White Women Drinking Themselves to Death
The Washington Post has a story substantial rise in heavy drinking by White women.
Here is a similar story from across the pond published last year.
Your thoughts?
The Washington Post has a story substantial rise in heavy drinking by White women.
Here is a similar story from across the pond published last year.
Your thoughts?
It will all increase. And for really, realy good reasons.
“” For 25 years, after all, Clinton was reviled as a synecdoche for unseemly female ambition. That’s part of what made her candidacy so fraught. If she’d become president, it would have been in the teeth of widespread male opposition; even the models that showed her winning had her losing the majority of men. She proposed policies that would have increased women’s power and autonomy at every level of society: equal pay, paid family leave, subsidized child care, abortion rights. For all her manifold faults, her election would have both signified progress toward gender equality and made more such progress possible. Before Nov. 8, it looked as if the arc of history was bending toward women.
Trump’s victory has obliterated this narrative. In many ways it was a fluke; had a few thousand votes in a few Rust Belt states gone another way, we’d be talking about Clinton’s popular vote landslide and the decisive defeat of Trumpian reaction. However freakishly contingent his triumph, it forecloses the future feminists imagined at least for a long while. We’re going be blown backward so far that this irredeemably shitty year may someday look like a lost feminist golden age. The very idea that women are equal citizens, that barriers to their full human flourishing should be identified and removed, is now up for grabs. A pastor warming up the crowd at a post-election Trump rally in Louisiana promised that with Trump in office, the White House would be a place “where men know who men are, women know who women are.” The massive power of the American state is about to be marshaled to put women in their place.
We might well lose Roe v. Wade in the next four years. Trump has said the issue would then go back to the states, but there’s no reason to think that Republicans would settle for anything less than a national ban. There is a particular insult at the thought of a sybarite like Trump, who still won’t say whether he’s ever paid for an abortion himself, imposing a regime of forced birth on American women. When and if Trump strips us of bodily autonomy, there won’t be any illusions that he’s doing it to protect life or the family or sexual morality. It will be because he has power, and women’s hopes and plans for their own lives don’t matter to him at all.
Controlling the course of our own lives is going to get harder in many different ways. We can say goodbye to Department of Education pressure on colleges to address campus rape. We can expect the end of federal aid for Planned Parenthood and of federal government action to promote equal pay and fight sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. The Women’s Bureau, the one department in the federal government tasked with responding to the needs of women in the workforce, will now fall under the aegis of former Carl’s Jr. honcho Andrew Puzder, whose company is known for commercials featuring near-naked women in orgasmic communion with sandwiches. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis,” he said. “I think it’s very American.” Like top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Puzder has also been accused of assaulting his now-ex wife.
In Achieving Our Country, a 1998 book much discussed since Trump’s election, Richard Rorty discussed how culture would change after the ascension of an American strongman. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion,” he wrote, adding, “All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.” This will likely prove prescient. Under an administration hostile to women’s equality and contemptuous of modern political norms, the way we live will slowly start to change.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/12/_2016_was_the_year_the_feminist_bubble_burst.html
EMichael,
The graphs in the Wash Post seem to show the trends began around 16 years ago. The trends also don’t show any improvement in the last eight years either. I’m not a woman but I happen to be married to one and I don’t get the impression that the last 16 years can be characterized as limiting of women’s rights and opportunities when compared to any era in US history that came before. Unless you assume the Trumpian oppression to come is powerful enough to exert a retroactive effect that spans a decade and a half, I think we need an alternative explanation.
“Unless you assume the Trumpian oppression to come is powerful enough to exert a retroactive effect that spans a decade and a half, I think we need an alternative explanation.”
I do assume that Trump’s oppression will be that bad.
And worse when you consider the evangelicals have now been let loose in our government.
“If you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Tonu,
Interesting how your answer is so different from EMichael’s. I view this more as akin to the increase in despondence in the former USSR after the fall of the communism. People who lost hope in the future drink. But I will admit, I am having trouble making that work with the fact that the Wash Post article indicates the problem is worse for women with college degrees. My wife drinks a few glasses a wine a year and my lifetime consumption of alcohol is negligible (more NyQuil than anything else, with vinegar as a second) so perhaps there is something about alcohol I don’t understand that is relevant here.
If you hear all the time that life is going to get worse and things appear to be going to hell in a handbasket, why not eat drink and be merry because tomorrow we die? Given the news media in generals preoccupation wih bad news and its ignoring of the good news such as the reduced world wide poverty and infant mortality rates, it is easy to believe that the end is near. I suspect that the decreasing total fertility rate in the US is because of the continuous predictions of doom seen in the media.
Of course prohibition made women drinking booze in public ok (saloons before that were most male plus women of ill repute)
Since education tells you of the 1000 and 1 ways you could die perhaps it makes folks just give up. I know way back in 1968 I attended a serious of seminars as freshman at college and heard about the 1000 and 1 ways to die that professors could dream up.
White women are mostly married to/divorced from white men and almost all had white fathers. Simple answers to simple questions.
White men.
Well, lets see. Most white women bore white children too. Perhaps we should blame white children. Makes about as much sense as your (Terry and SW) reasoning.
I was born and raised in a small rust belt city that lost 90% of its factory jobs after NAFTA. It used to be a decent place to live and raise a family, but now it’s a drug and crime ridden hellhole. If I still lived there and had been permanently laid off as so many of the people I knew growing up have been, I’d probably be drinking myself to death as well.
Karl:
Welcome to AB. First comments are always approved.
“After Nafta”.
Really? One of the few factory cities whose manufacturing decline did not start decades before Nafta? How’d they do that?
Not that I am defending Nafta, but it was really not the big culprit here.
Clearly another group besides blacks that Kimel can identify as not being helped by the Dems. They should all vote for Trump so they can lose their Obamacare.
Barkley:
Just waiting for the motion to come from Mr. Ryan’s House. It is not going to be pretty.
BR,
Personally I am trying to figure out why Kimel made no effort to separate these white women by cultures. After all, all women are not created equal.
Barkley,
And admittedly Trump is making it worse by not being a cheerleader for more wars of choice. Without more Afghanistans, Iraqs and Libyas, not to mention US support for questionable groups in Syria and now Yemen, there will be more Americans around to lose their Obamacare. On the other hand, there may be fewer illegal aliens being deprived of the program as well.
“I gotta woman stay drunk all the time.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJWDQ2H9E_c