The Wine O'Clock Myth: The Truth About Women and Alcohol: The Truth You Need to Know about Women and Alcohol

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All right, I think I’m actually going to go have a cup of tea because I have to say I’m a coffee girl but when you’re talking about tea and all the the kinds of tea you love I I do have a lot I feel like everyone who quits drinking buys the massive tea collection and I actually you know, for years and don’t dip into it very much. So I’m going to go do that. Um, great.

If I had a dollar for every time someone who has changed their relationship with alcohol said ‘If I can do it, anyone can’, I’d be a very rich woman. Those words are so frequently uttered by people who have stopped steadily drinking they’ve almost become meaningless. Which is a shame given it’s such a powerful and compelling statement. Just seven short words, but used in this context they are drenched in meaning. They convey pride and power, but also a measure of incredulity, almost as if the person uttering them can’t quite believe what they’ve done in turning their lives around. Why not? Because they genuinely thought they’d never be able to do it. She reveals the damage alcohol is causing to women: physically, emotionally and socially; and the potential reasons why so many women are drinking at harmful levels.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, but it really feels like it was written by alcoholics for alcoholics. After a while, all of the women’s stories start sounding the same. Maybe I truly am too influenced by Big Alcohol, but at times, this book was too political and felt as though the author was pushing her experience on everyone who drinks alcohol. Are you seriously comparing guns and gun owners to alcohol and alcoholics? And people fighting the opening of a liquor store? If you don’t want to drink, don’t shop there.

That may work for people whose brains are wired in a way that means they will never become addicted to alcohol, says Dann, but it won’t work for people like her whose brains are wired differently. “Knowing what a standard drink was wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to me.” With almost 11,000 members, Living Sober provides a place for people to talk and bond as they grind their way through the different stages of getting sober. “It’s a community of peers. None of us are experts, we’re not trained and we come in there and talk about how we feel.” Yeah, so in early sobriety, they were very, very important, especially Friday evening, because Friday comes. This Friday, magic feeling that you feel you need something and so, I’d often, I’d go out on a Friday and I’d buy myself fresh flowers, a magazine, a scented candle, just treats for me. The book is separated into different parts: our boozy world, what it’s doing to us, how we are being played, what lies beneath and moving on. Within each of these parts Lotta Dann delves into the alarming reasons that play into our culture of alcohol. She starts by exploring the relationship that women have with alcohol, the treat, reward, celebrate and soothe with a glass of wine, along with the bonding agent alcohol is in female friendships. It then moves into the what it’s doing to us part, the ‘not talked about’ dangerous medical and physical impacts that alcohol can have on women - which is disturbing.

The Wine O'Clock Myth

Lotta now lives sober with her TV-journalist husband and three sons in the hills of Wellington, New Zealand. So if you walk around our environment, there are no outward signs of the danger inherent in this product like, and, you know, the problem is that the industry has gotten so big and so powerful, and has such access to our policymakers, you know, through lobbyists and what have you. And they’re so good at what they do, at making themselves look like they hear, you know, they’re always putting out information about how to moderate how to how to limit your drink sizes, all the stuff that looks good on the surface. But actually, it’s disingenuous, because, as we said before, this is an addictive drug that many people can’t moderate. And the fact that alcohol also negatively affects the lives of millions of people is practically invisible in conversations about or representations of drinking in popular culture. The truth that if you are struggling to moderate drinking, you are not alone and you are not the problem: alcohol is the problem. Yes. And I, yeah, yeah. I love that too. And also modeling that mommy doesn’t need to get drunk every night to cope with life.