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Entity reports on the psychological and physical reasons women drink.

As summer is coming to an end, consider swapping out the boozy brunches and inebriated office happy hours for … feminism. When writer Kristi Coulter subscribed to a sober lifestyle, she got to some core truths about why women drink. She tells all about her experiences in her article, “Enjoli.”

What kind of trends do you think she uncovered?

1 We drink to distract.

What you imbibe defines you, whether you are the stylish boss drinking a whiskey on the rocks, the DGAF woman slinging back PBRs or the mom that drinks “MommyJuice wine” as a way to say her sole identity does not lie in her offspring.

Coulter says, “I see that booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise.” What would we be doing if we were not hiding behind our intoxicated veils?

2 We drink to ward off the mansplaining and micro-aggressions.

Why does Coulter say that male coworkers perceive their workplace as a “great company for women”? Easy. Women are great at camouflaging. We swallow all the backhanded comments and do it with ease to keep male colleagues at bay. We then treat ourselves to a double vodka on the rocks as a consolation prize. Creating real and meaningful change may mean facing the injustices clear-head on.

3 We drink to liquor everyone and everything up.

As the saying goes, until everyone is a drinker, everyone is drinking alone. Coulter noticed this saying come to life as she went about her daily routine. She found a margarita tent after finishing a women’s half-marathon, a “Vinyasa and Vino” class at her mainly female yoga studio and a tequila bar at the waxing studio for those dreaded Brazilians.

With friends flocking her Facebook photos with boozy comments, recommending wine as a remedy for any woe, Coulter suggests that “maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives.”

4 We drink to aid with the patience required to be a woman. All. The. Time.

As Coulter’s sobriety withstands time, she notices that her patience for being a “24-hour woman” dramatically drops. No more brushing off a passerby telling her to smile, no more putting up with conservative commentators expropriating women’s reproductive rights, no more tolerating the bulls***!

She tells us, “We can’t afford to act like it’s okay that ‘Girls can do anything!’ got translated somewhere along the line into ‘Women must do everything.’ We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.”

AMEN.

Is it possible that our drinking habits are covering up something deeper, something deeply flawed in our society? By reaching for a drink rather than calling a spade a spade, we fail to recognize the roots of our problems thereby holding ourselves and our potential success back. Maybe the next time we spring for the bar after a day of stomaching male-dominated culture and doing it all, we should instead stare deeply into the heart of our frustrations and then do something about it.

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