Today In Left-Medvedism

Sacha Zimmerman approvingly cites this New York article. Alas, she doesn’t deal with its fundamental problems, most notably its reliance on anecdotes and otherwise less-than-impartial data and the fact that it’s not clear what an increase in female drinking would have to do with feminism even if it was true (cf. Valenti, Howley, Filipovic.) And, worse, the tut-tutting about young women (rather than, say, young people in general) drinking is pretty clearly anti-feminist.

Rather than addressing any of these problems, Zimmerman makes the kind of argument I’d prefer to leave to the Michael Medveds of the world.

Still, in a pop landscape that turns drunk women into comedic icons, it’s easy to see why bingeing might at least appear empowering. Every swilled cosmopolitan on “Sex in the City” is fetishized; indeed, the pink martini has become a kind of symbol of female liberation. (Never mind that actress Kristin Davis, who plays Charlotte, is an alcoholic who has been sober 18 years.) Meanwhile, every booze-soaked character actress on television, from Karen on “Will & Grace” to the ladies of “Ab Fab,” makes alcoholism seem downright fun–if anti-intellectual. The gals on “How I Met Your Mother” are constantly drinking beer but are rarely shown drunk–unlike the Woo Girls of a recent episode (so named for their penchant to scream, “Wooo!” every time a drink is poured or a great song comes on).

This is strange on a number of levels. First of all, I’m not sure who’s saying that binge drinking (or, for that matter, drinking at all) is “empowering”; as Howley puts it, “I happen to have a female body. It does not follow that my every vice is part of some misguided attempt to achieve gender parity.” I’ve never seen the last show, but I have no idea what SITC or AbFab have to do with “feminism.” The cosmos are fetishized in SATC because all the consumption is fetishized (as most of its fans, I’m sure, are perfectly aware of.) And, most importantly, these are fictional characters in comedy shows. Characters who drink more than is strictly healthy or are otherwise irresponsible tend to being comedic potential to the table; to state the obvious, a show consisting entirely of Ned Flanderses would be considerably less funny than a show with one (usually serving as the butt of jokes.) Leaving aside Zimmerman’s implicit insults to the intelligence of the audiences of these shows, a culture world in which female characters were seen a role models rather than characters would be had for feminism and even worse for art, high and low. To borrow a point from Katha Pollitt, it’s like Irving Howe critiquing Roth because he wasn’t creating good Jewish role models (everyone knows that Portnoy’s Complaint would have been better if it only had the “strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses”!)

Even if one accepts Zimmerman’s dubious proposition that one can’t really be a feminist if one drinks more than Zimmerman considers appropriate, let’s please not use “empowerment” as the primary criterion for evaluating art.