Image credit: www.hipsobriety.com
Sober is a feminist issue. I say this as a survivor of sexual assault. As a mum of two little girls. As a now sober woman with a history of very problematic and often dangerous binge drinking. As a woman living in a world where women supposedly have equal rights but also where a man who thinks it’s acceptable to say things like ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ is the leader of the most powerful country in the world and (alleged attempted) rapists are (probably) able to sit on the bench of that same country’s highest judicial authority. A world that is starting to make The Handmaid’s Tale feel more like prophecy than fiction.
I have no intention of going into the detail of what happened to me or the role alcohol played in that here because it’s just not relevant. It’s not relevant whether or not I was drinking that night (I was, just to stop you speculating). It is emphatically not the purpose of this blog to say that women should not drink because that will protect them from rapists. Because it won’t. Women are not in any way in control of what rapists do. What we wear, what we look like, how we dress, if and how much we drink. None of it matters a damn. Because the only person in control of what a rapist does is the rapist. That goes to the absolute essence of what rape is, so how could it possibly be otherwise?
This week [the week of the Christine Blasey Ford/Brett Kavanaugh hearing in September 2018] has been very difficult for me emotionally. Triggering all sorts of big and unmanageable emotions, not just about what happened to me all those years ago but about the implications for me and my daughters of living in a world where misogyny is still so hardwired into the systems which govern our lives. Where the vast majority of real power in this world sits in the hands of rich, white, straight men who fully intend to keep it that way and who are able for the most part to keep it that way because the system works for them. And no wonder, they built it after all. Where women are still given constant messages, overt and subliminal, about what make us valuable and worthy and so much of this relates to a specific archetype of physical appearance that the majority of real women have no hope of ever matching (and nor should we be aiming to). Where glass ceilings are still very real, especially for women of colour and women in the LGBTQ+ community, no matter what lip service our corporations and public bodies pay to this.
And the only reason I’m even thinking about any of this is because I’m sober. And I find it hugely troubling and depressing to think how far we still have to go before we have true equality for ALL women, where we live in a society that is not racist or homophobic and which treats women as more than an adjunct to men. But it doesn’t make me want to drink. It doesn’t make me wish I hadn’t got sober. Because when you get your vision miraculously restored only to find out that your house is quietly falling apart around you, you don’t wish you were blind again or poke your eyes out with a fork. You get to work to do what you can to fix things. When I drank I was horribly anxious. Like off the scale anxious. It mostly manifested in anxiety about my daughters, about my ability to keep them safe in the world. And I couldn’t cope with it, I literally was not able to cope with it. My drinking and postnatal depression and anxiety had brought me so low that the only thing I could do to be able to function day to day was to hide from it. So I stopped watching the news, I stopped listening to the news, I stopped buying newspapers. I hid from the world. And even after I stopped drinking it took me over a year of sobriety before I felt strong enough to peep out of my self-imposed quarantine, before I started to feel flickers of interest in what was going on in the world, rather than just overwhelming fear and anxiety.
And now I can see something I could never see before. I can see how much women are still belittled and discounted in this world. Watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearing I just kept thinking how his behaviour and demeanour would have been reported on if he had been a woman. The words ‘hysterical’ and ‘meltdown’ would have been used; rather than his anger being seen as a justifiable response to the accusations being levelled against him he would have been painted as unbalanced, unhinged, insane. I kept contrasting his performance with Dr Blasey Ford’s enormous dignity in telling her hardest truth, in such inhospitable surroundings. I kept thinking how, if a man commits a sexual assault under the influence of drink, especially if he was blacked out, it somehow lessens the perceived blame attached to him. But if the woman who was assaulted is under the influence of drink this enormously increases the perceived blame attached to her, and how this goes to the absolute heart of everything that’s wrong about how sex crimes are dealt with in our society. The excessive focus on the victim’s behaviour and the enormous bias towards believing the accused if the case comes down to conflicting witness testimonies, as they so often do.
It suits the people who benefit the most from how society currently is (the Donald Trumps and Brett Kavanaughs of this world) for the rest of us to be quiet and accommodating. Accepting of the status quo and willing to live out our little lives without making a fuss. For us to ignore the misogyny that means a woman can be sexually assaulted with impunity, as long as the perpetrator is white, rich and powerful. For us to ignore the systemic racism that means a black man can be murdered in his own home with impunity as long as the perpetrator is white and part of the system. It sounds dystopian but this is the society we live in, this is where we actually are. This is how little the lives, wellbeing and bodily autonomy of the majority of the world’s citizens matter to those in power. And there are many ways we can be kept quiet and accommodating. But one of the biggest, I’d say probably the biggest of all, is with alcohol. With a legalised and widely advertised addictive drug which suppresses our natural confidence, kills our brain cells and increases our anxiety until we come to believe that we have no chance of making even a tiny difference in this world and so the best thing to do is to disengage completely.
Which is why for me sober is very much a feminist issue. Because we cannot do the work which needs to be done if we are drunk and hungover all the time, trapped in our tiny little worlds. Of course I’m not saying that people who drink never do this work or cannot do it very very well indeed. And I’m not saying that you can’t be a feminist if you drink. What I am saying is that when we are under the influence of alcohol we are not entirely ourselves. We are giving away a bit of our power, and the more time we spend drinking, the more of that power we give away, until eventually we have none left at all. But we can stop that process at any time. And we can take our power back, the magnificent, unstoppable, seismic power of womankind. The power of the goddess. It’s always there, waiting for us, no matter how long we’ve been hiding from it. We can take it back. I am taking it back, and it all started the day I put down my last drink.
I love this post. Thank you for writing.
Thank you – so happy you liked it xx