Recently I read an article* written by a female university professor about her drinking problem. She discussed how life in academia helped to conceal and even nurture alcohol abuse among faculty members. She wrote about how her �intellectual arrogance� made it difficult for her to embrace AA, though she eventually did. She also said this:

�As a woman, I had to be more careful, even with colleagues who drank heavily. The stereotypes of the alcoholic professor are male. Think of Michael Caine in �Educating Rita,� James Dickey stumbling to the podium, the jolly, randy scholars in David Lodge novels. Indeed, the cultural profile of the alcoholic is male, which in turn animates the social taboo about the woman who drinks too much. In this particular version of the double standard, her looseness of tongue and body suggests moral and sexual looseness as well -- trashiness, a word that, when pointed toward a woman, encapsulates our quaintest Victorian judgments about gender and class.�

Wow, I thought. Yes. The heavy-drinking man can be an intellectual, an artist, a poet; the heavy-drinking woman can only be a slut.

It�s not that simple, though, of course. Once I started thinking about it, I realized there is another social niche for the heavy-drinking woman, and it�s kind of the opposite of the slut, though I don�t think the two are mutually exclusive. I think the heavy-drinking woman can also be assigned or even claim a kind of honorary masculinity.

Drinking and being drunk in public has historically been a man�s privilege. Even now a woman can�t expect the same kind of social, sexual, or physical safety a man can while drinking heavily in mixed company. To go ahead and do it anyway is to either deny that vulnerability (in the case of the masculine female drinker) or exploit it (in the case of the slut).

While I�ve had my slut moments, my drinking and drug use had a definite masculine aspect. My drinking companions were primarily men, and I loved being able to drink them under the table. When I was a girl I wanted to be a boy -- I think most girls do, at least for a while. The benefits of maleness are pretty obvious for kids: more rights, better athletic abilities, cooler clothes. As I got older, the more subtle benefits of being female began to kick in. But it�s clear to me that my drinking was in part an attempt to claim some of those masculine rights (imagined or not) for myself: sexual invulnerability, casual companionship, society�s winking permission to behave badly. And what a disastrous, misguided attempt it was: I made myself ten times more vulnerable, alienated my real companions, and, well, just behaved badly.

I think I thought that by drinking and doing drugs and living crazily I was engaging in, or even creating, a kind of freedom that other people and especially other women didn�t have. Now I see that I have a choice of two freedoms: the freedom to drink, or the freedom to do everything else.

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*�Addicted in Academe,� by Anonymous. The Chronicle of Higher Education: May 3, 2002.

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