[ad_1]
The annual ritual known as Dry January is upon us. The monthlong ode to teetotalism started as a British health campaign in 2013, but it is now fully embedded in our American culture of self-branding. There are Dry January infographics, influencers, ad campaigns and incessant discussion about who is and is not drinking. The science is clear. Abstainers are doing a good thing for their health. I am happy for them. Still, despite a marked decline in my own taste for alcohol, I am not joining them.
Some of my reasons are petty. I don’t like cute social media campaigns and I cannot stomach self-righteousness about consumer choices. Do or do not, as Yoda might say. But please shut up about it, as I definitely would say.
Some of my reasons are deeper. Anything that becomes popular has politics. Dry January takes a choice and compels people to talk about it, to proselytize it, and ultimately to perform it. I’m sure people think they perform going dry for all the good reasons. To let others know they are not alone. To fight back against insidious drinking culture. But what we mean to do and what we end up doing can be two different things.
If Dry January were just temporary teetotalism or total abstinence, it would be innocuous. But consumer-driven health campaigns that get this kind of traction do not happen in a vacuum. A broader modern temperance movement promoting “clean” living traffics in moral superiority and old racist ideas. That history is unavoidable, but today’s version of “the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine” also reflects our self-defeating politics of individuality: Cutesy individual solutions cannot solve big social problems, like alcoholism or cancer.
I’m not talking about sobriety here. I have spent plenty of time with relatives who struggled to get clean in hospital wards and recovery programs. I lost my dearest father figure to alcoholism. Addiction is a disease, and it takes a strong person in a strong community to build a sober life in the face of it. That’s why I don’t like to think of myself as being sober when I pass on a cocktail. Sobriety without addiction feels like stolen valor.
Whatever they call it, people who choose not to drink have new ammunition. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is calling for more strident health warnings on alcohol. The medical community has at least partially challenged the long-held idea that there is a “healthy” amount of drinking — a couple of glasses of red wine and the occasional spirit no longer seem like good bets for longevity.
So people are drinking less, almost all people. Just 62 percent of adults age 35 and younger say they drink. That is 10 percentage points less than 20 years ago. I was a child in 1984, when the United States raised the legal drinking age to 21. That campaign reflected our long national concern that young adults are the most at-risk group for alcohol abuse. Times have changed. Newer data show that young adults are now about as likely to have a drink as their grandparents.
There are two groups trending the other way. More middle-aged adults drink now than did 20 years ago, and middle-aged women are prone to binge drinking. Maybe that’s why the fervor of the cultural denigration of drinking feels like it is less about the number of people who drink and more about who is drinking.
A society that does not trust women attaches a lot of morality to women’s choices. If a mother gives her child a tablet, she is a selfish mother. If she drinks too much one night, she is reckless. In either case, labeling drinking alcohol in any amount a bad decision unfairly condemns women. Anything less than performative abstinence makes a woman too self-absorbed to be good for her family and for society. If we are at all in the throes of a drinking crisis, I believe women would have a lot of defensible reasons for partaking. I also believe we deserve empathy, not condemnation masked as criticism of our choice.
Choice isn’t the only concept that I find troubling. Going dry draws on the culture of performative health consumption that includes fasting, juicing and purifying. Language is a big part of these types of consumer health choices. In the early 2010s, being thin and able-bodied was out; it was too exclusionary in an inclusivity-obsessed liberal culture. Being strong and “healthy” was in. It was progressive to proclaim that any body could be strong and healthy. It just so happened that the strong, healthy bodies people curated, desired and posted about were also thin and able. Pilates-toned physiques, those thin enough to show musculature but not too bulky, also sold us cosmetics, vitamins, workout regimens, athleisure, journals and lifestyles that promised a clean life in a polluted world.
When someone alludes to “clean” healthfulness — from clean living to clean drinking — someone somewhere is carrying the burden of being “dirty.” You cannot have one without the other. The idea of clean is not apolitical because ours is not a fair society. Our culture sorts people by their bodies, from size to color to ability. Historically, it justifies who is assigned to stations beneath political consideration by saying those people are dirty or unclean.
The clean anti-drinking influencers look very homogeneous. They are often white, able-bodied and conform to Western standards of beauty. Even the more diverse influencers spouting clean living and dry lifestyles promote a network of supplements, coaching and online communities with very white, very Western ideas about health.
The cultural war on drinking looks very similar to the cultural war on obesity. That war is playing out more as an attack on fat people than on supranational companies that make it expensive and nearly impossible to eat locally, healthfully and affordably. Of course, alcohol consumption comes with health risks. I just wonder why we have more interest in Dry January and mocktails than we have the will to critique our culture of consumption.
Those individual solutions are more about branding than health care. Performative temperance is a market: A quick scroll through my social media feeds shows influencers calling alcohol “poison,” bubbly visuals of ways to live clean in 2025 and companies selling CBD gummies or weird adaptogen drinks to replace a glass of wine.
While alcohol consumption has declined, other data suggests that CBD use is up. Switching alcohol for CBD does not exactly match my idea of sobriety. But CBD can be easier to market as natural. Natural does not always mean healthy or even safe, but it certainly implies cleanliness.
Even I am susceptible. I own a bottle of CBD happy pills, purchased in a late-night social media fugue state. I keep them on the kitchen counter to shame myself. Buying morality is always a sucker’s bet.
Prizing what is natural — and valorizing those who have the means to buy it — shifts our focus from collective responsibility to individual choice. It may feel good to debate whether someone chose cancer because she drank red wine or chose to die because she ate too many carbohydrates and got fat. But it also lets our institutions off the hook. We live in a carcinogen-saturated culture. Everything from our food systems to our consumer packaging is linked to cancer. Our anxiety about how institutions are failing us makes going dry feel empowering, but it does not build power.
Micro-dosing CBD gummies because they are natural may count as being “dry,” but it is also isolating. It is not lost on me that our hustle economy might prefer a lonely individual with social anxiety who self-soothes with a digital screen and a gummy or two over a social drinker who loses her cellphone at a bar. My point isn’t that drinking is good. But switching drinking for casual CBD use is not solving a problem so much as buying into one industry instead of another.
Tossing around moral binary language like “clean” and “natural” is especially dangerous in today’s social-media-driven world. We have the power to circulate millions of aesthetically pleasing images about clean living that just so happen to promote white, upper-class ideals as the antidote to unhealthy cultural invaders. After a generation-redefining pandemic, Donald Trump won over voters with his vicious demonization of immigrants, minorities, non-Western countries and transgender scapegoats. They are the “dirty” threat to this nation’s fantasy of itself as a clean room of meritocracy and nationalism.
Because of this, it makes sense that everyone seems to be aspiring to prove her cleanliness. The ship is sinking. Posing as clean and ignoring the actual politics of making vulnerable people appear dangerously dirty is like tangoing on the Titanic.
So, please do not ask me if I’m clean or call the month “dry.” I accept the science about drinking and I do not care if you abstain, but I reject the cultural politics of being clean and sober when I have never been dirty and I have never been an addict.
If you push me on this, I am likely to drink a martini in protest.
[ad_2]
Source link
