Gender Bender
More women are drinking, and the women who drink are drinking more, in some cases matching their male peers. This is the kind of equality nobody was fighting for.
By Alex Morris
New York Magazine
Of all the drinkers I know—male or female—Kate drinks by far the most. She drinks at home before going out to drink. She drinks on the phone because it’s sort of like not drinking alone. She drinks on Sundays because it’s still the weekend and on Mondays because it isn’t. There are days when in 24 hours, she will have as many as 24 drinks. At a party, she can throw back ten, fifteen cocktails and still stay upright in her stilettos, which is even more remarkable when you consider how slender she is in her little designer dresses.
That wasn’t always the case. Unlike most girls, Kate didn’t touch alcohol in high school and rarely drank in college, but three months into her first job as an analyst at one of New York’s investment banks, something in her shifted. She was working grueling hours at a grueling pace. The only people she’d see in a day were the taxi driver who drove her to work bleary-eyed in the morning, another who carried her home comatose late at night, and her co-workers, a mostly male group with whom she had little in common. “One day,” she says, “I consciously made the decision to try to get to know them better. So I started going out with them.”
Going out with them meant drinking, usually heavy drinking, which suited Kate’s mind-set at the time. “I felt like I deserved it,” she says. “I realized I can work crazy hours, I can work just like anyone else, so I can party just like anyone else.” Soon she had an agenda: If she could finish her work by 2 a.m., she would grab a guy from the office—“I had no girlfriends, it’s such a male- dominated industry”—and they’d hurry to a bar, order a few rounds of shots, and try to catch up with the people who were already drunk. “I drank almost every day,” she says. “But I thought it was normal because I was always going out, and when you’re out, everyone else is drinking.”
As she drank more, her career advanced. “It was like a one-of-the-guys kind of thing. In terms of success, people wanted to work with me. They’d be like, ‘Ugh, I have to work with X,’ you know, another girl. But with me, it’d be like, ‘Oh, this will be so fun.’ ” Rather than trying to hide how much she drank, she realized that her party-girl image would make her more relatable. “You have to be a bitch to survive—and then they’ll call you a bitch. I think maybe for me the drinking let me balance out the kind of stern, bitchy attitude at work with, like, Yeah, obviously, when I’m not working, I’m really fun. It made me look a little more human.”
(More here.)
By Alex Morris
New York Magazine
Of all the drinkers I know—male or female—Kate drinks by far the most. She drinks at home before going out to drink. She drinks on the phone because it’s sort of like not drinking alone. She drinks on Sundays because it’s still the weekend and on Mondays because it isn’t. There are days when in 24 hours, she will have as many as 24 drinks. At a party, she can throw back ten, fifteen cocktails and still stay upright in her stilettos, which is even more remarkable when you consider how slender she is in her little designer dresses.
That wasn’t always the case. Unlike most girls, Kate didn’t touch alcohol in high school and rarely drank in college, but three months into her first job as an analyst at one of New York’s investment banks, something in her shifted. She was working grueling hours at a grueling pace. The only people she’d see in a day were the taxi driver who drove her to work bleary-eyed in the morning, another who carried her home comatose late at night, and her co-workers, a mostly male group with whom she had little in common. “One day,” she says, “I consciously made the decision to try to get to know them better. So I started going out with them.”
Going out with them meant drinking, usually heavy drinking, which suited Kate’s mind-set at the time. “I felt like I deserved it,” she says. “I realized I can work crazy hours, I can work just like anyone else, so I can party just like anyone else.” Soon she had an agenda: If she could finish her work by 2 a.m., she would grab a guy from the office—“I had no girlfriends, it’s such a male- dominated industry”—and they’d hurry to a bar, order a few rounds of shots, and try to catch up with the people who were already drunk. “I drank almost every day,” she says. “But I thought it was normal because I was always going out, and when you’re out, everyone else is drinking.”
As she drank more, her career advanced. “It was like a one-of-the-guys kind of thing. In terms of success, people wanted to work with me. They’d be like, ‘Ugh, I have to work with X,’ you know, another girl. But with me, it’d be like, ‘Oh, this will be so fun.’ ” Rather than trying to hide how much she drank, she realized that her party-girl image would make her more relatable. “You have to be a bitch to survive—and then they’ll call you a bitch. I think maybe for me the drinking let me balance out the kind of stern, bitchy attitude at work with, like, Yeah, obviously, when I’m not working, I’m really fun. It made me look a little more human.”
(More here.)
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