Earlier this year, Athena Gervais, a 14-year old from Laval, Quebec, was found dead in a river near her school – the victim of an alcohol-induced fall. She drank a can of FCKD UP, a colourful, sweetened Four-Loko knockoff loaded with sugar and malt liquor.
The public reaction was immediate: FCKD UP was pulled from shelves and the Quebec government banned similar drinks from convenience stores.
It’s easy to focus on the binge-drinking-in-a-can beverages which often find themselves at the centre of these cases. But that wouldn’t be the full story.
Gervais’ death is a symptom of a much larger trend. Women are dying from alcohol-related causes in numbers never seen before.
According to a 1999 to 2015 Washington Post analysis of American health data, alcohol-related deaths among white women increased by 130 percent. That compares with an increase of just over 25 percent for Hispanic women, and a decrease of 12 percent for black women.
One third of white American women engaged in risky binge-drinking behaviour at some point in 2015, an increase of 40 percent from 1999, the analysis showed.
Alcohol consumption rates are even higher in Canada.
According to World Health Organization data from 2014, just under 75 percent of Canadian women drank in the past year, compared to just over 60 percent of the female population south of the border. Another report from Health Canada in 2015 noted rates of risky drinking are increasing in young people, and in particular, in young women.
Photo by Michael Discenza on Unsplash
This rise in female drinking has coincided with a rise in alcohol marketing targeting young women; the introduction of ‘alco-pops’ like Mike’s Hard Lemonade and flavoured vodkas, for example.
Ann Dowsett Johnston, author of the 2013 book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, said this was the liquor industry’s purposeful strategy.
“In the mid-1990s, the spirits industry looked around and realized that beer was outselling them, and all the Johnny Walker drinkers were dying out,” Dowsett Johnston said in a phone interview. “They realized there was one market that was underperforming: women. They invented the ‘alco-pop.’ I call them chick beers. They’re pre-packaged drinks focused on teenage girls to steer them away from beer so they’ll become a spirits consumer later.”
This trend is especially concerning, said Dowsett Johnston, because women are hit harder than men by the long-term effects of drinking.
The research backs her up. Heavy-drinking women are more susceptible than heavy-drinking men to liver and brain damage, according to a report by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The report also suggested alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing breast cancer.
Another 1999 study by researchers at Stanford University showed it’s worse for women in the short-term as well. Women had a higher blood-alcohol concentration and were more impaired than men who had consumed similar amounts of alcohol. This was due to differences in how alcohol is metabolized, the study found.
“There is a wrong interpretation of what equality between men and women is,” said Hubert Sacy, director-general of the Montreal-based Éduc’alcool. “They tell women ‘you’re equal to men.’ But in the case of alcohol there is no equality between the sexes. Alcohol is undoubtedly sexist. Women cannot stand alcohol as well as men; it’s a matter of biology.”
But Dowsett Johnston warns that alcohol advertisers have hijacked the message of women’s liberation. She said they’re telling women in order to assert themselves alongside men, they need to drink like men do.
“That stance has been adopted by the liquor companies, and it’s very similar to Virginia Slims tobacco – all of a sudden women had their own cigarettes” she said, referencing the tobacco brand aimed at women that was released in 1968. “We see the same thing now – it’s equal opportunity drinking.”
She said this trend follows young women into adulthood.
“Of course, too, you have the whole mommy drinking culture, which is the idea that the most expensive thing about having a baby is all the wine you have to buy,” she added.
Dowsett Johnston pointed to the introduction of Jane Walker whisky, a Johnny Walker spinoff, in March. Each bottle featured the first-ever female edition of its striding man logo, and the company donated a dollar for each bottle sold to various women’s causes.
However, not all think this rising trend is solely the fault of advertising. Michel Rod, a professor of marketing at Carleton University who has researched wine marketing globally, said people are not as impressionable as they are often made out to be.
Photo by Sérgio Alves Santos on Unsplash
“I do not believe that firms treat customers as passive, reactive, mindless pawns that can be easily manipulated,” he says. “I don’t think a lot of the negativity associated with marketing is valid; that it creates wants or needs that wouldn’t exist otherwise if we didn’t see an ad.”
However, Rod notes this is different for vulnerable populations like children and adolescents.
“They’re a little more susceptible; they look and see these images and think ‘Ah!'” he says. “But that’s where the law comes in, and if you tow the line in terms of legality and regulations, and you don’t push the moral compass to the questionable side, that’s fine. People are always going to want to get hammered – that predates any particular product that’s come on the market.”
Evidence in scientific literature as to whether alcohol advertising actually increases drinking levels is inconclusive.
A 2009 study in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism found youth and adolescents exposed to alcohol marketing growing up, were more likely to drink as adults. Additionally, a study in 2010 by Henry Saffer in the Journal of Applied Economics suggested a total ban on alcohol advertising would decrease alcohol consumption. However, the study noted most previous research on the topic hadn’t found such a link.
Additionally, a 1998 report from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism concluded, in general, alcohol advertising did not increase consumption, but instead encouraged people to switch brands and types.
That begs the question: is the increased marketing to women a product of a cultural change, or a cultural change which has been influenced by marketing? A correlation or a causation?