I saw the ad on the back of a pay phone whilst sitting in my car waiting for my teenage son to emerge from rehearsals this weekend. What caught my eye was the beautiful woman in a glamorous outfit, holding a drink. In the foreground was a bottle of Glenlivet whiskey.
That on its own wasn’t shocking. But the words on the ad were. They were more than shocking. A gnawing from the deepest, most honest place inside me told me this wasn’t just wrong, it was dangerous.
An over-reaction? You decide…
The words said:
“A Man’s Drink?
Whiskey Doesn’t Care What’s Between Your Legs.
Obey the rules. Miss the fun.
Drink Responsibly”
Wow. They really said that. And they know exactly what they are doing. Specific drinks to target women are nothing new. Glenlivet know that their ‘beginners’ whiskey is the perfect entry point for women looking to enter the more discerning, trendier, section of the alcohol market.
Keeping up with ‘the boys’
As a woman growing up in the 80’s and 90’s my story with booze is a sadly familiar tale. And so much of it has to do with ‘keeping up with the boys’.
I remember starting with beer fairly early on in my teens, which never seemed to cause me too many problems. But then came the stronger ciders (9 per cent alcoholic strength) targeted at women. I started on those around 16. I didn’t get into the alco-pops that the alcohol industry brought in around the same time to increase the market of young women – I didn’t have a sweet tooth.
Once I started working in London, things escalated. Not because I was a bigger drinker than everyone else. But because after work the women were drinking gigantic goblets of wine at 12 or 13 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV), most of the blokes were drinking beer at 4 per cent ABV. There were many nights where I would pass out on the underground and go back and forth along the line until I regained consciousness or someone told me that the tube had closed for the night and I would need to leave the underground and get a cab from who knows where, with who knows whom.
Shots made things really dangerous for me — shots were when the blackouts started and things got really messy. I was lucky I only had a few scary things happen, it could have been so much worse. I thought I was drinking the same amount as everyone else. But what I was drinking far more alcohol than the blokes I was drinking with.
Fast forward twenty years and I took on all the roles of a ‘normal life’ – mum, wife, career woman. Running full throttle on caffeine, booze and adrenaline for so long. It all came to a head for me in 2018 when I suffered burnout from years of chronic stress and I had to leave my corporate career.
One night, reading a story to my eldest child, I was asked to stop bringing wine into the bedroom as it was making him feel anxious.
Woah. That hit hard. And I’m so glad it did.
The widespread manipulation of women and girls by the alcohol industry
I know I’m not the only woman waking up in mid-life realising that booze has become the only way she knows how to manage her stress, overwhelm and exhaustion. As a society we have to look around at the messages we are giving young women – because it all starts somewhere.
Since that moment in my child’s bedroom, I have retrained as a counsellor and psychotherapist, stopped drinking and become an alcohol coach to help other women on the same trajectory.
The manipulation of women and girls by the alcohol industry has become starkly clear to me throughout this time.
Women don’t use alcohol for the same reasons men do, we don’t drink the same way men do, and we are falling like flies as we continue to drink to meet society’s expectations, to suppress our experiences of the world and to put up with the reality of a life that we just can’t manage under the weight of parental and economic constraints.
It’s a lot.
It’s so easy to slap a ‘Drink Responsibly’ label on an ad for an addictive substance and make it the individual’s job to manage consumption.
(FYI, Drinkwise, who distributes that message is not a not-for-profit public health body as many assume. It is entirely funded by the alcohol industry. It’s existence and the ‘drink responsibly’ tagline perpetuate the myth that alcohol is not an essentially harmful drug).
According to The Lancet, who explored the burden of disease caused by alcohol across 195 countries and territories, the conclusion is clear — the safest level of drinking is no alcohol. Meanwhile, the Cancer Council of Australia says there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink.
It’s time to stop putting the burden of blame on the individual and call a spad a spade.
This ad and the victim blaming implicit in the two words “drink responsibly” comes hot on the tail of America Ferrera’s Oscar nominated “It is impossible to be a woman’ soliloquy from Barbie. What her characcter says about thinness what could be applied to alcohol:
“We are supposed to drink hard liquor because ‘obey the rules, miss the fun,’ right? But not so much that we get drunk, or sick or addicted – because that would be our fault, right?
With the Glenlivet ad, the saddest thing about it is that it has been created by women, the very people it is trying to manipulate to buy its products, to increase its market share. Sadly – the exceptionally talented Anna Paquin of True Blood fame is the face of this campaign. The Australian & NZ Marketing Director for Glenlivet is a woman named Kristy Rutherford and the ad’s video is directed/filmed by Jamie Nelson.
According to Rickie Green the deputy editor of Campaign Brief: “#BreakTheStereotype (campaign) celebrates inclusivity within whisky and is the first in a series of bold ambitions The Glenlivet is undertaking as part of their new platform, ‘This Is Whisky’. Now when searching ‘whisky drinker’ using Google Images, the user is greeted with diverse real whisky drinkers. In Australia and New Zealand, nearly a third of female drinkers drink whisky monthly, a 40% increase since 2015. Females are adopting whisky at four times the rate of males.”
I understand corporate ambitions to increase market share but as a society we really need to start asking ourselves bigger question about the accepted role of alcohol in all our lives. There’s hundreds of thousands of women already struggling with booze, do we need to be encouraging increased consumption of hard liquor on top of that?!
Not only is it not ‘good for business’ for more women to drink less, it’s not good for the government. The Australian government makes billions of dollars by taxing alcohol.
I wish women knew they were being conditioned, I wish they knew it wasn’t their fault they were in trouble with booze. I wish they felt rightfully angry at the systems and corporations putting them in an impossible position and reclaimed their power.
When we lift the lid and look at where the real problem lies, companies like Glenlivet need to acknowledge that harmful advertising is part of the problem. Even if they encourage ‘drinking responsibly’.
As Ferrera ends the Barbie soliloquy:
“It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.“