Drinking Beer Is Not a Feminist Act
Why closing the gender gap in alcohol consumption doesn’t empower women
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Back in my drinking days, beer was one of my favorite beverages. I liked pilsners for their golden hue and crisp taste but also drank IPAs. Sometimes, I worried about my three to six cans a day habit. But mostly, I convinced myself that beer was only water with a tiny bit of booze. And so, if I had a drinking problem, I’d be downing tequila instead. Right?
Also, I believed drinking beer was a feminist act. Not so long ago, women were excluded from bars, forbidden from ordering pints of beer, and unceremoniously shamed for the audacity of wanting to drink alongside men and as much as them. Generations of women fought for my right to get gleefully drunk, I told myself, so the very least I could do was oblige — with beer, preferably. Because holding a craft IPA in my hand felt like an act of rebellion towards oppressive gender norms, in a way that grasping a strawberry lemonade vodka did not.
Now that I look back at my beer-swigging years with sober eyes, I’m not convinced I was as invested in dismantling the patriarchy one lager at a time as much I was in justifying my heavy drinking. I didn’t have a problem, I told myself, just a staunch political agenda.
To be clear, I’m not denying that achieving equal drinking rights is an important feminist victory — one that some governments still refuse to grant. In fact, I believe that gaining access to traditionally male-dominated spaces like bars and saloons gave women freedoms that go way beyond our right to drink in public without fear of judgment. And yet, I can no longer get behind the idea that consuming stereotypically masculine beverages, or any beverages at all, constitutes an act of feminism when it’s become increasingly clear that far from empowering us, alcohol is now taking us down.
The gender gap between men’s and women’s drinking is narrowing, but not in a good way. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol-related deaths amongst women in the US rose by 85% between 1999 and 2017. Research shows that women are more susceptible than men to suffer long-term health repercussions from alcohol, including an increased risk of liver disease, cognitive decline, and heart damage. And it’s not only women who drink vodka like it’s water who are putting their health on the line. According to a meta-analysis that reviewed 572 studies and close to half a million cancer cases, drinking even small amounts of alcohol leads to an increased risk of developing breast cancer, which recently surpassed lung cancer as the most common form of cancer worldwide.
And that’s not even addressing the toll that alcohol can take on women’s mental health or finances, both barriers to gender equality. And so why do we still tout alcohol — and beer specifically — as a symbol of female empowerment? Most likely because that’s exactly what liquor companies, via global, multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns, want us to believe. This is all familiar territory: in the 1920s, tobacco companies, eager to expand their market share, successfully portrayed the cigarette as a token of women’s emancipation. Nowadays, beer brands are seeking to sway women by convincing us that real feminists drink fermented malt.
Case in point: in 2019, Coors Light branded itself as The Official Beer of Being Done Wearing a Bra, in a nudge to the no-bra movement that spans back to second-wave feminism. In the same vein, Brewdog celebrated International Women’s Day by launching a pink version of their popular Punk IPA to raise awareness about gender pay inequality in the UK. Heineken also jumped on the feminist advertising bandwagon in 2020 with a campaign that depicted women rebelling against gender stereotypes by choosing to drink lagers instead of cocktails.
Smaller breweries across the world also advertise the beer bottle as a beacon of female empowerment. Some do this with labels that carry feminist messages, like Fuck The Patriarchy, Cerveja Feminista, and We Can Do It, which features a Rosie the Riveter-type illustration. To their credit, these small brands, all founded by women, seek to disrupt a male-dominated space that has historically been filled with prejudices about women’s tastes (we’ll only drink beer if it’s bloat-resistant) and sexist marketing messages (“Don’t worry darling, you didn’t burn the beer!”). While I don’t doubt these initiatives stem from a good place, I’m not convinced these brands are helping advance the feminist cause.
Would I see things differently if only I’d learned to “moderate” my beer intake? Reader, I tried. In fact, I told myself that beer was much easier to moderate than wine. I knew that once I opened a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, I’d most likely drink the whole thing in one evening. But with beer, there was a trick: I could buy however many cans I thought were socially acceptable to drink on my own. And yet, most evenings, I’d still walk to the local corner shop to get myself an extra one or two. Needless to say, I was ashamed of my inability to moderate. Whenever I saw a billboard with the words “Drink Responsibly” plastered underneath a sweating beer bottle, I felt just as worthless as when staring at one of those “Are You Beach Body Ready?” weight-loss ads.
All of which is to say that I’m not interested in participating in the shaming economy by criticizing or policing other women’s alcohol consumption. Beer, like most things, isn’t inherently good or evil. Many women find drinking it pleasurable and fun; many others don’t. In any case, it is corporations, not us, who profit from the insidious idea that by holding a bottle of beer, we’re raising a glass to women’s rights.
This article is part of my sobriety series, where I examine society’s relationship to alcohol, as well as my own. If you’d like stories like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Medium.
