Smart women drink loads of booze

That seems to be the logical conclusion to the Daily Mail’s article on modern drinking women.

Apparently, successful women drink more to try to keep up with successful men. Which means that successful men must be plastered all the time. That’s where I’ve been going wrong then – sobering up occasionally is hampering my career advancement.

The article claims that if you drink heavily (their definition of ‘heavily’ is somewhat lighter than mine) then reducing intake by one unit per week will save your life. One unit per week will make no difference to someone well within Nanny’s guidelines. To someone way over those figures, well, their liver won’t even notice a difference.

One in five woman graduates regularly drink ‘hazardously’ compared with one in ten for those with lower levels of education.

Experts have Said and Studies have Shown that… smart people know the Gubblement’s guidelines are a load of made-up bollocks. The word ‘hazardously’ is in quotes because it doesn’t actually apply to the levels being discussed.

Hazardous is defined as consuming at least twice the safe limit of 14 units a week for women and 21 units for men.

Whereas real hazardous levels are an awful lot higher than that. Get past three times the guidelines and you’re starting to touch on ‘slightly risky’, but the needle is still a long way from the red.

Why would these intelligent women be drinking so much anyway?

‘They aren’t being frogmarched by their bosses but there are social pressures to go out and to network.’

Well yes, in business you need to talk to people. Make deals, arrange contracts, and often over lunch with wine or beer. I don’t know how others do it but it always seemed to me that the best way to get a contract was to stay pretty sober while negotiating. Have a drink afterwards to toast success or drown failure, but being drunk while negotiating is a bad idea. You never know what you might have agreed to!

There are a number of reasons why women are drinking so much more today, but an important factor is the aggressive marketing tactics employed by the drinks industry to attract female consumers.

Now we get to the real reason behind it all. It’s a long-winded and circuitous route to a direct attack on Big Booze. Higher taxes, grotesque warnings and plain packaging are on the way…

Consider the ‘facts’ as presented –

1. Intelligent women are drinking more than less intelligent women overall.

2. Women who drink more are being suckered into doing so by drink companies’ marketing.

There is something wrong with this picture, isn’t there?

The thing is, the intelligent people see the flaws here. That’s why they ignore all this crap and drink as they please. There is a problem in that the intelligent people are not the ones running these kids of studies, nor are they the ones in government who nod sagely at the reports.

All the politicians see is an excuse to hike their tax income. Any excuse will do. The Experts who Say will assure the politicians that there will be no black-market consequences at all. That people will drink less but the higher tax means the government gets the same money. Both of which are rubbish, as the anti-tobacco debacle has demonstrated.

It’l happen anyway. Advertising bans, graphic warnings, tax hikes and plain packs. None of it will work at all.

I bet they’ll do it anyway.