Stress Drinking Has a Gender Divide

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More than a decade ago, when Holly Whitaker worked a director-level job at a Silicon Valley start-up, insecurities haunted her. She feared never being enough, never getting ahead. “There was just an inability to be with myself,” she told me, “and that manifested as fear.” She often sought comfort in alcohol. The relief would start even as she anticipated drinking; at the first sip, she began to feel warm and right; numb, but also energized.

In her 2019 book, Quit Like a Woman, Whitaker describes drinking alone after a night out, feeling proud to have had “only” a bottle of wine in a day, and carrying airplane shots of liquor around in her purse. Sometimes, she would start drinking in the morning and go until she passed out. “Anytime I felt anything I didn’t want to feel, I used outside things to manage that, and alcohol was very effective,” she said. The next day, she would feel shaky and even more stressed—and still be facing the demons she drank to avoid.

Now sober, Whitaker views her past drinking as a perverse form of dealing with anxiety. She and others are urging women to see how alcohol is becoming a modern-day tranquilizer, a substance that the booze industry peddles to successful, stressed-out women as a way to forget their problems—while quietly making them worse. “If you look at the history of Valium, or Miltown,” Whitaker said, naming two early sedatives, “women have been sold coping mechanisms for their daily lot for a