Funny what you stumble into online. I was looking at changes in alcohol marketing trends, one being the proliferation of high-alcohol low-calorie beverages, and saw many offerings from the brand Skinnygirl. Wanting to see if the brand advertised its high intoxication-to-calorie ratio or left customers to figure it out for themselves, I googled it. The first thing I learned was that Skinnygirl is “not about a shape or size,” which sounded like gaslighting to me. Calling your brand Skinnygirl then insisting it’s not about being a skinny girl is like naming your child Smellyboy and forbidding people to sniff him. Anyway, the web site was mostly pictures of hot women, so I didn’t learn much about the brand except that it promotes “a balanced life with more flair and less compromise, so you can indulge a little and live a lot.” That seemed to apply to low-calorie high-alcohol beverages in a general way, but I was hoping for specifics, so I clicked “cocktails.”

To my surprise, I landed on Beam Suntory’s web site, which was the opposite of Skinnygirl’s web site, just a long list of products and teeny-tiny photos to help customers distinguish Skinnygirl flavored vodkas from the many other flavored vodkas, even though they don’t need to be distinguished because they all come from the same distilleries and will all help you lose weight if you drink them in place of one or two meals a day. I was disappointed, having hoped to find, at the very least, a weight-loss plan with a catchy name–Drink Yourself Thin or Dipso Dieting, perhaps. But, as always on the internet, I was quickly distracted, this time by a link promising help with “responsible drinking.” Help? Normally, responsible drinking campaigns consist of the command “Drink responsibly!” next to a picture engineered to make you drink irresponsibly. I had to click.

Beam Suntory’s help consisted of admonitions to make a plan and stick to it and an app for making that plan. Oooh, an app; I’m in. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t actually do anything. It asks you a few questions, such as how many drinks you plan to have over what period of time, but rather than suggesting a pace based on your info (e.g. one drink every two hours), it just repeats your info back to you and asks if you want to share it. Share what? The app is as useless as the iBeer app, which, for those who don’t know, turns your phone into a pretend beer that empties as you pretend drink. And burps, which actually makes the iBeer app more useful than the responsible drinking app, now that I think about it.

Beam Suntory seemed to know their app was useless because they suggested I go elsewhere for help with responsible drinking and listed different sites for different parts of the world. Because I’m in the US, I visited the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (FAAR), even though there was no hotlink, so I had to copy and paste the URL. Copying and pasting wasn’t too much of a strain, but it did tell me that Beam Suntory wasn’t expecting many people to want help with responsible drinking.

FAAR’s web site, Responsibility.org, is much more polished than Beam Suntory’s little app. I would expect that; after all, FAAR is a national distillers’ group, hence a motherlode of mixed messages about drinking. The only way to understand the contradiction at the heart of FAAR is to realize one crucial fact about the alcohol industry: they need people to drink irresponsibly. Almost three-fourths of their revenue comes from the ten percent of the population that averages 73.85 alcoholic drinks per week. Not the “responsible” ten percent who average 15.28 drinks per week, but the ten percent who average six twelve-packs of beer or four 750 ml bottles of liquor every single week. If we dipsomaniacs started drinking “responsibly” overnight, the industry would lose sixty percent of its revenue. So the alcohol industry faces a challenge: how DO they deliver a message that looks authentic but that they hope their audience will disregard?

Step one is putting yourself in the center of the frame, which downplays the problematic message. So, after a screen announcing that April is Alcohol Responsibility Month (photo: people drinking to celebrate Alcohol Responsibility Month), we see a series of full-screen photos with legends telling us that FAAR is:

It’s weird that numbers three and four are the same if you swap “empowering” for “inspiring.” Presumably, old people have to be empowered to make responsible choices, while young people have to be inspired to make the same choices, which I suppose implies that Boomers are feeble while Zoomers are apathetic. It’s also weird that there are hardly any men in these pictures–and hardly any alcohol. If it weren’t for the people celebrating Alcohol Responsibility Month, no one would be drinking.

Moving on, finally, I learned that the “efforts” FAAR is “leading” mostly involve catching and punishing drunk drivers and underage drinkers. In fact, I began to wonder why the pictures on the main page weren’t of people being arrested and jailed, which would have been much more on point. But, okay, FAAR does promote responsible drinking in a few ways that don’t involve the legal system, ways such as education, so I headed there to see what I could learn about responsible drinking.

The key to responsible drinking, it turns out, is responsible thinking, so I took a quiz to see if I’m a responsible thinker. In the first question, I was to imagine myself at a holiday office party with the chance to impress colleagues and an open bar, and my choices were:

1. Take advantage of the open bar by having two or three drinks right away.
2. Plan to have two or three drinks total, along with water.
3. Plan to have one or two drinks with a water after each.

Note that having no drinks was not an option. Anyway, I chose number two, because it was the closest to what I would have done back in the day, except for the water. Yes, I would actually have downed at least a dozen if the party lasted more than two hours (or the drinks were weak), but I would have planned to have only two or three, so I stuck with number two, which turned out to be a good answer because it earned me a “Nice work!” on that question. Encouraged, I finished the quiz and discovered that all the questions on it were exactly like the one above: there was a light drinking option, a moderate drinking option, and a heavy drinking option, and the first two were equally “correct.” In other words, as long as you didn’t answer “I plan to get hammered” on any question, you would earn a perfect score.

My perfect score made me a “Responsibility Expert” and earned me a photo toast from a beautiful young woman (I’m toasting back, though I seem to be toasting with a rum and coke, so it’s probably not actually me.) Below her photo, the beautiful young woman says, “Niiiiice! You’re, like, really smart and seem to make good decisions.” Wow, she, like, really knows me! The beautiful woman then gives me some more compliments and tells me (twice) to share my results. I feel young and hip and plugged in–woke, too, because I’m white and the beautiful woman is not–and I can hardly reach for the “Share” button fast enough because Responsibility.org has done, like, an awesome job of empowering and inspiring me to drink responsibly!

They know they haven’t, of course, and this fact is really important. The folks at Responsibility.org know I’m mocking their stupid quiz with its obvious answers and its clumsy attempts to appear young and relevant. They must know. They’re the alcohol industry, which sponsors the most clever, seductive advertising on earth! Think for a minute about the best ads you’ve ever seen; how many of them are beer or liquor ads? The most interesting man in the world? Whassup? Absolut whatever? The alcohol industry knows marketing better than anyone on the planet; do you honestly believe they couldn’t come up with a brilliant “drink less” campaign if they really wanted people to drink less?

Of course they could. So it’s not unreasonable to speculate that they’re failing on purpose. They need to appear good corporate citizens, but the last thing they really want is for people to limit their drinking. For people to stay off the roads when they’re drunk: sure, they want that. Everybody wants that. But not less consumption. Remember that sixty percent potential loss I cited a few minutes ago? The underage market represents eleven percent of alcohol sales, not as dramatic as sixty percent but still significant. Successful campaigns to reduce teen and dependent drinking would cripple the alcohol industry. Only unsuccessful campaigns make any business sense.

Then there’s the way they fail. Look again at the little quiz I took, which appeared to be striving for youthful relevance. “Niiiiice!” says the beautiful young woman, “You’re, like, really smart and seem to make good decisions.” What’s more pathetic than trying to mimic youth culture and getting it wrong? Answer: nothing. If you really want to turn people off, don’t just be uncool; shoot for cool and miss. A lot of anti-underage-drinking PSAs have the same quality: they come off clumsy, unsophisticated, and hapless, which associates those qualities with the message they’re trying to convey. When I was young, I thought it was because not drinking (or drinking just a little) was so inherently lame that it would be impossible to portray in a non-lame way. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve seen some anti-drug PSAs that are vaguely edgy (the “Oh, Meth” music video from the 90s comes to mind), but I’ve never seen an underage drinking PSA that wasn’t utterly cringeworthy.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Responsibility.org and other industry-sponsored groups are deliberately missing the boat or just not trying very hard. The outcome is the same. Drinking alcohol, promoted with all of the skill and creativity that the advertising industry and its media affiliates can muster, is hip, sophisticated, knowing, and fun. Not drinking alcohol–or drinking very little alcohol–is backward, naive, clueless, and puritanical. Trade in your Skinnygirl White Peach Margarita for iced tea on a regular basis, and you’re in that second group the moment somebody notices and wails “Why aren’t you drinking?” Even if you reply (as I have), “Alcohol ruins my heroin buzz,” you’re exiled to nerdtown and wondering how such a simple decision as not drinking could have so much power.