several shows from slightly to well before my time that I came to appreciate.
I love Cheers.
During lockdown, I tortured myself and watched every episode.
Pubs are central to western civilisation. Of course it goes wrong sometimes and people are harmed by booze but the benefits of community eased a little with beer a beyond compare
I can understand the tortured part. That show got pretty heavy at times and some of the episodes are hard to watch. One of the only shows to have to deal with the death of an actor. Then Sam and Diane was one of the better tragic romances written for serialized television. Lot of good tv.
Something I observed while living in Scotland, though it may be a general rule, is that the more uptight and restrained a culture is most of the time, the more the need to let off steam with alcohol at the weekend.
Perhaps more relaxed cultures are happier with more moderate drinking and feel less of a need to binge.
I had an acquaintance (long dead) who had an old national service friend from the Ulapool area who he visited regularly over the years.
As he told it, the Presbyterian Churches grip on the community was akin to that of the Taliban (padlocking playground swings and no hanging out washing on a Sunday, woman expected to wear hats outside the house and so on) save that did not apparently have an issue with drink and even drunkenness was socially acceptable
Units of alcohol per capita are rough the same in Italy and the UK.
The Italians are nit famed for being uptight
Fair point, though having been out at night in the U.K. and in Italy there is a real difference. Are drinking patterns different? Is the way different nationalities respond to drink different?
What a strange article even by Unherd’s standards. A paean to teenage girls’ drinking and then a throwaway paragraph linking it to the ongoing rape-gangs- grooming scandal (carefully not mentioning Pakistanis) and then to make it even more absurd, the commentators below reminiscing about getting drunk and signing off ‘cheers.’
What a weird, previously unheard of for me, Unherd world!
It should also be noted that young teenage girls should not be let out on their own at night in such economically depressed regions. I know many families in such towns and they are very wary.
Can’t mention the rapists of course unless they were British.
” … social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity …” Do not read too much into the what the social workers and police said. They were looking for any excuse to avoid arresting Muslims.
This is too rose tinted. Much of the violence, litter, unwanted pregnancy and disorder comes from that ‘innocent’ drinking. It is a pathology that is behind many teen car crashes and it is one that renders most British town centres no-go areas at night. People who do not know how to relax or talk have to get drunk in order to succeed, only to find that back in the real, sober world they are just as shy as they were in the first place, only poorer and sicker and more pregnant.
First, I’d advocate some sort of golden mean. Drink is enjoyable, but if you want to carry on enjoying it you need to manage your consumption.
Second, as a relatively shy teen, drink enabled me to overcome my shyness in a way that was relatively permanent. It’s probably not the best way, but it can help.
Seconded. There’s also credible anecdotal records, for example, of shy men who used drink to loosen up and talk to women later became their wives. Not all of them became career boozers thereafter. Friendships that begin in the rosy glow of consumption often endure once the glasses are put away.
On the violence and impaired judgment front, Graham certainly has a point. Yet what do we see in the Muslim world, where enforced alcohol prohibition is the norm? I’m not suggesting some simple cause and effect formula, just that human violence and poor judgment hardly require lubrication.
In my youth we had plausible deniability, if we did something stupid whilst inebriated we could lie our pants off if there were minimal witnesses and learn our lessons with minimal shame. Now every thing is filmed and shared with the world for perpetuity.
Mind you, at least with alcohol there is a level of excuse, there are young people doing mind boggling things and running to the press for maximum coverage. Shouting from the rooftops that they have had 100’s of men in x amount of time, and then we wonder why men of a certain culture look at us like they do.
Rather a strange article for Kathleen. The alcohol industry promises a lot, but fails to emphasise the dangers of its products. We can all be taken in by the glamour, especially as teen-agers, eager to become adults. It’s easy to side with anti-puritan sentiments, too: ‘what’s the harm in a little drink, after all’? Well, there’s plenty, and rather than copy their mother’s mistakes, young women would do better to learn from them. Drink isn’t going away, and does provide pleasure, but encouraging young women to ‘get bladdered’ cannot be good. Mentioning the connection with grooming gangs in a casual way also seems odd. What begins as seemingly harmless and trivial may not remain so.
This glorious piece of writing from Professor Stock is worth the year’s subscription. Made my day!
Agreed. Headline writer did a good job too.
I couldn’t agree more. Occasional inebriation used to be a perk of youth and foolishness, but sad to say in a different world from today. Now the social media jekylls would make your easily forgotten idiocy into video hell to haunt you for ever.
Who ARE all these down-voters? Is it a religious thing? Are they worried that someone, somewhere might be enjoying themselves?
It will be interesting to see if any of the feminist writers in Unherd call for the resignation of Jess Phillips, Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence against Women and Girls for failing in her duty as defined by her government position.
As someone who never drank as a teenager, nor participated in most of the other activities mentioned here, I am fascinated by this article. I was wary of drinking because I knew the effects of alcohol and the idea of losing my inhibitions and compromising my judgment horrified me. I honestly questioned why anyone would willingly do this to themselves. It helped having several bad examples of what alcoholism does in some extended family members. I considered these behaviors to be irresponsible, silly, and dangerous even at that time. I was quite content to sit in my dark room thank you very much. I can’t say I regret not taking stupid risks with alcohol, sex, and other drugs in my youth, but Kathleen makes a pretty good case for it being normal and appropriate. While I would never have agreed at the time that such behavior should be tolerated by parents or society or regarded as appropriate, I did know that I was the deviant, the outlier in the statistical sample of teens that constituted my high school class. Through the (hopefully) greater wisdom that comes through life experience, I’ve come to have a greater appreciation for the importance of these social behaviors even as I realize that they don’t really apply to me personally. Let the kids be kids.
Waste of a good surname if you ask me!
Oh you have no idea. I consider my name proof that God has a sense of irony as I’m among the most stoic, grounded, sober, and rational people you’re likely ever to meet.
Two things
The first…I suspect the street bobbies who arrested a twelve year old girl for being D&D did so to get her out of the house where she was being held by a bunch of degenerate perverts, who probably outnumbered them and were used to operating with impunity, in plain sight…and I’d guess, they expected to see the matter pursued…but it would be closed down by senior officers with a clearer view of the importance of “community cohesion” in respect of their promotion prospects…
…secondly, if I ever see Professor Stock in a bar, I’ll be buying her a large one…
That crossed my mind too, I hope it was that.
I was always oddly proud that Brits topped every bad league table for drink/drugs/sex etc, and I certainly contributed to it all while I lived at home. I always thought the other countries must have been rather boring in comparison, long may the drunkenness continue!
Not necessarily drunkenness BB, just the conviviality of the Great British Pub, unrivalled throughout the world.
Whilst old ‘backstreet boozers’ might be closing, their offspring: former retail premises re-fashioned into real ale / wine bars are springing up at an extraordinary rate. In addition, the Brewery Tap is the place to neck the freshest variety of life-enhancing nectar in the civilised world.
Although in London at least its increasingly difficult to find pubs with cask ales – since Covid they prefer to have kegs on tap which apparently keep better, and more popular with younger drinkers. My closest local is a lovely old pub with a real fire during winter, but more often than not has no ale.
Hi Jonathan – my advice would be for you to join CAMRA!
That’s a terrible shame. Have you asked them why?
Ms Stock is a wonderful writer.
Life is difficult and dangerous for both men and women; different dangers maybe but still terrible.
Alcohol, for all it’s joys, makes us vulnerable but I wish those men who exploit this in young girls burn in hell. It is not difficult to be a gentleman and look after a woman who is two sheets to the wind and I cannot imagine how any man can enjoy sex with an unconscious woman. God help us, some do.
All true. But let us not forget that is a 2-way street you describe. And ‘to exploit’ is a very loaded term with very vague definitions which are highly dependent upon context, dangerously vague if we’re recommending burning in an eternal hell if/when it occurs.
You ask how any man can enjoy sex with a (drunken) woman? I would guess there are a whole lot of drunken men who would, drunkenly, raise their hands. Unconscious (as in Mdme. Pelicot) is, of course, another matter entirely…. though one probably also ultimately dependent upon context (see the very strange 2011 film, ‘Sleeping Beauty’)
Yeah, but what is the point?
Not so much of drinking, the point of that is well-known, having been publicized to praise & criticism for at least the last 3000 years or so. But what is the point of this paean to teen-drinking? Why do we care? Why is this an issue worth 1500 words?
Teenagers, certainly, don’t need encouragement to drink, to party, to misbehave, to shake/rattle/& roll their parent’s customs & expectations. I would suspect that’s exactly what the typical rebellious adolescent has been doing for those same 3000 years (though a Hobbesian life in an earlier era would tend to cut those halcyon days of Dionysian revel somewhat shorter than we see today). Plus I would equally suspect that the number of UnHerd subscribers under the age of 20 is minimal at best…so most of us here have left those days far, far behind…in a universe far, far away.
So why?
And the idea that ‘girls deserve a drink’?? What? Teenagers drink if/when they can (not all…not most…. but many…an estimated 33%). But how is that ‘deserved’? Ms. Stock is usually quite deliberate in her word choice, why does she feel a 15 year old has somehow ‘earned’ an alcoholic drink or two or twenty? What does it take to earn intoxication, let alone a ‘bladdered oblivion’?
Predictably, she makes the same stereotypical assumption that so many make: that drinking somehow enables ‘fun’ (and Girls, we all know, just want to have fun. Perhaps she think they ‘deserve’ fun!?). She tells us, “…few seem to remember how much fun it can be to be a drunk teenage girl (or just a drunk teenager, full stop).” But the validating reference she then makes to Sex in the City and Cosmos in trendy Manhattan bars evokes only single, lonely, increasingly desperate, professional women in their mid-30’s. Lucky Jim’s, Jim Dixon is a university lecturer in Medieval History (not typically a job for teenagers). And Dylan Thomas’ self-portrait ‘As a Young Dog’ is a portrait of a man who drank himself to death.
So perhaps the references aren’t quite as ‘encouraging’ of drunk teenagers as the author would seem to indicate.
Maybe I just don’t get it.
Maybe the declaration that children ‘deserve’ what drink offers: “O Dionysus, we feel you near, stirring like molten lava, under the ravaged earth, flowing from the wounds of your trees, in tears of sap, screaming with the rage of your hunted beasts.”…. seems in the end, just a bit dubious?
But maybe this will all become clearer with Part 2 in this series, ‘Girls Deserve a W*nk.”?
How many words is your (valid) response? I see the article as more of a pushback against (likely) many more thousands of words of panic or lamentation. Important? Nah, but relatively harmless in the way underage drinking often is. And sometimes fairly lightweight articles spark a great comment board.
In any case I doubt we have to worry about too many teenage girls flocking to UnHerd then deciding to get plastered after all.
Hah, good point! But I’m only at 434! I figure Kathleen easily merits a considered response (albeit lengthy). Teenagers drinking? Not so much.
And yeah, totally agree that not too many15 year old girls are reading any of this.
But their parents might be.
“Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? “
Remember those moments when you woke up naked in a strange bed with no memory of what happened?
Remember those moments when you were so drunk you vomited continuously and passed out on the street?
Remember those moments when you were driving drunk and hit a tree, killing three of your best friends?
Glorifying teenage drinking and drunkenness is stupid. Most adults do not handle drinking well. Drinking does not have to be a rite of passage. I was raised in a “dry county” which meant that no alcohol (other than Illegal moonshine) was available. Some kids drove to adjacent counties and convinced adults to buy them liquor. Some of those kids lost their lives while driving drunk.
Encouraging experimentation with alcohol and excusing it as just part of growing up is irresponsible. I expect better from Kathleen Stock.
Thank heavens there are still some things in which we achieve our political leaders’ insistence that we are “world-leading”, even if those things are teenage intoxication and football hooliganism.
Apposite comment.
Perhaps teenage intoxication, to the point of drunkeness, is a sign of unhappiness and boredom, I wonder how many of the teenagers who drink to get drunk have hobbies and interests the way we used to.
Football hooliganism is not such a negative thing imo, it is men venting their aggression against each other during peacetime. If there was a war many of these same men would be fighting our enemies on the frontline and considered heros.
I suspect you’ve had a few too many over the holidays Kathleen and are feeling maudlin. Oh well, god be with the good old days of a few cans with the boys, I will miss them forever.
“You’re no fun anymore.”
M. Python Esq.
Too much drink is too much drink no matter who’s doing it… This is not to say anyone ever deserves to get abused as a result…
And your point is?
No one ever deserves to get abused. These gang rapes are despicable and the law (or leaders) appear incapable of dealing with it because of the uproar about Islamaphobia.
Excellent, as always. My only take on the boozing and it is a question at that. I have heard my son, daughters, and their friends say that are going to go and out and get puking drunk. Now, I certainly have been puking drunk but I don’t ever remember planning on doing that, like it was the main goal of the night or day! In my younger days and actually after that, it was to socialize with my buddies and get laid. Of course, there were occasions where you were likely to get shit-faced but it just happened. Has there been a sea change that I missed as this seems to have occurred 15 to 20 years ago?
Also, as an aside, I think girls, women, and ladies deserve to have the first round, and probably more on me. I realize I may be old-fashioned in this regard, but it is tradition (where I come from), and I enjoy it. It loosens the inhibitions and lightens the conversation. Where it goes from there is up to all involved. I have read that women now demand drinks, dinner, and all sorts of expensive extras on the first date. If you don’t come through you are a loser and that is too bad. Not sure if this is true or not so could some kind reader let me know.
Kathleen, I actually would like to comment on this is true or not. Love UhHerd.
I have to wonder, and hope, that the “12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house” as the Copper saw that as the only way to get her out of that situation.
How is “age appropriate” different in its essence from say, “race appropriate”, aka apartheid??
Love it!
The novelist Alan Warner used to specialise in such worlds of young women. As a 90s writer, he’s a little forgotten now. In contrast, no-one lives in the world of Jean Rhys and her Paris and London. They haven’t done for the past 10 years at the very least and clearly it’s where we’ve gone wrong.
Watch and learn how the Unherd feminists ignore one of the most vile scandals of modern Britain witb young women as real victims. Not the fake-victimhood of Feminist logic.
Not a feminist myself, but Julie Bindel deserves some credit for being one of the first journalists to write about what was going on.
I agree that treating teen-girl drinking like a tragedy or pathology in and of itself is an overreaction, one likely to backfire. Seems like it is backfiring, or at least not working as intended. It’s also kind of heavy-handed, with a whiff both of paternalism and nunnish scolding. Can places like America and the UK take a few pages (or sips) from the French and Italians, who seem to have a culture of greater acceptance around drinking, but far less life-threatening drunkenness?
Small beer of a note: Why is the phrase alcohol and drugs is such common use, instead of alcohol and other drugs? Booze is most certainly a drug, one I haven’t kicked altogether yet, and many of those aptly named spirits are pretty nasty.
Even so, drinking does have elements of upside that are rendered blurry by categorical naysayers and selective romanticisers alike. Cheers to everyone, from saucy tosspots to stern teetotalers. With so much year left, a lot of us need to pace ourselves better in ‘25, and not just with alcohol. As for me, I’m goin’ dry as soon as the last of the New Year’s bourbon is gone.
“the authorities failed to recognise what was going on”. I disagree with this Kathleen. I think they knew what was going on all right. Still they tried to cover it up. These authorities tried to cover up rape torture and murder, and are still doing so, aren’t you Jess Phillips.
What is this, a promotion by Inbev/Diageo? A call for a national inquiry into Pakistani abuse gangs that DPPikea ignores because the victims were white? Who cares, ‘just do it’ ‘because you’re worth it’……
I can’t make head nor tail of this comment so could you explain it again? Are you complaining because young Miss Stock enjoyed a drink (presumably older Dr Stock does too but if she’s anything like me the the spirit is willing but the body isn’t as strong as it once was)?
No, no complaint at all, why shouldn’t women have a drink, they can decide for themselves, of course. There are, as much as may be denied, consequences. Intoxication is a state of incapability that may be exploited. Such cases as inexcusable as they are will occur and must be prosecuted without bias. These incidents may be few and far between but nonetheless do and will happen (to men and women alike). The promotion (Eg InBev/Diageo – Drink responsibily!) of actions (drinking to incapability) especially where the actor may be open to exploitation because they may be inherently vulnerable , needs to be understood. To ignore the potential danger of this vulnerability is overlooked (just do it; because you’re worth it) for convenience by agencies concerned only with sales/consumption/profit.
That’s better.
LMFHO
Shame on you Kathleen Stock for writing this cr ap.
Read this and write about what is truly happening.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/
Women drinking to excess is un-ladylike. The same goes for smoking (especially in public). So there.
I miss the good ol’ days of the Thirties, when guys like Frank McCourt’s dad could piss up the whole paycheck buying rounds for friendly strangers, no women allowed.
Ah isn’t that a nice story. And let’s all ignore what has happened. Let’s all look the other way. Well done.
Hello Kathleen, tell me about the first time you were violently sick after drinking and the hangover that followed.
Nostalgia and alcohol have softened the brain. You can get a bigger and better high from climbing a col on a top-end carbon bike, but that requires effort and training.
and a bike.
So can we put you in drastic reaction/scolds’ camp? She isn’t giving alcohol some ringing endorsement, but pointing out that there is disproportionate shaming and worry around drinking for girls compared to boys. (Some of which is based on social and biological reality). And arguing that much of drinking’s clear potential for harm falls in the moderate or temporary range. It doesn’t prevent one from waking up one January morning and starting the long process of training for a triathlon, or whatnot. We can also find plenty of slobs who never touch a fermented drop.