Читать книгу The Man Diet: One woman’s quest to end bad romance - Zoe Strimpel - Страница 8

Rule Number 2 Cut Down on the Booze

You need this rule if …

• Once you start, you can’t stop.

• The bulk of your sexual encounters as a single woman follow excessive drinking.

• You can’t imagine not drinking on a date.

• You worry about being boring when sober.

• You think you only come alive sexually after a bottle.

• You frequently do things with men when inebriated that you later regret.

• Your big nights out involve necessary consumption of ten times the government’s recommended weekly number of units.

• Your hangovers trouble you far more than ‘my head hurts’.

• You worry that your boozing is affecting your overall health and mental alertness.

Goes well with …

• Refuse to Have NSA Sex

• Dwell on Your Sense of Self

• Do Something Lofty

• Do Not Pursue

• Know Your Obstacles

Sarah’s alarm went off. She couldn’t bear the task in hand: getting up and going to work. She prolonged the agony of getting out of bed by trying to decide what was most horrible about her current situation. Was it her physical state – pounding heart, vile aftertaste of red wine sharpened with gin from the G&Ts she’d thought were a good nightcap, inflamed eye sockets and sharp head pain? Or was it the inevitable mental distress that would descend when events from the night before came creeping back?

Her eyes are still closed, her alarm still beeping. Sarah’s normally a cheerful, emotionally stable woman. But when she wakes up like this, which she does no more than any of her friends or the other millions of women in the UK who occasionally binge drink, she’s not cheerful, or even okay. She feels an intense horror at herself; dread at what she might have done. Or has done. She pictures a massive black well out of which she must pull herself in order to regain her hold on life.

What happened the night before …

In this case, what Sarah had done wasn’t particularly bad, but it was the fact that she’d been making a habit of it. The night before had started out as work drinks; some lawyer contacts had hired a space at a bar for a group of her colleagues. A bottle of wine per person was already waiting for them on the table, along with some nibbles. It went fairly rapidly; and suddenly it was closing time. Feeling a naughty pulse rise in her – the desire to make some kind of trouble for herself involving men – she decided to see what she could rustle up. She wanted sex; she felt reckless, wild, her romantic dissatisfaction and fragile ego about to be pummelled under a wave of alcoholic courage.

It was a multi-pronged attack: first, she dispatched a few texts to men she’d either had something with before, or thought she could have something with now. She didn’t like any of them enough to see them when sober. Then, she started homing in on the seemingly interesting candidates that were out with her. Keeping up this dual-pronged attack, she eventually made headway. None of her textees replied – something that bothered her but that she could deal with in the morning. But thank God, one of the guys that turned up at the after-hours place they went on to seemed up for it. As soon as he showed unmistakeable interest, she suggested they go back to hers.

What happened when they got back hadn’t been all that great; it was certainly not the intoxicating orgasm fest suggested in some representations of unfettered, big-city casual sex. Rather, it had been made plain how little regard they had for each other, and while Sarah enjoyed faking intimacy, the guy didn’t have the slightest inclination to do so. He banged her (two seconds before condom; 20 minutes post-condom), he came, he suggested anal, she said no, they napped for an hour, and then he said, ‘Shit, I have to go’, got his stuff and left, only just remembering on his way out to ask for her number. It was just a vague politeness reflex; anyone could see that.

Now she felt horror – why did she always have that impulse to take someone home with her when drunk, even though she was too old for these completely unrewarding encounters? Why did she give herself to some random who couldn’t even pretend to be polite in bed? And, worst of all, what of those seconds of sex before the condom went on? Was she willing to even risk her health when drunk? And for what? Through the cloudy pain of these reflections, she haltingly pulled on her clothes and made it to the Tube without being sick. The day was not pretty.

The regret had largely faded by night, though, and the next day she was ready to go again, the dark hole of the previous morning forgotten, and the sex of the night before already related to her friends as a highly amusing story.

It was Saturday night, and Sarah and her flatmate Lynn had a birthday party to attend. They got ready to the sound of their favourite tune, also Lynn’s BlackBerry ring tone: Jamie Foxx featuring T-Pain’s ‘Blame It [on the Alcohol]’.

Flash forward to midnight. Lynn’s snogging a good-looking guy. Sarah has drunk more than she should have, though less than the other night, and is now in guy-searching mode. Nobody bites, though, and she’s starting to feel like she has no vibe. When a cutie hoves into view and offers to get her another drink, she gratefully accepts, even though she doesn’t really feel like it. But in the presence of her potential ticket out of here tonight, she sucks the double Absolut through a straw and makes flirtatious conversation. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when she comes back, the guy’s gone. She looks for him everywhere, but can’t find him. Now her buzz is gone, she’s drunk, and she’s got nobody. She starts talking to other guys, but it’s a no-go. Eventually she gets a cab home – it’s 3.30am and Lynn has gone off with that guy she’s been wrapped around for the last three hours.

The next day’s hangover is both better and worse than the one before. It’s worse in that, when the pain of it dries up, she’s got nothing concrete to show for it. No hook-ups. She feels like a failure of a single girl; she’s meant to be able to hook up whenever she wants when out on the razz, and last night was a reminder that she clearly can’t. But the hangover’s better in that she’s woken up guilt- and loathing-free, hasn’t put herself at risk in the sack or given her body to someone undeserving. Oh, and crucially, she doesn’t have to go to work. Still, her body is in a bad way and the calories she consumed last night were ungodly. She’ll have to write off the day.

So I say …

Take a break from the booze. Giving your body a rest – and showing it some love – will give you a fresh perspective.

The single woman and her tumultuous love affair with booze

This is not an unusual or crazy snapshot in the life of a single, fun-loving woman. It’s not typical, perhaps, but it’s a scenario that most British women aged 18–35 will relate to. When researching this book, I asked women in their twenties and thirties if they drink more when single. Here’s what they said:

‘Defo, drank a hell of a lot more when I was single.’

Naihala, 34

‘Yes, definitely – I got wasted all the time, it was the only way to get over my shyness with men. I lacked confidence and was massively body shy. So needed to be pretty out of it to disrobe.’

Laura, 35

‘Definitely. And there’s a lot of alcohol consumption when you’ve just started seeing someone – you know, lots of going out, getting pissed, eating crap, staying out late.’

Laura, 32

Another woman, a good friend of mine called Mary, frequently blacks out when drunk. ‘I have missed lots from blacking out – I don’t remember meeting half the people I’ve dated; and sometimes I’ll wake up next to someone and not remember how we ended up in bed.’ She’s no basket case; Mary is a successful, grounded person who does not have an alcohol problem – it’s just that a few drinks, even as few as three, can make her forget what happens to her. But instead of being terrified by the experience and its implications, she just accepts that it happens on big nights out. Such is the single woman’s cross to bear.

Rising alcohol consumption among women is a horn that is tooted with great insistence by the media, and rightly so: the numbers suggest that we’re the fastest growing demographic of boozers in the UK, with the image of the hard-partying single gal right up there. After all, women aged between 18 and 24 in the UK drink more than in any European country (Datamonitor, 2005). Across the pond, CBS news in the US did a shock-horror ‘Sex and the City syndrome’ story, inspired by a rise in DUI (driving under the influence) accidents among young women. They worried about the ‘girls’ nights out and those pink drinks’ SATC popularised. And well they should.

Reality check: do we really need to give up the booze?

This Man Diet rule is not about lecturing and tut-tutting; it’s about giving you a respite from habits that might be dragging you down. Alcohol is not a simple topic – i.e., ‘bad for you’ – and it plays an enormous, complex role in most of our lives. Kate Spicer, a journalist, wrote a courageous ‘life’s too short not to drink up’ piece for The Sunday Times. In it, she confessed to ticking a good handful of what the government might call ‘alcoholic’ boxes, but argued that when used appropriately, excess alcohol can be a source of pleasure and relaxation without necessary punishment. It’s not alcohol that creates a mess, she concludes; it’s people.

Spicer’s view is appealing, and there’s no chance I’ll be giving up social drinking and occasional drunkenness for government-guideline-style imbibing any time soon. But when the single woman – under pressure to have more fun than everyone else (see NSA and No Talking chapters) – ends up in a run of alcohol-fuelled promiscuity followed by self-loathing hangovers, it’s time to take a breather. In the same Sunday Times feature, I felt that student Ruth Gilligan more accurately captured the mania of acquiring the experience, stories and gossip that alcohol often facilitates. She describes the experience of sitting in her college room, whilst next door, thumping music starts up, heralding the arrival of the girls invited over by the lads in the house. She listens as the word ‘stawpedo’ is bellowed en masse, then sighs with relief when the music stops – the group have headed out into the night. It’s only Part One of the evening, though: she’s certain at least three of the girls will be back later and that a sizzling stew of gossip will be ripe for the stirring in the morning.

Every woman has a pronounced relationship with alcohol. Some get trashed on weekends; others like a glass or a bottle of wine of an evening. Some use it as a massive social crutch, and morph from shy wallflowers into sexual predators on a few wines. Some women use it to show they’re as hard/good/fun/wild as their male peers. Others don’t get what the fuss is about – and get snippy when asked questions like, ‘Do you binge drink?’ Still others don’t drink at all and face relentless social pressure to do so. Many of us worry a huge deal that we drink too much but make little attempt to cut down.

Clearly, women’s relationship with alcohol is more complex than the oft-alarm-bell-ringing Daily Mail would have it – yes we drink too much but we’re not all bingeing terrors of the night, constantly in hospital having our stomachs pumped. This complexity also applies to the connection between boozing and unwise sexual behaviour. As a Man Dieter, the concern is to minimise the psychological effects of uncomfortable run-ins with men – which chip away at self-esteem, as per Sarah’s really rough mornings described above. So when I advise laying off the booze for a bit, I’m hoping for a double-pronged attack on:

a)low-quality sex with a low-quality person in a low-quality environment

b)the vile, self-attacking hangover, which is bad enough once in a while, but over time makes you feel really out of control and thus rotten overall

I maintain, once more, that the single woman is more prone to the stabbings of regret and self-loathing than the one who wakes up hungover next to her boyfriend, regardless of what she’s done the night before.

So what exactly is the link between drinking and the ensuing horror at what seemed perfectly reasonable the night before? Does getting drunk actually make us prostrate ourselves unwisely on the loins of any available man? Possibly. One study found alcohol use to be a stronger predictor of ‘engaging in hooking up’ for women than men, possibly because women feel pressure not to hook up due to societal constraints, so alcohol makes it easier to lower the barrier (Owen, Fincham & Moore, 2011). But the connection between booze and sex is, predictably, a more complex one for women than men.

‘Does getting drunk actually make us prostrate ourselves unwisely on the loins of any available man?’

Does booze turn you on?

In one study, published in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, it appeared that booze does not in itself make women more horny or aroused. It’s just that we think it does. A 2011 survey got 44 men and women to watch erotic/neutral films while consuming either alcohol or juice. After drinking alcohol, more sexual arousal was reported even when watching neutral films than with no alcohol. However, women’s genital response didn’t increase with greater amounts of alcohol consumed. So, it looks like perceived sexual arousal increases even if actual arousal (that is, genital sexual arousal that was measured by a device) doesn’t change. The researchers found that the best predictor of post-drinking sex was the intention to have sex before you went out.

Another theory of sex and booze linkage sounds more familiar. This is that it’s the effects of booze that causes us to take sexual risks we wouldn’t otherwise take – be it unprotected sex or sex with someone dodgy, or sex that is likely to have a negative emotional impact. This one is about the cues you respond to or ignore when pissed: according to the pleasingly named cognitive theory ‘alcohol myopia’, alcohol has a disinhibiting effect because it makes you less able to process information. Cues that instigate sexual behaviour continue to get processed, while more complex ones that would normally cause you to think twice get sidelined. The drunk brain can’t deal with both and chooses the simpler path.

Here’s a typical drunken ‘horror’ story from a friend of mine that illustrates this point:

Chloe, 28, had been sleeping with a man every weekend while single and had been using a dating website too. One night we were at a friend’s house party together and she was getting nice and pissed. There were no good male options there, so she started rifling through the guys on the dating website on her phone, finding one, Mark, who happened to be online at 11.30pm on a Saturday night. She summoned him to the party – he clearly worked out but also pulled his trousers up way too far and fastened them with a pernickety little belt. He was balding. He was loud. He was … not ideal. By now reeling from her numerous vodkas, Chloe and Mark headed out into the back garden where they appeared to be doing a mixture of feeling each other up and arguing. Suddenly they were gone.

Chloe told me the next day that she’d taken him home with her only to find out, just as she was sobering up, that he was a complete sex fiend (not in a good way) who wanted to re-enact degradation porn scenes and began addressing her as ‘bitch’ as soon as they got near her bedroom. After he pushed her head down for a blow job, she ordered him out. At first he refused – then she got violent with him and he left. She didn’t tell me all those details that day – she was so horrified by the experience that it wasn’t for another two or three weeks that she actually came clean about it. That was the last time she went online drunk – and the last time she went out of her way for sex.

From sober to sex kitten: drinking till we’re drunk

‘On a big night out I always end up going for it in some way or another, even if I secretly want a quiet one. It’s just the format.’ Jane, 31

We act crazier and more sexually regrettably when we’re drunk because that’s the expectation – that’s the image. A classic study found that post-drinking behaviour is driven by pre-drinking beliefs ‘in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Journal of Drug Issues). The idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy hits home. After all, how many times have you headed out on a ‘big night out’ and not at least made a good attempt at acting like someone on a ‘big night out’? When you’re ‘larging’ it, you can’t very well ‘small it’ at the last minute without being a party pooper.

The expectation to act like you’re drunk is a double-edged sword. Not only do women expect themselves to be more sexually up-for-it, but men expect us to be so when we’ve been drinking. ‘Drinking women are perceived by men as being more sexually available, and coerced sex with a drinking woman is less likely to be viewed as rape,’ said Maria Testa and R. Lorraine Collins in a 1997 survey. These perceptions, say the authors, lead to women being fed more booze by sexually hopeful men. But they also make us feel like we have less of a right to say no to sex because we’re aware of the impression we’ve given by drinking heavily. In short, we’re afraid of appearing to be teases.

More evidence suggests that boozing makes us seem like wanton sex machines even if, as per the study carried out by Prause, Staley & Finn, we’re not actually more aroused. Other studies have found that when we drink more we’re significantly more aggressive and ready to engage in foreplay. It’s also interesting – though hardly surprising – that perceptions of female sexual disinhibition were significantly enhanced if the man bought her the drinks. Working with Substance Misusers: a guide to theory and practice, a compilation of essays from experts, argues that ‘alcohol does not “make” you behave in a way that is alien. However, it is certainly the case that alcohol is often used as an excuse for inappropriate behaviour.’ In other words, the blame – contrary to what Jamie Foxx and T-Pain say in their anthem ‘Blame It’ – is on us, not the alcohol.

Beer goggles: fact or fiction?

Fact. One thing that studies show for certain is that the more you drink, the better looking people of the opposite gender appear, but you don’t need me to tell you that. What is interesting is that despite being studied, ‘the mechanism [that makes us find people more attractive when drunk] remains unclear’. One possibility suggested by other experts is that being trashed makes it hard to assess facial symmetry and other attractiveness cues. Other studies suggest that as the night wears on, people look more frantically to find someone to go home with, thus lowering their standards. The role of ‘beer goggles’ is obvious in the regret-causing antics we get up to when drunk, but whether we fall under their sway because we literally can’t see properly, or because of a more complex cocktail of factors involving suppressed needs and desires for intimacy (my money’s on this), has not been determined yet by our friends in social science.