Alcohol has become so normalized there’s hardly a situation when a drink doesn’t feel appropriate, experts say. Now we’re marketing it to one another.
“It’s a catch all for everything.”
— Emily Lynn Paulson, the founder of Sober Mom Squad, on how alcohol seems to be the answer for every occasion
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In the four years since she stopped drinking alcohol, Emily Lynn Paulson has reflected a lot on how central alcohol was to her life.
Quite often, she said, she would drink while taking care of her five children or she’d wake up groggy or unable to recall conversations. But then she’d scroll through Instagram and see a friendly face holding up a mug emblazoned, “Rosé All Day.”
It was so normalized: There never seemed to be an occasion when drinking wasn’t billed as the appropriate response. “If you’re stressed, have a drink; if you’re nervous, have a drink; if you want fun, have a drink; if you’re grieving, have a drink,” Ms. Paulson said. “It’s a catch all for everything.”
“It made me think, Gosh, this must be OK — everyone around me is doing the same thing.”
Ms. Paulson, who last year founded Sober Mom Squad, an online support network for mothers who have stopped or want to curb their drinking, pins this normalization on the alcohol industry which, for years, has targeted women with its advertising, and made people far less likely to question their intake. Less than half of the population is even aware that alcohol is a carcinogen. It can also lead to other health problems such as liver disease and heart disease — especially for women.
The inspiration for alcohol’s marketing approach with women came from the tobacco industry, which wooed women by tapping into their desire for equality. In 1929, a time when it was taboo for women to smoke in public, marketers hired women to smoke their “torches of freedom” while protesting inequality in an Easter Sunday parade. By the 1960s, Virginia Slims started its influential campaign, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
In ads, women were pictured, impeccably dressed and oozing self confidence, cigarette in hand. These liberated women were contrasted by images of their sepia-toned forebears who had to sneak cigarettes and risked being punished by their husbands for taking a drag.
Smoking became symbolic. It wasn’t just an accessory or a habit, “it was sold as empowerment,” said David Jernigan, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health and the former director for the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Alcohol ads have gone the same way by aligning the product with female liberation and sophistication. “We have a repeat of Virginia Slims,” Dr. Jernigan said.
Alcohol companies began expanding their range of products, Dr. Jernigan explained. The push began with wine coolers in the 1980s and continued in the 1990s when alcopops — sweet and fruity alcoholic beverages — came onto the market. The term, which was born from combining the words alcohol and soda pop, applies to drinks like Zima, Smirnoff Ice and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Though the companies never announced it outright, Dr. Jernigan said the products were positioned for entry level drinkers and people who didn’t like the taste of alcohol. “Read: young women,” he said. “We called them beer with training wheels.” A 2012 paper in the American Journal of Public Health notes the preference of alcopops over beer among high-school girls.
The industry held on to those female consumers, Dr. Jernigan said, by evolving with them as they became mothers. “And now we have MommyJuice,” he explained, referring to a wine brand, but which is also a popular term for the alcohol that moms keep in their insulated cups. “We have Mommy’s Little Helper.” (The latter term was first used to refer to the tranquilizers prescribed to women in the mid-20th century to deal with the challenges of motherhood.)
To alcohol companies, Dr. Jernigan said, women are a market.
The trend toward female-focused advertising is not surprising given the rise in women’s socioeconomic status, says Linda Tuncay Zayer, a professor of marketing at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. Advertisements linking alcohol with sophistication, elegance and sociability have become commonplace. “It’s positioned as a way to pamper, escape and relax,” Dr. Zayer said.
Recently, Dr. Zayer noticed Anheuser-Busch using themes of female empowerment by tapping Halsey for its “Be A King” campaign. There’s also Kate Hudson’s new vodka brand, King St., that Dr. Zayer said uses a mix of the feminine aesthetic, star power and female entrepreneurship to sell its brand.
During the pandemic, she said, alcohol was thrust into the limelight as the silver bullet for emotional management. As stress increased, so did the wine memes. “It’s supposed to be funny, but it can really make light of excessive drinking,” Dr. Zayer said. “The wine-guzzling mom has become an acceptable form of self-care.”
The rush to court this market has spurred a number of products and trends, says Carol Emslie, the leader of the Substance Use research group within the School of Health and Life Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. She sees “pink, fluffy and sparkly” packaging, ads promoting wellness — most notably “low-calorie items” — and products positioned for any and all occasions. “Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day,” Ms. Emslie said, “it’s piggybacking onto everything, even International Women’s Day.”
The push for female consumers can even be seen in countries where women haven’t traditionally been part of a drinking culture. For the past few years, Bailey’s has held a Mother’s Day campaign in Nigeria, urging women to share the drink with their mothers. “Here, the love of your mother gets tied up with drinking together,” Ms. Emslie said, “and this, in a place where women haven’t historically drunk.”
Part of the issue is that for many women, the reason for drinking alcohol goes deeper than having a buzz, Ms. Emslie explained. They define themselves by what they drink and how they drink it. Through extensive research, Ms. Emslie found that women in their 30s and 40s often use alcohol as a “time out,” a demarcation point between work and home life as well as a way to transport themselves to a time before career pressures and household responsibilities. “They drink to bring back that sense of carefree youth, frivolity, fun and spontaneity,” she said, “to show their identity beyond what is associated with being a woman in midlife.”
“The alcohol industry is really super aware of this,” she said, noting that it is hyper-focused on messages that speak to those desires.
Lisa Hawkins, the senior vice president of public affairs for the Distilled Spirits Council, said in an email that it was reasonable and appropriate for spirits companies to develop and market products that appealed to their consumers’ tastes, preferences and lifestyle choices. “To suggest that women should be shielded from advertisements about legal products available in the marketplace because they are incapable of seeing an ad and behaving responsibly is patronizing and antiquated,” she wrote.
She added, “We encourage all adults who consume alcohol — men and women — to drink in moderation and follow the advice of the federal dietary guidelines.”
Dr. Zayer, however, said research had shown over and over that we underestimated the influence of advertising in our lives. “Not just women — it’s everyone,” she said. “Companies wouldn’t be spending all this money on it if it didn’t work.”
These days, it’s not only big companies that bombard women with advertisements. Holly Whitaker, the author of “Quit Like a Woman,” argues in her book that women themselves are the marketers now.
“We are marketing to one another,” she said in an interview. “When we post a picture of ourselves enjoying a Friday night in a bathtub with a glass of champagne, we are selling the idea that we have to use alcohol to enjoy ourselves.”
Ms. Whitaker points to cultural touchstones like Ina Garten mixing cocktails with the nonchalance of baking muffins and “Bad Moms,” the movie that works under the premise that moms, after all they do for everyone, deserve to get hammered. It’s not even about asking women to quit, she said, and more about “stepping back and asking why we have all decided to view a glass of ethanol as a reward?”
It is important to consider, given that the health effects on women are harsher than for men. Women metabolize and absorb alcohol differently, which leads to the onset of alcohol-related problems including, but not limited to, liver damage, heart disease and brain damage sooner and from smaller amounts of booze.
Although women still drink less than men, the gap has been narrowing. From 1999 to 2017, alcohol-related deaths among women jumped by 85 percent while alcohol use disorder — the inability to control drinking despite adverse consequences — rose by nearly 84 percent between 2002 and 2013. Liver disease is also rising among young women.
Despite the serious health tolls, experts say it is difficult to communicate the dangers of drinking to women, who have had a long, fraught history of fighting for bodily autonomy. A C.D.C. campaign introduced in 2016 to discourage drinking among women of childbearing age had swift and extreme backlash. “It was absolutely hostile: ‘How dare you tell us what to do with our bodies!’” Dr. Jernigan recalled, referring to many women’s response to the recommendation at the time.
What is even more troubling, says Thomas Babor, a professor of community medicine and public health at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, is that just like Big Tobacco, the alcohol industry has been far from transparent with its consumers, often going to lengths to obfuscate the truth about its health effects. Researchers writing in The Lancet posited there is no amount of alcohol that is safe to consume while other researchers have found that alcohol is responsible for at least 15 percent of breast cancer cases. And yet, Dr. Babor said, alcohol companies are known for practices like “pinkwashing” where they decorate their products in pink to convince consumers that they can help fight breast cancer by buying their goods.
“They are trying to appear as if they support breast cancer research,” he said, “when in fact, they are encouraging women to drink at levels that actually contribute to breast cancer.”
The industry also continues to promote the idea that moderate drinking is good for our health, which, Dr. Babor says, it justifies by using old studies that are deeply flawed. “You don’t have to be an alcoholic,” he said — “risk for some 200 health conditions increases with each dose of alcohol you take.”
To turn the tide, Ms. Emslie, the alcohol researcher, is raising awareness through a social media campaign called #DontPinkMyDrink. She and her colleagues ask that women use the hashtag when they spot alcohol being cynically marketed via pink packaging and/or low-calorie and wellness promises. “This will challenge how alcohol is sold,” she said.
“Women will start to become aware of the messages for themselves.”
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