Review of Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

The first time I read Holly Whitaker’s Quit Like a Woman, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. I liked the book’s focus on alcohol and recovery culture, so vital to understanding why we drink too much yet so often ignored in books about how to stop doing it. I liked her anger at pro-alcohol propaganda, anger that is not only justified, but also surprisingly helpful in getting sober, as this blog attests. In fact, I often marvel at how much people with addictions, especially women, can benefit from redirecting their anger away from themselves and toward a culture that pushes an addictive drug then shames those who become dependent on it. Quit Like a Woman rouses that anger and aims it at recovery.

I also liked that the book is overtly political. Though not the first recovery author to focus on women’s experience, Holly Whitaker is the first that I know of to offer a feminist critique of alcohol and recovery cultures and to make that critique an argument for abstinence. When she calls not drinking a “radical choice,” she’s not indulging in hyperbole; she’s connecting heavy drinking with systems of oppression and identifying sobriety as resistance. Even readers who don’t buy that argument—and I do—have to acknowledge the appeal of seeing abstinence as rebellion, rather than renunciation.

Whitaker was the founder of Hip Sobriety, an organization that strove to change the way people thought about alcohol and alcohol problems. Now folded into the for-pay Tempest Sobriety School, Hip Sobriety helped to create what’s sometimes called the “elective sobriety” movement, reaching out to younger women who recognize that alcohol interferes with their goals but don’t know how to quit without stigmatizing themselves as “alcoholic” or blowing up their social lives. On a range of platforms, Whitaker supplies her followers with facts, resources, and inspiration, helping change the conversation about alcohol, particularly for people in their twenties and thirties.

Change starts with the assumptions on which the conversation is based. Citing mounting medical evidence, Whitaker challenges the myth that alcohol is benign or even beneficial to most people and only dangerous to “alcoholics.” She’s not the first to make this point,[1] but she makes it well—and, in truth, the point must be made over and over again because myths about the health benefits of moderate drinking are so widely believed in our culture. In reality, she explains, alcohol is a toxin that, even in small amounts, upsets the delicate equilibrium of the human body. And the reason you don’t already know that is that alcohol’s harms have been minimized by one of the most successful corporate propagandists of all time: Big Alcohol.

She focuses particularly on Big Alcohol’s targeting of women, which has escaped the censure heaped on similar campaigns by Big Tobacco. She doesn’t quite explain why other feminists give Big Alcohol a pass, but that may have to wait until someone investigates why the entire left does it. (Note: James Wilt has recently made an excellent start on this issue.) Better to focus on what can be explained, which Whitaker does brilliantly, as when she traces the theme of drinking as liberation in advertising. She’s particularly strong on the industry’s use of social media, excoriating wellness influencers who preach hypervigilance about minor (or imaginary) toxins while promoting the major toxin that funds their preaching.

Perhaps the most important change in the conversation about alcohol concerns the questions we ask ourselves about our own drinking. Instead of anxiously wondering “Am I an alcoholic?” we should be asking “Is alcohol getting in the way of my life?” Explaining why the second question is better, she lays out facts that have yet to gain currency in the media, so they will come as revelations to many readers. There’s no such thing as an alcoholic, for example. Alcohol is more dangerous than crack cocaine and just as addictive. Addiction is extraordinarily complicated and variable, so no single theory adequately explains it. Accordingly, no single treatment method will work for everyone–or even a majority of people who want to quit.

Unfortunately, most of the help available is one-size-fits-all, and that size fits most women very poorly. Whitaker explains at length why Alcoholics Anonymous should not be the only game in town, and she has taken flak for criticizing the organization without having spent much time in AA meetings. Yes, perhaps individual groups are more diverse and open-minded than she acknowledges, but her focus is the ideological structure that supports all AA groups, clearly laid out in the book Alcoholics Anonymous for anyone to see.

A program designed to chasten willful white men, AA can be dangerous to people who already have way more humility than is healthy for them. Moreover, AA’s language, customs, and obsolete ideas so dominate the recovery landscape that those of us who would take another path, even one guided by rigorous research on addiction, must constantly defend our choices to family, friends, even strangers. In fact, some of the comments the author reports are downright shocking!

By now, you may be wondering when I’m going to get to my dislikes. It’s complicated because some of my reservations are about a feature I just finished praising: Whitaker’s boldness, her willingness to make big angry claims and then move on without qualifying or substantiating them. The author began as an Instagram influencer, not a journalist, scholar, or health professional, and she has written a book that is impressively dramatic but sometimes crosses the line into bombast and overstatement. For example, when she calls alcohol “a drug designed to keep us [women] down,” she blurs the line between exaggeration for effect and paranoid rant. Alcohol is a drug, yes, and it absolutely can keep women down. But it wasn’t designed for that purpose; fermentation happens naturally, and human beings have deployed it to make alcoholic beverages for at least 9,000 years and for a range of reasons, including protecting people’s health. If alcohol has been deliberately used to keep people down, there’s a much better case to be made for its use against Native Americans and early industrial workers than against women, who remain under-represented among problem drinkers (though the pandemic is narrowing that gap). The truth is that alcohol culture is way too complex for binary analysis (patriarchy versus women), though such analysis can certainly illuminate features of it.

Look, I get it: Whitaker is trying to fire women up so they will reject a drug they have too long embraced under false pretenses. The alcohol industry tells death-dealing whoppers all the time, so what’s wrong with a little “heavenly deception,” as the Moonies used to call lies for the purpose of conversion? Maybe nothing; maybe the ends justify the means, and, if the ends are lots of women getting sober and leading healthier lives, then I’m okay with a little fibbing. If the ends are to sell a lot of books and subscriptions to the Tempest Sobriety School, then I’ll have to wait and see if that ends up helping women or leaving them pretty much where they are, only poorer.

My second reservation is this: much as I appreciate the fact that Quit Like a Woman is political, its politics amounts to little more than a superficial identity politics with occasional anticapitalist gestures, a politics in which what applies to women applies to all other “historically oppressed folks.” Make that “what applies to some women,” because the book’s audience is women like the author: cis, white, western, educated, professional, and well-off (or aspiring to be). I didn’t think it was possible for a twenty-first-century feminist to treat white professional women as paradigmatic of all women, much less all oppressed people, but the autobiographical part of the book makes it clear that Whitaker is fairly new to politics, so maybe she hasn’t had those conversations yet. Anyway, her focus on some women becomes especially evident as the book turns from problems to solutions and lays out a program of recovery that requires resources—money, help, and time—that most of the world’s women, not to mention those other “oppressed folks,” simply do not have. With the frequency of alcohol use disorders rising as income falls, I consider this narrow focus a serious problem, as is the author’s turn in this section toward the New Age philosophy and popular psychology that celebrate and nurture the neoliberal self.

The turn is tolerable when it’s described as what Whitaker believes but offensive when she slips into preacher mode, as in this passage:

Every person you meet—be it for a minute or a lifetime—is placed there by design, part of the universal plan to give you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, in order to grow into your potential; to show you the parts of yourself that you have forgotten to see or have refused to see; to build you into the most beautiful, kind, forgiving, loving version of yourself, one encounter at a time.

Who’s this “you”? I don’t live in a universe hyper-focused on my needs; nor is my life engineered by a loving, meticulous cosmic designer, and frankly I’m shocked to see a privileged white woman suggesting that “historically oppressed folks” have been oppressed for their own improvement according to some universal master plan. Does she say that flat-out? No, of course not, but a master plan that gives everyone “exactly what [they] need exactly when [they] need it” is, by definition, a plan that justifies the worst human atrocities as ultimately for the victims’ own good. Such Panglossian optimism justified colonial subjugation and slavery during the Enlightenment, and it continues to uphold exploitation and inequality today, including the very injustices Whitaker correctly identifies and professes concern about.

Let me pause, though, and add a qualification: Whitaker says explicitly that “quitting like a woman” means finding your own path out of alcohol dependence and that she is merely describing a path, not the path. She doesn’t always sound so provisional (see the preceding paragraph), but saying “my path is just one among many” is important and all too rare on the recovery scene, so put that statement squarely in the “like” column.

Having said there are multiple paths, however, she doesn’t describe a range of different approaches women might take but instead lays out a very specific program of self-love, self-healing, and self-development, some of which rests on a foundation of evidence and some of which rests on a foundation of faith. As I said a minute ago, that’s fine when the author frames it as “what I did to get sober and why I did it” because well-told recovery stories are valuable even when they’re very different from ours. But, when she describes her path in the first person plural, as who we are, what we feel, and what we must do, I get a strong whiff of the narcissistic fallacy ubiquitous in the recovery community, assuming that what is true for us must be true for others—or at least others like us.

It’s not. As a cis, white, western, educated, professional woman who blogs about addiction, I’m a lot like Whitaker; moreover, I see alcohol and recovery cultures in similar ways. But her program doesn’t fit my history, my temperament, my beliefs, or my bank balance, and I know that because it resembles the outpatient treatment I tried eight years ago. Whitaker claims that self-love, self-care, and learning to take up more space in the world are crucial to recovery, but I needed to focus less on myself, whether positively or negatively. Though I completely agree that self-loathing is a problem for most women with alcohol problems, for me the solution is not falling in love with myself; it’s perceiving that my self (and my feelings about that self) are far less substantial and enduring than I assumed, which is liberating. And, if two women with similar profiles can need such different things to quit drinking, then I can barely imagine the disconnect people unlike her might feel.

Additional concerns include features of Whitaker’s program with the potential to harm some readers. For example, the author distinguishes between “gut sense,” which should be trusted absolutely, and “mind sense,” which is apt to mislead. Yes, this is good old American anti-intellectualism, not too surprising in a book on addiction by someone lacking credentials in the field, but the possible harm lies elsewhere. One of the cruelest effects of childhood trauma, particularly early trauma, is the warping of survivors’ perceptual abilities. What feels comfortable and right is what’s familiar, so survivors’ “gut sense” will often lead them in the direction of people and situations like those that harmed them as children. This tendency is the reason for a joke among survivors: “If you meet someone, and you immediately feel like you have known them all your life, you have.” Survivors of serious trauma must often learn to override their guts with the “mind sense” that Whitaker disparages, even if the process feels unnatural and uncomfortable, until they can retrain their viscera to offer healthier guidance, which isn’t always possible. I’m delighted that Whitaker’s childhood was stable enough to leave her with a gut she can trust, but way too many heavy drinkers were not so lucky.

Whitaker rightly acknowledges the role of trauma in alcohol addiction and rightly claims that dealing with that trauma is part of the process of successfully giving up alcohol. But I wish she had pointed readers to a good book on childhood trauma, such as Iron Legacy by Donna Bevan-Lee, rather than attempting to cover such a complex topic in just a few pages. As is inevitable, her summary is reductive, but the real problem is that, in mapping herself onto her readers, she fails to anticipate another inevitability: that some of her readers will have experienced much more severe trauma than she has and so could be harmed by some of her suggestions. The readers she worries about will have trouble seeing their histories as what she calls “big T Trauma,” but what about survivors whose physical and psychic scars leave little doubt? Whitaker encourages all readers to “start renegotiating” their trauma with meditation, yoga, breath work, and massage if they can’t find or afford a therapist, but human beings with histories of severe complex trauma can be overwhelmed by traumatic memories during all of those activities, not only harming themselves but also reducing the future efficacy of valuable adjuncts to therapy by forming negative associations with them. At the very least, Whitaker should have acknowledged the risk and advised survivors to work with teachers or practitioners of meditation, yoga, breathwork, and massage who identify as trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed.

My last and clearest disagreement with Whitaker returns to the issue of politics. In the chapter titled “People Who Need People,” she once again picks up what has been a periodic theme in the book: capitalism as a root cause of addiction. Drawing on the work of Bruce Alexander and Johan Hari (who himself drew silently on a lot of earlier analysis), Whitaker summarizes before commenting:

In other words, capitalism causes disconnection, and disconnection causes addiction. Maybe this seems like a tangent, or some radical anticapitalist perspective that has nothing to do with an argument for why we need people. It’s not. The root of what is wrong in our society is that we have lost both our power as individuals and our connection to one another. To seek to regain these things is not to argue for socialism; it is to argue for lives where we are singular and autonomous individuals who are free to express our truest nature, while simultaneously feeling we are part of something larger than ourselves.

The reasoning here is so muddled it’s hard to unpack, but the muddle begins in a cartoon version of socialism as necessarily collectivist and therefore hostile to individual flourishing, like Mao’s China or Star Trek’s Borg. Whitaker recognizes the problems in capitalism but can’t or won’t challenge an economic system tilted in her favor, so she misrepresents the obvious alternative system, socialism, and pretends she’s looking for something alien to socialism when what she’s looking for is actually a central goal of socialism. In fact, it is socialism that “argues for lives where we are singular and autonomous individuals who are free to express our truest nature, while simultaneously feeling we are part of something larger than ourselves”; it simply insists that a more equitable economic system is necessary to make such lives available to all, rather than just the fortunate few able to afford them under capitalism. In other words, to seek to regain our power as individuals and our connection to one another is to argue for socialism, as long as we’re talking about everyone’s power as individuals and everyone’s connection to one another.

This difference is at the heart of many of my problems with the book. My focus is more systemic than individual, and Whitaker’s focus is more individual than systemic, though both of us care deeply about both. Our critiques of the alcohol and recovery industries are very similar, but I’m more focused on social and policy change while Whitaker is more focused on helping people alter their relationship with alcohol. I have to write carefully in order to reach people who disagree with me, including people who drink lightly or not at all, whereas Whitaker has to write boldly in order to get through to people deep in a dysfunctional romance with alcohol. Frankly, I also think she stands a good chance of midwifing some policy changes by helping dislodge myths about alcohol that have proved impervious to more cautious writers. And, if she influences enough lives, she’ll likely also help open up the recovery industry to diverse and fruitful approaches, a badly-needed change.

Finally, I want to end on a positive note. If you’re young, female, liberal or progressive, educated, financially comfortable, a fan of social media, interested in spirituality, and questioning your relationship with alcohol, Quit Like a Woman could change your life. If you’re not many of those things, it may still have much to offer you if you follow its (and, yes, AA’s) advice to “take what you need and leave the rest.” On balance, I have to say that I’m glad I read the book—and would have been twenty times as glad had I read it in 2015 or 2016 when I was struggling to work out my own sobriety independently of the recovery establishment. So, if you’re in that position now, give it a read.

For more discussion of books that may help you stop drinking, see this recent post.

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[1] Seeing addictive substances as poison is also the starting point of Allen Carr’s Easyway books and programs, including The Easy Way to Stop Drinking, which Whitaker cites as an influence.