Or Why We Still Can’t Calmly Discuss Alcohol Policy a Hundred Years after Prohibition

Last week I read an article with a fresh perspective on alcohol policy, a topic rarely covered in the media.  I didn’t completely agree, but I admired the article and was sorry to see it misrepresented by most of its online critics. So what follows is, I hope, a more respectful response.

The essay appeared under an editor’s provocative headline, which the writer, Moira Donegan, disavowed on Twitter: “Drunk men are a danger to women. Should feminists oppose boozing?” Despite the headline, the article raised serious questions about how communities decide who and what to protect when it comes to the world’s most popular recreational drug. Thanks largely to efforts by the alcohol industry, these questions are so routinely ignored by the media that simply raising them in a major newspaper takes real courage.

And the article is thoughtful, as well as brave. Donegan anchors her discussion in history, looking back at the temperance movements that produced alcohol prohibition and pointing out that they were motivated as much by concern for women’s safety as by puritanical zeal. No historian would dispute the point; it looks odd to the rest of us only because we’re so used to dismissing prohibitionists as pinchy-lipped pleasure-haters that we’re unaware they had other motives, much less ones we might find sympathetic.[1]

But they did, and chief among them was the problem of domestic violence. Donegan is right to point out that the temperance movement blamed it on drunkenness, as illustrated by a famous plate from George Cruikshank’s 1847 book The Bottle.

The image shows a drunk father about to punch his terrified wife while two children try to restrain him and a servant watches horrified from a doorway. The overturned furniture indicates that the assault has been underway for a while, suggesting it is part of a pattern of escalating violence. And indeed in The Bottle’s next plate, assault has escalated to murder with the wife lying dead on the floor. As abundant historical work confirms, such violence was not exceptional but frequent in countries whose per capita alcohol consumption was up to three times what it is today. In other words, alcohol-fueled domestic violence was a serious—and widely recognized—social problem, one tackled chiefly by temperance activists.

That said, I think Donegan overstates how neatly gendered such violence was in the nineteenth century. Yes, most perpetrators were men, but not all of them. And their victims were also boys and other men, as we see in the following image of a father hurling his son across a room.

It’s important to remember that nineteenth-century households could be quite large, so domestic violence was not limited to wives and children. Employed and enslaved domestic staff, both men and women, were also victims as were other relatives. And women were sometimes perpetrators, as we see in the top center image of the broadsheet illustrating this essay. The woodcut depicts a woman assaulting a slightly smaller man or boy, likely her son, given his clothing. As with the homicide depicted by Cruikshank, the weapon used in the assault is a bottle, lest anyone miss the point that alcohol sometimes injures people who don’t drink it, whatever their gender.

I want to be clear: gender is relevant to the issue of alcohol and assault; court records show that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women bore the brunt of drunken domestic violence. Moreover, the saloons where most drinking was done were male enclaves that encouraged “heroic” consumption of alcohol. But, when it comes to both alcohol policy and gender politics, legions of readers wait to pounce on overstatements they can leverage to discredit arguments that would otherwise be hard to challenge. In other words, though I appreciate how fresh and startling Donegan’s gendered framing of the issue is, I wish she had phrased it less absolutely.

After educating readers about the lasting social changes temperance activists achieved despite formidable opposition by the alcohol industry, Donegan laments that the drunken male violence they opposed remains a serious problem today. Once again, I had conflicting responses to this claim: it’s over-schematized in the way I just complained about, yet there’s still considerable truth to it. In addition, after reading a lot of research on alcohol and violence, I welcomed Donegan’s boldness and clarity, because the conversation among scholars and policy-makers doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

In the interdisciplinary field of alcohol studies, everything seems endlessly complicated—subtle, contingent, and always disputed. It’s hard not to link this complexity to a certain stagnation in the field, which has made far less progress than other disciplines. Reading descriptions of the latest clinical studies funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which bankrolls most of the alcohol research on the planet, I often see scholars asking the same questions they were asking thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, questions that don’t produce much new insight, just confirmation of the self-evident and/or support for competing models or belief systems.

The research on alcohol and violence is typical. As Donegan points out, everyone knows that a causal relationship exists. Different studies cite different numbers, but no one denies that a large percentage of homicides, assaults, and rapes is perpetrated by drunk people and that it’s a serious problem. What’s disputed is how alcohol produces this violence: is the effect pharmacological, a result of disinhibition, or is it social, the result of expectation? Or is the violence secondary, a result of alcohol disrupting normal cognition, and, if so, what’s the most important disruption? Myopia? Diminished ability to interpret social cues? Something else? Or does causation, in fact, go the other way: aggression comes first, and people get drunk to give themselves license to express it? Or are both drunkenness and violence parallel effects of a prior cause? Not surprisingly, given all this dissent, most researchers indefinitely postpone coming up with anything so prosaic as a solution.[2]

Here’s an example of what academia is up to right this minute—a clinical study you yourself can join if you fit the criteria. This study, in its own words, “examines whether alcohol intoxication on the part of a male perpetrator impairs attentional capacity and leads to a narrowing of the perceptual field causing a dehumanizing perspective of women as sexual objects for men’s pleasure rather than individuals with thoughts and feelings, thereby increasing the propensity for sexual aggression.” Seriously? The NIAAA is spending $320,000 to test a hypothesis any hard-partying college student could confirm? If that study represents the state of research today, then, after all the theorizing and data-collecting and model-building, our understanding of alcohol, violence, and gender is about where it was in 1973, and it might be time to lob a few incendiary overstatements into the conversation.

And that’s exactly what Donegan does. She argues that it’s time to stop focusing so much on alcohol’s harm to drinkers and pay more attention to drinkers’ harms to other people. She’s right that most news coverage of alcohol’s effects focuses on health risks to consumers, though I have observed elsewhere that even that coverage tends to get sidetracked into a defense of moderate drinking. When the media do consider harm that drinkers may do to others, they focus almost exclusively on two problems: impaired driving and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, neither treated as a social issue but as an individual failure calling for individual punishment.[3]

Donegan wants us to consider additional problems: the domestic violence, sexual violence, and sexual harassment perpetrated against women by intoxicated men. She states flat-out that alcohol prohibition would not work but instead proposes a thought experiment: “[W]hat if we took women’s safety as seriously as we took men’s pleasure? What would such a commitment obligate us to do?” With the usual disclaimer about their overly binary framing,[4] I think those questions are important and long overdue for some consideration.

Donegan’s critics, especially those on the left, missed her point completely. Readers of this blog know that anyone who says anything remotely critical of alcohol or alcohol policy will be called a prohibitionist, and Libby Emmons and Barrett Wilson of The Post Millennial get right down to it, claiming that Donegan’s article is a “defense of temperance” just because it asked readers to take seriously the temperance movement’s concern for domestic violence. Moreover, Emmons and Wilson go on to claim, falsely, that Donegan seeks “a prohibition one-off, where removing the liquor elixir will solve the problem of male violence against women.” The rest of the essay attacks this made-up thesis, so there’s no point in assessing its logic except to say that it’s tissue-thin and completely unsubstantiated.

Emily Alford of Jezebel sees the essay as a call to feminists to police men’s drinking, even though it appeared in The Guardian, was addressed to a general audience, and didn’t call for anything except reflection. Along the way, Alford re-caricatures US temperance activists as pinchy-lipped pleasure-haters, who “solidified the stereotype of feminists as the death of joy,” and mocks Donegan as suggesting “feminists should step in once again to slap the liquor out of everyone’s hands.” She concludes by urging her readers not to slap men’s drinks down but to drink them instead. “Liquor is not the patriarchy,” she quips, “Drink it yourself, for feminism.”

There’s not much to say about Alford’s essay either because, like Emmons and Wilson’s, it doesn’t actually respond to Donegan, just riffs on the title her editor added. The riffing is puerile, consisting of insults to other feminists and exhortations to drink, and, if it has a point beyond painting its author as the fun kind of feminist, I can’t find it.

The response in the subreddit LeftWingMaleAdvocates is equally reductive—to the point where most commenters seem not to have read the essay, just (again) the title or a moderator’s rebuttal, the most upvoted comment in the thread. That rebuttal begins with a wobble: rather than score some solid logic points by contesting one of Donegan’s overstatements, it challenges her legitimate claim that “it is by and large men, not women, who get violent when they are drunk.”

The challenge is tentative but telling: “I’m pretty sure that women are, in fact, more likely to get violent when they’re drunk, but I don’t have research immediately on hand to prove it.” Citing temporarily misplaced scholarship is comical when keyword-searchable academic databases are just a mouse-click away for people with the kind of expertise this moderator, mtcapri, is trying to claim. Even ten seconds on the universally accessible Google Scholar repeatedly confirms that, just as crime statistics indicate, men are more aggressive than women under the influence of alcohol.

Mtcapri goes on to call out Donegan for what he terms “tongue-in-cheek’ sexism,” defined as  “saying, ‘of course we shouldn’t do this, but, like…what would happen if we did (and maybe, just maybe we should)?'” Notice he doesn’t quote Donegan to demonstrate that her disavowal of prohibition was insincere, even though he earlier quoted her at length. Instead, he creates his own girly paraphrase and attacks that, replicating the straw man strategy of Emmons, Wilson, and Alford. And the specious attack has the same goal: to paint Donegan as a prohibitionist—a covert one, which also makes her a coward.

At first, I found the vehemence of this accusation hard to understand. Yes, people who like to drink often overreact to criticism of alcohol policy, and they often do it by accusing the critic of wanting to take their booze away, and it never seems to matter how inaccurate that accusation is or how far-fetched the possibility of reversing the inexorable deregulation of alcohol under neoliberalism; they just howl at the idea of talking seriously about alcohol policy. But this post—and many others in the thread—went further.

Mtcapri’s real problem with Donegan’s article—and likely the reason he misconstrues it—is that he perceives it as representative. In his words, it’s “something . . . I see feminists do a lot, which is coyly propose we think about instituting a sexist law, while simultaneously denying they’re arguing we actually institute it,” a strategy that “is actually intended to get society to open up to concrete sexist policies.” The fact that Donegan didn’t propose a sexist law doesn’t matter because it’s this larger body of disingenuous feminist legal activism that’s the real problem.

Perhaps I need to spend more time on social media, but I’m not aware of all these sexist laws feminists are urging me to (wink, wink) just think about. To educate the likes of me, mtcapri hotlinks to a 2014 Vice article about an experimental male-only curfew in Bucaramanga, Columbia, which I agree verges on sexist law, but it seems not to have lasted or inspired any imitators, so I’m not sure why it’s so worrisome. These days, the men of Bucaramanga, along with the women of Bucaramanga, seem much more concerned about the murder of Dilan Cruz, the student protester shot during last November’s National Strike than they are about a failed five-and-a-half-year-old social experiment, and I’m inclined to follow their lead.

But mtcapri swears the “sexist and despicable” writing of Donegan and her ilk is already influencing policy, citing judicial reforms in the UK that “privilege” women by not jailing them except for the most serious offenses. He fails to mention that these reforms were motivated by the discovery that most women were serving brief terms for minor crimes and were the sole parent of minor children they had to abandon to serve their sentences. Of course, it would be better if men and women divided child-rearing more equitably and if nobody were incarcerated for minor offenses. But, given the real world at this moment, calling child-centered prison reform “misandrist” ignores the asymmetrical burden of social reproduction and thus strikes me as disingenuous.

The rest of the thread is more of the same. In fact, the responses are so homogeneous that I wondered if anyone but the moderator had read Donegan’s article. I was heartened to see HashtagMenAreCash point out the contradiction between progressive drug policy and a supposed feminist defense of prohibition, but it didn’t lead to a reassessment, just some fuzzy generalizations about both drug policy and feminists. I was even more heartened to see flusurvivor raise the issue of class, which almost never comes up in discussions of alcohol policy, though it should be central. In fact, if his post hadn’t condemned Donegan for “JAQing off about prohibition,” I would have thrown it a parade for so clearly and powerfully articulating the greater hardships faced by working-class and indigent people with alcohol problems.

From LeftWingMaleAdvocates, I moved on to the men of the United Forum, a football discussion group, whose responses were surprisingly congruent with those of their leftist bretheren though expressed far more succinctly. They call Donegan’s  article “a lot of balls” because “women are miles worse” and because men denied beer “would probably beat women in greater numbers than those who do it drunk now.” I have to admit, I never considered that last possibility, probably because—and it’s hard not to shout here—no one is proposing to take away anyone’s beer!

Just when I was about to despair, I found some intelligent responses to the article in an autism forum, where posters accurately represented Donegan’s claims and thoughtfully discussed gender, alcohol, and violence. The discussion doesn’t go on long or reach many new conclusions, but it it’s a real conversation about issues, for once, not an attack on a straw man or a clickbait headline. It’s a relief to know that somebody reads before commenting.

So what do I make of Donegan’s thought experiment? If we, as a community, took women’s (and men’s and non-binary people’s and children’s) safety as seriously as we take men’s (and women’s and non-binary people’s) pleasure, what do I think such a commitment would obligate us to do?

Such a commitment would obligate us to treat alcohol as the drug it is, rather than treating it like a benign near-food that is dangerous only to isolated “alcoholics.” That means not:

• selling it everywhere.
• selling it too cheaply.
• selling it at all (or nearly all) hours.
• selling it by mail
• licensing home delivery of it.
• marketing it to children.
• specifically targeting alcohol dependents and/or binge drinkers, especially those in low-income and minority communities.
• making false claims about its health benefits.
• allowing subliminal advertising of it.
• banning less-harmful recreational drugs, such as cannabis, kratom, and most psychedelics, and eventually every other drug less harmful than alcohol to both users and those around them.

Such a commitment does mean:

• selling package alcohol the way cannabis is sold in US states where it is legal: in dedicated shops that require ID to enter and that keep limited hours.
• selling intoxicants other than alcohol, as well as non-intoxicating drinks, in bars and restaurants where alcohol is consumed.
• raising sales and excise taxes on alcohol.
• offering trauma-informed, scientifically-based treatment on demand for alcohol use disorders, treatment paid for by alcohol taxes.
• developing comprehensive social programs to reduce the sources and impacts of the trauma that often leads to addiction (and violence).
• transforming the economy so that fewer people use drunkenness to escape immiseration.
• educating people about the potential effects of all drugs so that they can choose the recreational substances that will least harm their lives and the lives of the people around them.
• reducing the involvement of the alcohol industry in alcohol- and addiction-related research, as well as addiction treatment.
• merging the NIAAA with the National Institute on Drug Abuse and phasing out faith-based “recovery science.”
• publicizing the involvement of the alcohol industry in crafting public attitudes about drinking, abstinence, alcohol use disorders, the role of alcohol in social problems, and alcohol policy.

For people on the left, it might also mean de-centering alcohol a bit, becoming more aware of the suffering it causes, especially to working class men, women, and children, and more mindful about the role it plays in our movement.[5]

The bullet points above make clear that I don’t consider drug policy and alcohol policy separate topics, and I don’t think we’ll make headway against alcohol-fueled violence as long as they are treated separately—or as long as the alcohol industry, which earns most of its huge profits from alcohol abuse, controls the public conversation about drinking. Collectively, one of our biggest mistakes has been privileging a pharmacologically volatile intoxicant while banning others that, because of the way they affect the human brain, rarely produce aggressive behavior. I don’t want to prohibit alcohol; I just want to strip it of its unique legal status, tell the truth about its predictable effects, and deal with those effects as humanely as possible. Doing so won’t solve the problem of alcohol-fueled violence, but I think it will certainly help.

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[1] Non-historians who have read a little about the temperance movement (or watched Ken Burns’s miniseries “Prohibition”) might also be aware of motives such as anti-Catholic and/or nativist fervor, but I consider these motives unsympathetic and so don’t count them.

[2] The exception here would be smart phone apps, now trending among NIAAA grant recipients. Stay tuned for a future article investigating how an app could possibly prevent alcohol-fueled violence when family, friends, and police officers can’t. But, heck, no judgment before investigation, right?

[3] Drunk driving was considered a social problem when Mothers Against Drunk Driving first brought the issue to public attention, and the group did push through significant policy changes in its early years (raising the minimum drinking age and lowering the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.10 to 0.08). But the alcohol industry was smart enough to partner with MADD and push a narrative that shifts attention (and policy) from the widespread problem of having “one too many” before getting behind the wheel to lurid, exceptional cases of “hardcore drunk driving.”

[4] I have at least two problems with Donegan’s opposition between women’s safety and men’s pleasure. The first is one I’ve made twice before in this essay: perpetrators and victims of alcohol-fueled violence don’t break so neatly along gender lines. My second objection is that I don’t accept that most alcohol is consumed for pleasure. In several essays (principally “Two Views of Alcohol Abuse” and “Tipsy Demography“), I cite the best research available about who drinks what, which reveals that 74 percent of all alcohol sold is consumed by people who average 9-10 drinks per day, that is, people with alcohol use disorders. And recent research shows that a majority of people with AUDs drink to cope with mental illnesses, complex trauma, or both. There may be an element of enjoyment in that kind of drinking, but it’s not reducible to pleasure.

[5] Right now, for example, my (very small) local chapter of DSA has its regular meetings in a brew pub and its weekly reading group over beers in a restaurant. All socializing involves alcohol as well. Several members have obvious drinking issues, arriving to meetings “pre-loaded” and consuming several beers over the next 90 minutes. Putting aside the discomfort of members in recovery, drinking during meetings normalizes unhealthy consumption for members with active AUDs and dumbs down discussion overall, especially in the reading group. Convinced that drinking alcohol enhances solidarity, group leaders wave off the idea of a move with no discussion.