Saying bye to dry.

A movement that's preachy and aimed at women is not for me.

January is not kind. It is the morning after the after-party, and it’s dreary and cold, no bows and baubles, a wreathless winter of discontent. But this one is particularly nasty. Los Angeles burning up in wildfires and families have lost everything; Zuckerberg, Bezos et al are bowing to the new King, heading into the Inauguration declaring that truth is malleable and that any sort of fact-checking will be shelved until further notice, and that hate speech is fine and no tampons in the bathrooms for anyone who may be transgender; the health secretary, who apparently runs a taxi service for dead bear cubs and a preschool for ravens, is floating the abolition of vaccines that save lives and stem pandemics, and then there is the impending and continued loss of life and liberty for women, and for many of us — immigrants — who have been living on American soil, supporting our economy for decades. And then on top of it all, Dry January. For fuck’s sake.

Look, I know that the medical community has come up with some fairly damning and compelling evidence that alcohol is linked to cancer. And I am not making light of alcoholism as a disease that is actually a cancer and takes lives, and breaks people and their loved ones apart; it is a monster. But Dry January is not about sobriety. Sobriety without addiction is a sort of stolen badge; that is a very different, more beastly animal.

Photo by Marco J Haenssgen on Unsplash

You may be shaking your head at me, wagging your fingers at my desire to continue to imbibe despite the Surgeon General’s warnings, but let’s be honest. Everything gives you cancer – the smog and the city, the processed wheat, the red dye (bye bye), all those preservatives, and the ingredients that use every consonant in the alphabet that you find scrawled across puffy plastic packages of assorted dehydrated snacks. And of course all the fast food, the microwavable boxed meals, and who knows, probably our phones and all the scrolling. I mean life gives you cancer. So why not make life worth living?

Dry January has become this entire preachy marketing industrial complex; my Instagram feed is so full of mocktails, canned concoctions, and fizzy fake wines loaded up with adaptogens or CBD and, let’s be honest, that other naughty trick – sugar – to continue to sell that feeling you get from a Negroni because people want to feel what you feel when you drink – the release, the lightness — without the guilt of the booze.

The movement has an haughty air of superiority to it, as Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in the Times on Sunday; and interestingly, it’s aimed primarily at women. She points out two groups have been drinking more – middle aged adults, and middle-aged women who are prone to binge drinking (Should we maybe examine the causes of that? Why would middle-aged women be driven to binge drink? Hmmmm.)

“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,” she writes. “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.” She’s not wrong.

At its simplest, Dry January is just another downer; another platitude to add guilt to your choices, another round of naysaying for the naughty – just like the judgement that swirls around the war on fat – the salted butter on a warm baguette, a juicy steak charred to a crust and pink inside tucked into a pile of fries, a good croissant with a cafe au lait.

I’m frankly tired of all the nice things being taken away – not only my civil liberties and those of every woman in this nation, and all of our gay and trans children and our immigrant friends and family. That’s hard enough. But then you go after my rituals too? Why can’t we have nice things!!!!? We are all gonna go some-way someday, why not eat stinky soft cheese and open a bottle of something good?

These are the moments that battle the darkness of the days we are in. Particularly this day, this MLK Day, that also happens to be Inauguration Day. So, I am here to say that I am not giving up the warmth of a fire with a few fingers of brown spirit, or meeting a date for a drink when the afternoon is dark and cold, or opening a bottle of wine with my girlfriends in the middle of the day, or staying for a nightcap when the conversation doesn’t end, or raising a glass to celebrate a milestone, or just getting through the fucking week.

And here my friends is the thing: there is something good and necessary about drinking, and I proffer here and now that it may be worth the risk. I am keeping my nice things. I’m saying goodbye to the dry.