Is Sober October Slut-Shaming Me?

My frustrations and weird questions of shame around anti-alcohol campaigns like Sober October and Dry January.

YOWCH, so many thoughts right now. We’re in the first week of October: a second month that was appropriated by the anti-alcohol movement and that is now being fought for by those who contrarily (scandalously?!) believe in encouraging the convivial, community-fostering nature of wine.

To put it more succinctly: It’s a partisan campaign battle of Sober October vs. Come Over October. Hrmph. Our country loves a dichotomy, don’t we?

I’m just going to come right out and sound like a petty, crotchety boozehound: I dislike Sober October and all it does (doesn’t do) for the resiliency of wine.

UGH, more so—now that I’m venting—I hate that everything is a campaign these days. Why does not drinking for 31 days have to be A CAMPAIGN to raise money for cancer research?! In fact, I hate that the very word CAMPAIGN is so prolific these days. Everything’s a campaign—“an organized course of action to achieve a goal”—from our politics to our holy corporate marketing strategies to our own personal goddamn social feeds. I’m so tired of campaigning and I’m so tired of the inherent “us” vs. “them” rhetoric that comes alongside a campaign. At this stage of my life, I’d really like to be less organized, less action-oriented, less stressed out about ACHIEVING ALL THE GOALS.

There. Now that that tangent’s off my chest, we can move onto my second rant: the dichotomization of every little freaking thing in our lives. My first issue with Sober October and Dry January and all the abstinence campaigns is that they propose that it’s all or nothing.

These days, it feels like so often you must choose whether you’re FOR or AGAINST us / them / something. The factors that got us here are for another blog on another day, so I’ll simply point out here that this space in which you’re reading is intended to be a gray zone of inclusivity. All opinions are welcome because if you are reading this, you are a human being who is actually capable of dialogue and conversation and who can exercise kindness and grace and compassion during our conversations. You are welcome if you’re sober; you are welcome if you’re drinking; you are welcome if you’re capable of being both of those at various times. Just because I make a statement here as the author does not mean my attitude on it is fixed forever in cement, nor does it mean I am an evil person should you disagree, nor does it mean that you are not welcome in the conversation should you currently hold a contrary perspective. The joy comes in the diversity and the inclusion; remember, we are all on our own portion of our own special paths.

Now then. With that strong caveat and longggg intro, I’m going to get to my point and share my strongly opinionated thoughts about Sober October: It is a campaign I detest. I already know all the reasons I’m “wrong” for detesting this, and how I need to be inclusive of sober-curious folks, compassionate about the realities of addiction, kind to my body that is a temple, etc. etc. etc. Indeed I am all of those things. However! I detest many things about the anti-alcohol movement and the myriad logical fallacies it uses to argue its point. Long ramblings out of the way, here are a few problems I have with Sober October and Dry January:

1. Extremism in lieu of moderation and the implication that if you’re not sober, you’re drunk… calling to mind the issue with temporary fad diets/binges versus long-term, realistic adjustments to holistic health.

2. Lack of context when painting alcohol as the villain; a disregard of rituals, traditions, styles of drinking, and types of drinks… the implication that sharing a bottle of wine with friends at a dinner party is the same kind of drinking as taking down a half-handle of vodka alone on a Tuesday.

3. Poorly researched medical studies leading to blanket statement that all alcohol in all cases diminishes total “health”… the lack of proper research around a multitude of physical, mental and emotional health implications of various “styles” and modalities of alcohol consumption and a failure to understand causation versus correlation.

4. Symptomatic versus underlying “fixes” to healthfulness, i.e. arguing that simply not drinking will fix issues pertaining to weight, anxiety, sleep, depression, blood pressure, etc. without addressing other systemic, cultural, mental/emotional causes and the why of why you drink coupled with a holistic consideration of external/world factors in tandem with internal/personal beliefs and habits.

5. News campaigns(!) with strategic SEO and lobbying budgets behind them that then algorithmically populate mainstream media and our social feeds with powerfully suggestive and shame-inflicting statements about the purportedly extreme, flat-out, evil dangers of alcohol. Never mind 8,000 years of fermentation, distillation and drinking culture among humanity. MAYBE we should talk about SOCIAL MEDIA ILLS MORE THAN BOOZE!

6. The sometimes low-key but oftentimes blatant, condescending Puritanical-vibes and slut-shaming-esque proselytizing that anti-alcohol advocates employ to perpetuate the notion that those who drink are less self-controlled, less mindful, less worthy, less pure.

Slut shaming is defined as the stigmatization of an individual based on his or her appearance, sexual availability, and actual or perceived sexual behavior. I use this phrase as a metaphor for the ways it seems that the anti-alcohol movement stigmatizes those who choose to drink by implying that if we’re not abstaining it’s probably because we’re, like, grossly not capable of abstaining. The conversation gets framed as a call to all for mindfulness, healthfulness, purity and self-control PLUS the betterment of others à la Sober October’s fundraising for breast cancer research. We are so holy. UGH, BITE ME.

Even more crucially, the whole thing misses what is, for me, the ENTIRE POINT OF WINE. I wrote this in my shop’s newsletter this morning, and it’s on-point enough that I’ll quote it again here:

I drink wine pretty much every single day... literally. I don't drink a lot of it, and it's almost always with dinner and Josiah, or a friend or two or twelve, but it is essentially every day. I've had lengthy conversations with my doctor such that she's finally stopped harassing me after my Kaiser survey reports to her my "high" consumption. She gets it now that the rest of my mental and physical health practices are extremely good and that I have an extremely well researched and carefully considered perspective on the World Health Organization's anti-alcohol bias and the ways that sharing a bottle of wine in intentional community is wholly different than crushing several cocktails to drown out the noise of your anxiety and dismay after overworking yourself to death daily.

It's not about the alcohol, for me—it's about the way that a bottle of wine is an evolving, ephemeral, aromatically and texturally fascinating art form that connects us to the people and places that made it and to the people and places and occasions with which we savor it. The ceremony of opening and sharing a bottle of wine is grounding, centering, even sacred to me. I have been […] stumbling through [this] piece I'm trying to post that doesn't come across too feisty, that acknowledges healthfulness and addiction yet still laments my frustrations with "Sober October" and "Dry January." In the wine industry, I'm not alone in my frustration. Authors I admire like Eric Asimov and Karen MacNeil have put together beautiful thoughts and even entire marketing campaigns around the notion that wine brings people together, and in a wild day and age when we're mostly falling apart—especially right now with a big important and polarizing thing looming over our country next month—wine is singular and special in its fostering of community. 

I want to get together more and fall apart less. With that, I’ll be drinking wine tonight. Call me: you’re invited.