today is national wine day and i’m seeing girls as young as 18 joke about being “future wine moms” with their besties and while this is cute and seems funny it also reminds me how normalized overconsumption of alcohol is in our society. it’s a tough thing to talk about because these convos sometimes lead to full out shaming of people who engage in this behaviour. on the other hand, the complete acceptance and normalization of this kind of behaviour is extremely harmful. we live in such a pro-alcohol society that alcohol consumption is even pitched as being “heart healthy” when antioxidant benefits of the grapes in wine don’t even come close to outweighing the destructive properties of alcohol. we have to learn how to discuss substance “vices” – because, let’s face it, drinking, smoking etc are literally always going to be apart of the human experience and will always be apart of our community and our lives – without promoting their absolute acceptance or absolute dissolution. the trend of aggressively shaming people into quitting cigarettes without addressing why specific demographics suffer certain addictions more than others is not beneficial in the grand scheme of limiting self-destructive habits.
we gotta approach a model where we can discuss appropriate limits for all substances without shaming people and using holier than thou rhetoric, but also not making such behaviour marketable and neutralizing its harm with cute memes etc.
As far as I can tell the “wine mom” trope started 12-15 years ago as a rebellion against the pressure to be perfect mothers at all times, but yeah, now the internet is full of women saying “haha I could never deal with my family sober amirite girls?” and I can’t tell which of them are just joking.
Mooncustafer 