A UK female boozer story - what a loser

SHE IS SITTING on the pavement at 2am. She is either crying inconsolable, irrational tears or laughing so hard she can’t clamber back on to her heels. Her eyeliner is smeary, there is a suspicious stain on her Whistles top, but somehow after 15 vodka shots she is still attached to her clutch-bag and her swaying best mate.
This week we have been bombarded by prurient images of the female drunk: the mini-skirted binge-bird army who will defile our city centres 24/7 with lewd cries and pink vomit, or the 21-year-old student too off her face on vodka to recall whether she’d consented to sex with a security guard on a corridor floor.

A drunk man can be many things. A bully, a brawler, a pisser-away of promise certainly. But also a poet, a playboy, a bon viveur, a comic hero, a top bloke. George Best encompassed them all. But a drunk woman is only ever pathetic. She evokes disgust, unease, pity, even fear that nature itself is being perverted.

What we term femininity is predicated upon poise, self-control, taking heed of the approval of others, especially men. Alcohol abrogates control, ends care. The prettily made-up party face cracks open to reveal a cackling creature of crude appetites. Men have always called for female sobriety. Ian Fleming decreed in Casino Royale that ladies should follow a ratio of one drink to a man’s three and Tony Parsons, the columnist. raged against female boozers “because being drunk makes you loud, obnoxious, sentimental and stupid. And . . . women are like that when they are completely sober.”

In Gin Lane, Hogarth depicted a drunken mother allowing her infant to tumble to its death. Today fear of “mothers’ ruin” takes the form of endless reports that a Bacardi Breezer habit will render young women barren and the belief that Kate Moss deserves our opprobrium for her excessive partying because she has a child.

So what should we conclude from the fact that a third of women now drink well over medically acceptable levels? Are ladettes, Marlboro Light in one hand, house white in the other, laughing, dancing and screwing with the careless abandon once only enjoyed by men, the ultimate liberated females? Are they now winning feminism’s last battle: the right to equal fun? Are they having the best time of any generation of women yet born? Is it not fantastic that while their grandmothers waited at home, afraid to enter men-only pubs, today’s women now have bright, cheery, girl-friendly bars? Or that while as a teenager I had to learn to like bitter — in a “lady’s glass” — today’s female drinker now enjoys an array of sweet drinks tailored to her palette or can afford vodka which, thanks to the Chancellor, is 54 per cent cheaper relative to incomes than it was in 1981.

If dressing up in skimpy clothes, cheering for Man U in sports bars, accompanying blokes to lap-dancing clubs, having sex with half-strangers and being sick on the way home, truly is what young women want — and is not some new lads-mag stereotype to which they feel obliged to conform in order to win the attention and approval of boys — then who are we to deny them?

And of course, the Seventies feminist slogan — “whatever we wear, wherever we go, ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no’ ” — still stands. But is that enough to protect those who today really do go anywhere wearing anything, yet still live in a country that convicts just one in every 14 men accused of rape? It should be possible to state — without insinuating that women bring sexual violence upon themselves — that they must take more responsibility for their own safety. A woman who gets into a car with a bunch of strange blokes should be OK, but may not be. The blind drunk are vulnerable, reliant upon the decency of others. Booze blurs the edges between a lustful drunken shag and an unwanted assault, not just in the eyes of the law, but in those of the man on top of you.

We cannot be completely sure what happened when Ryairi Dougal, a student who that night was acting as a security guard, was asked to walk a drunken girl safely home. He may have tipped her on to the floor outside her student room and humped her unconscious body, as she claimed. In which case, according to the 2003 Sexual Offences Act he was a rapist since the woman had not the “freedom and capacity to make a choice”.

But what if she showed some vague initial interest — she recalls “emitting a pleasurable groaning sound” — before falling into a semi-stupor? That makes him what? Well, maybe a cad, a bounder, a sexual opportunist who, in that old phrase, “took advantage”. But a rapist? No. Dougal was cleared of any crime.

The judge’s ruling that “drunken consent is still consent” has been seen as a rapists’ charter. But what is the alternative? A limit on alcoholic units after which a woman’s word cannot be taken, some kind of bedroom breathalyser? Drunken consensual sex takes place every night: some couples have no other sort.

Many a girl has woken the next morning after such an encounter thinking first “why?” and then “never again”. In less litigious times, she would tell her friends, warn them, shame him. This would form the kind of instant moral justice that sets lives back on course, not ruins or be- smirches them in crown courts and newspaper columns. But if women are to use the law to seek retribution and heal their battered feelings, they must be prepared for its cold, sober rigour. And they should remember that while rape victims have our sympathy, no one loves a female drunk.




TRAPPED in my house all day with a child off school with a cold, I ring a louche young friend and fellow freelance. He’s in an excellent mood having just completed piles of work: “It’s because I’ve employed a personal assistant,” he says loftily.
Since my friend works from a garden shed, I marvel at the expense: “Oh, I’m not paying her,” he says. “I did loads of unpaid work experience when I left university. I felt it was time I got some back.” His young woman “intern” sits beside him in the shed filing and ringing editors up on his behalf.

I’m sorely jealous. My own intern has eaten all the biscuits, nags to play on my laptop and has now given me his cold.