Simone Barclay shakes her head as she recalls a recent supermarket visit. “I was looking at the rosé section – it’s like half the wine section now. And I’m not surprised. Because it looks so pretty and fresh and the labels are gorgeous, and it’s like, whoa, why wouldn’t you drink this stuff?”
The psychologist has been sober for 25 years. But even she was tempted by the display, seemingly aimed very much at women.
“That particular genre is very feminine. And it’s fresh and summery and it’s pink, for god’s sake.” For Barclay, the takeaway impression was, “How harmful can it be?”
Barclay specialises in addiction and sees a large number of women in her practice. Alcohol is baked into our culture, she says. “Alcohol is still the most widely available, accessible and socially endorsed drug.”
She notes that every one of our transitions as humans is marked by the consumption of alcohol: birth, christenings, birthday celebrations, marriages, funerals.
“We are so surrounded by it in every way that for many people I think it’s impossible to think of a life without alcohol in it.”
Alcohol has become far more prevalent in our lives over the generations, but there’s been a particular shift for women. Jennie Connor, emeritus professor in the department of preventive and social medicine at Otago University, has spent much of her career researching alcohol harms and policies. She says that over time it has become more common for women to drink.
“In my parents’ generation, women drank a lot less than men, and it was quite common to be a non-drinking woman.
“Women really did consume a lot less alcohol. And now they drink less than men but it’s not that much. Basically, everyone in New Zealand is a drinker.”
The most recent New Zealand Health Survey shows that in 2022/23, more than three out of four adults (76.3%) drank alcohol in the past year – 3,205,000 of us aged over 15. Among women, 73% reported drinking, compared with 80% of men. The numbers are higher for the over-45s: 81% for women aged 45-54 and 76% for ages 55-64. Wāhine Māori are drinking at higher levels in most age groups.
About one in seven women drinks at what is known as “hazardous” levels – likely to harm the drinker’s physical or mental health, or to harm others. “Hazardous” might not be what we would imagine. It is defined as more than six standard drinks on one occasion, at least once a month.
A standard drink is less than many of us would pour ourselves at home: just 100ml of wine, one regular can of beer or one shot of spirits.
Selective Hearing
And it’s likely that more of us than the data suggests are hazardous drinkers. Alcohol researchers say most people in health surveys typically underestimate their alcohol intake.
Barclay reckons “your average middle-class dinner party is a binge-drinking session”.
We drink despite knowing what health experts are constantly telling us: alcohol is bad for us.
Behavioural scientist Fiona Crichton says it is difficult for that message to register. “We are not driven [to change] by the idea that alcohol is hazardous for our health. And it’s partly because human beings are very bad at thinking about future risk ‒ even those of us who should know better.”
Barclay agrees. “There’s a selective hearing loss when it comes to alcohol research. People filter through and take the information they want and choose not to know the rest.”
Health Myths
It’s getting harder to ignore, though. Recent research from Otago ranking the country’s most harmful drugs put alcohol in the top position.
The Heart Foundation released a new position statement on alcohol last June saying no amount of alcohol is good for heart health and drinking less or nothing are better options. In its position paper on alcohol, the Cancer Society notes that alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen and “a known cause of many cancers”. It says “drinking any amount of alcohol regularly, even at low levels, can increase cancer risk.”
Other recent findings have put paid to the idea long clung to by red wine lovers and alcohol marketers alike – that moderate drinking is better for your health than not drinking at all. A meta-analysis published in US medical journal JAMA last year looked at more than 100 studies covering more than four million people and found no benefit from moderate drinking. In fact, it found there was a significantly greater risk of all-cause mortality in women who drank around two drinks a day and among men who had four or more drinks a day.
Perhaps reflecting that, the Canadian government has led the global charge and changed its drinking guidelines. Its advice now uses what it calls a “continuum of risk” associated with weekly alcohol use, which recognises that the more people drink, the higher the health risks.
It notes that not drinking has benefits such as better health and better sleep. It says people drinking up to two standard drinks a week are likely to avoid alcohol-related consequences for themselves or others. More and the risks go up, including the risk of developing several types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer.
Breast cancer is the big worry for Kiwi women, Connor says. She has led some of the research on alcohol harm in New Zealand. “One of the interesting things that came out of [our] original analysis was that about 30% of alcohol-related deaths are from cancer,” she notes. “And when we looked at the differences between men and women and more specific types of cancer, breast cancer just came screaming at us.”
Alcohol consumption is the lifestyle factor most consistently associated with increased risk of breast cancer, the main alcohol-related killer of women. Connor says we don’t like to talk about this; we would rather think of breast cancer as “a tragic, out-of-the-blue event” than something for which we might have some ability to lower the risk.
She acknowledges that though it’s not true in all cases, “there’s a real problem with acknowledging that alcohol causes breast cancer. And the whole issue of cancer has been suppressed by the [alcohol] industry for decades. But it’s there in the studies. It’s there in the data.”
It’s estimated alcohol is responsible for one in seven breast cancer deaths and more than a third of those are due to an average consumption of fewer than two standard drinks a day.
“Breast cancer is a much more common outcome for drinking than we thought, and drinking at lower levels,” Connor stresses. “In fact, apart from reproductive things like how many children you have and whether you breastfed them … alcohol is the only thing that we really know about that substantially makes a difference [to breast cancer risk].”
There’s also an issue with self-harm and alcohol. Connor notes that of the 43% of alcohol-related deaths attributable to injury, a notable portion are self-injury.
And we can’t talk about women and alcohol without considering fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Te Whatu Ora Health NZ estimates about 1800 babies are born with this preventable, lifelong condition in Aotearoa each year. It encompasses a range of physical, cognitive, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disabilities, though it is not officially classified as a disability, so there is very little support or financial assistance for sufferers and their families. “It’s punishing these people forever,” says Connor.
Why Do Women Drink?
Barclay describes alcohol as “the first drug I picked up. It was the last drug I put down. It was my go-to; it was a reliable friend.” She says alcohol as a coping mechanism for mental distress can be a strong driver for women.
“There’s a modern scourge of anxiety and low mood. And people manage their anxiety with alcohol, or they think they do. It’s actually a terrible anxiety manager. But it’s a very accessible mental health service.
“Unless you’re suicidal or homicidal, really, mental health services are not that easy to access. Even if you have the money to pay, there are massive waiting lists for private counsellors. So for medium to moderate mental health concerns, alcohol is the easiest; it’s your go-to mental health treatment service.”
Lotta Dann, author of three books on alcohol and sobriety and founder of the Living Sober online community, agrees.
“The fact of the matter is the drug works,” she says. “In the moment when you drink it, you get the dopamine hit, you get that warm feeling, you get an uplift.”
She describes her own drinking habit – now 12 years in the past – as “blurring myself every night”.
“I’m sure I was still lovely,” she says of her former self. “But I was very resistant to anything deep. I used to scorn what I called navel-gazing. Everything had to be fun and upbeat all the time. But I was deeply, deeply sad, deep down.”
Barclay says alcohol is almost always seen as “the solution, not the problem”, a way of dealing with difficult feelings. She describes her own addiction in similar terms.
“My thing was emotions management. I didn’t know how to be sad. I didn’t know how to be appropriately angry. I didn’t know how to be appropriately assertive. So that was my underlying issue: how to deal with human emotions, how to manage those on a daily basis. All my frustration was held until the end of the day when I could have a drink. Or the middle of the day.”
Women also typically have to deal with what Barclay calls “the juggle”.
“All the women I know have 10 balls in the air. There’s family, there’s work, there’s extended family, there’s ageing parents, there’s teenagers with their own issues, there’s finances, there’s all these things going on.
“And you can’t let the balls drop. You can’t. And so where do you switch off? Where do you get a break? I think that’s driving it. It’s wine o’clock; all the memes. Absolutely, alcohol gives people a way to switch off and decompress.”
When it comes to social and popular culture and alcohol, we’re soaking in it, as the saying goes. Crichton notes how the media normalises drinking for women. “There’s a lot of narratives in pop culture that I think subtly do this, without us knowing.
“We see amazing, empowered, incredible female detectives [on TV shows] coming home at night with a case file, and they sit down and they pour themselves the most enormous glass of wine. And then they have another one. And then they get a call and they go out and solve a crime. This is everywhere… and it’s definitely about those older women.”
Dann notes in the age of streaming, the so-called “watershed” – the time after which alcohol advertising is allowed to be broadcast – is nonexistent. “I was streaming Love Island Australia at 11 o’clock in the morning while folding the washing, and every ad was for booze.”
Social media is full of alcohol references, too. “We have the whole yummy mummy wine o’clock. There are a lot of pop culture references to the idea of alcohol being – hilariously – a way to cope with menopause or to cope with ageing,” notes Crichton. “We all look better when we’ve had a drink, ha ha ha – there’s a whole narrative around that.
“And in New Zealand and Australia, it’s often also: we deserve it. We’ve been sensible for too long. Now is our time to kick up our heels. And that’s tied to alcohol.”
Marketing Power
“Celebrate the big and the small moments with Lindauer!” is the tagline for the popular bubbly on its Instagram page. The imagery for Babydoll rosé features manicured female hands toasting in sequinned sleeves. The RTD, Long White Vodka, goes with a casual, summery vibe on its Facebook page, where it promotes “Your fave Long White flavours, now available in 7% ABV” (the brand’s standard drinks have an alcohol content of around 5%). Magazine ads for Möet & Chandon feature glamorous people toasting at a long table flanked by twinkling city lights, with the slogan, “Celebrating life since 1743″.
Dann says alcohol marketers are always looking for new markets as trends change. There’s currently a “sober curious” movement that appears to be driven by younger drinkers; that means companies are looking at where the growth opportunities lie. She cites the resurgence of gin and its marketing as, “it would have been decided in a boardroom somewhere”.
“Everywhere, suddenly, there were gin clubs and there were cookbooks and it was all about the botanicals this and the mixology that. Let’s make gin trendy again … let’s suggest women have gin clubs. Anyway, it worked.
“They’ve now moved on to the amber liquids. There was a giant billboard down Ghuznee St [Wellington] recently of a gorgeous woman sitting by a fire holding a tumbler with a bit of probably whiskey, or something brown, with ‘it’s not just for the boys’. They’re literally trying to appeal to women to sell that product now. [The message is] it’s about equality.”
Connor says marketing is an incredibly powerful force in motivating us to drink, alongside the levers of availability and price of alcohol. Women drink, she says, in response to the environment and the social norms surrounding us.
“We make an assumption that we decide what we do. We don’t. Most people don’t make a decision to drink at any stage in their lives. We drink the way that’s normalised in our society.”
Connor asserts the alcohol industry has “colonised the information space” under the guise of education.
“One highly discredited way to try to change people’s minds is to give them information. But when people get [messages] that don’t match, they choose the thing that sounds like fun, the thing that sounds better to them, which is: don’t change your lifestyle because it’s really great to drink.”
Industry-funded website cheers.org.nz asserts “moderate drinking can fit into a balanced lifestyle” and features just one mention of cancer. The site includes the current Ministry of Health guidelines for safe drinking, alongside “tips to drink better”.
What Is Safe Drinking?
For some – and increasingly more women – the concept of moderate drinking is impossible. As they hit midlife and alcohol interacts with hormonal change and ramps up perimenopause symptoms, some women re-evaluate their relationships with alcohol and find it a toxic one.
Alcohol can contribute to unwanted kilos in midlife, too: alcohol’s “empty calories” in a 150ml glass of white wine equate to the caloric intake of a large banana but without the nutrition.
Dann says her Living Sober community is around 80% women and numbers close to 17,000 people, not including the lurkers. Some of those women are like she was, desperately wanting to become so-called “moderate” drinkers.
“I tried every trick in the book to moderate because I desperately wanted to be able to keep drinking,” Dann says.
“I just could not. Once I had it, I wanted more and more and more. It was just that pull in me. One of the hardest things is just accepting when you’re one of those who can’t moderate.”
Barclay says moderation isn’t a myth. Some people can. But it’s not a failure of the individual if we can’t.
“Alcohol isn’t the enemy. But the lie we are sold about alcohol – that a ‘responsible consumer’ can moderate their drinking – I think that’s the enemy. Would you say that about meth: ‘a responsible consumer can moderate their meth use’? Or smoking: ‘a responsible consumer can just smoke one a day’? It’s ridiculous to say that.
“You’re dealing with a drug that carves neural pathways in the brain that say: ‘When I’m upset, angry, tired, stressed or when it’s this time of day, this is what I do. And it creates powerful urges that are very difficult to overcome by yourself. It’s not a moral weakness finding that a difficult process to face.”
That reckoning process is worth it, Dann thinks. “I always say just be really honest with yourself because you know the truth. You know the truth deep down of how things are for you. Know that you are being targeted and manipulated blatantly by an industry that does not have your best interests at heart. And know that change is possible. And that there are so many of us who are doing life without this liquid drug. And it’s totally great.”
Alcohol: The Bad Boyfriend
Drinking was “a survival thing” for Julie Blamires after she had kids. But soon it was out of control.
Julie Blamires started drinking as a teen, she says, but didn’t feel alcohol was a problem for her until she had kids.
“I think it was like a survival thing, almost. You know: it’s that time in the evening, when the kids are ratty and you’re tired and you’ve got to do kid dinner and baths. I noticed this real culture among mums; ‘Come on over, we’ll give the kids dinner and we’ll have a few drinks.’ But for me, I’d go home and I’d keep drinking until I cooked our dinner. And then after dinner. It became something I couldn’t not do.”
She says she tried to drink less without cutting out alcohol altogether.
“I would say, ‘I’m not going to drink until Friday’, but I just always found a way to reward myself with it.”
Her reckoning came after one too many occasions that left her berating herself for drinking too much.
“I remember one time, I was walking home [from a school function] with the kids and my husband and I could hardly walk straight. I was so drunk. The kids were laughing at me – they were little at the time. I remember the next day thinking: ‘Wow, that is actually not okay. That is really not okay.’ It took a few of those moments for me to do something.”
Simone Barclay says people who are able to moderate their drinking “don’t need people like me to help them do it. People say they want to moderate their drinking and actually they don’t really want to moderate. They want to moderate the negative effects.”
She says if you can moderate and you want to drink less, “set yourself some rules and work within those boundaries”. If not, she suggests trying a period of abstinence.
“A period of sobriety is a real litmus test: what role is alcohol actually playing in my life? You take it out of your life and see: okay, now what am I left with? It doesn’t have to be forever. Three months is ideal. If you can’t do three, do one.
“Just really take that time to evaluate your relationship with alcohol and what it’s actually contributing, and what it’s taking. What it’s costing.”
Barclay reckons for many of us, alcohol can be like a toxic partner. “You know, ‘It’s going to be different this time’, but really, we are madly in love. ‘Don’t you remember how good it can be?’ And we do that for a long time before we really call it out and go, ‘Actually, you know what? You’re all talk.’”
When Blamires quit drinking, she had the support of a sober friend. “She told me, ‘You just have to start, just do one day. And then do the next day. And do the next day.’”
Now sober for 10 years, she says she feels “really good”.
“I feel clear and strong. Sleep is better. I know that I’m in a much better place than I was when I was drinking.”
Every now and then, she notices the thought that it would be nice to have a drink. Watching travel shows, “you think, oh, a glass of red wine in Italy would be quite nice. And it’s just so romanticised. But, you know, I can have a glass of sparkling water and it’s probably going to be just as beautiful.”