Author Lotta Dann said opening a bottle of wine at 5 pm. made her feel like she was still participating in the 'adult world'. Photo / Catherine Cattanach
Author Lotta Dann said opening a bottle of wine at 5 pm. made her feel like she was still participating in the 'adult world'. Photo / Catherine Cattanach
From about the age of 15, Lotta Dann drank alcohol every day.
She got to the point where she was having a bottle of wine and a half, at least, a day, and spending about $200 a week on alcohol.
She hid her drinking from husband, broadcaster Corin Dann, by hiding empty bottles.
Now, the journalist and mother of three has been sober for eight years and has written her third book.
The Wine O'Clock Myth looks at the societal encouragement for women to drink and the way the liquor industry targets women.
In the extract below, Dann explains the problem with "Wine Mum" culture.
Lotta Dann used to hide her drinking from husband Corin Dann. Photo / Supplied
Isn't social media lovely? So safe and kind, full of positivity and connectedness, where people share only truthful and uplifting content based on good intentions and solid information. Yeah, right. The truth about social media, as we all know, is that it's a deeply complex and conflicted arena. It can bring joy and connectedness, but, boy, can it also bring pain and negativity. At best we get to enjoy highlights from our loved ones' lives, and access useful and interesting content from individuals and organisations we choose to follow. At worst, we get all manner of stuff that can make us feel isolated, upset, jealous, worried and angry. Nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to alcohol-related content.
There is a veritable crap-tonne of booze-related material floating around social media. Most of it is targeted at women, especially mums. We seem to be ripe for the picking when it comes to online alcohol promotion. Quirky memes with vintage cartoon images chirp "Motherhood: Powered by love, fuelled by coffee, sustained by wine" and "Wine is to women what duct tape is to men: it fixes everything".
Photoshopped images show mums guzzling from ginormous wine glasses under the words "I wish my tolerance for my children would increase as much as my tolerance for wine" and "Tick-tock it's wine o'clock". Babies are snapped wearing onesies with slogans saying "I'm the reason mum drinks". Cutsie nicknames for alcohol like "mummy's juice" or "mummy's little helper" get liberally bandied about.
This is the Wine Mum culture online and it's rampant. Images are liked, shared and commented on at such a rate they've spread around platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat like the plague.
"There was a time when 'mummy needs wine' jokes were genuinely a little subversive," writes Metro magazine in an advice column. "Joking about needing a drink because your kids are driving you insane was once a kind of shorthand for communicating something difficult in a lighthearted manner, because life is hard and being a parent is extra hard and sometimes it's good to acknowledge that in a way which doesn't feel relentlessly negative." But, the magazine notes, the tone has now shifted: "In its relentless quest to wring each last drop of utility from every pop culture phenomenon, the internet rewards the retelling of the same joke until it's flattened and wrung dry."
What once offered a cheeky laugh has now been bastardised and cynically commercialised to the point where it's simply no longer funny. The once subversive little in-joke is now a deafening roar, and we can't hear ourselves think (let alone parent) without being hit with the message that we need alcohol to help us carry out our motherly duties. We'd all still be laughing if it wasn't so bloody damaging.
Being a mum is wonderful, but it's also hard work on so many levels. Births can be traumatising, sleeplessness is crippling, hormone surges are overwhelming, information overload is intense, insecurity hobbles us, opinions come from everywhere, cabin fever is real and loneliness sometimes achingly painful. Having a drink at the end of a long and tiring day can offer us a way out, and I've been very open about the fact that my drinking escalated hugely when I started being at home more after having kids.
Opening a bottle of wine at 5pm made me feel like I was still participating in the "adult world"; taking the first sip flooded my body with dopamine and took the edge off my *insert any tricky emotion you can think of here*. I was drinking alone, but there's no doubt I felt supported and encouraged in my solo habit by all the Wine Mum content pouring from my computer. It helped me justify my regular, heavy drinking. It normalised it, and it made me feel connected with other mums who were dealing with the same s*** (literally, at times) as I was, in the same liquid way.
"Wine Mum culture was a blast for problem drinkers like me," Halley Bondy writes on The Temper. "I was a brand-new mum when the internet started chanting, 'Rose all day!' I was there on the front lines slurring, 'Yes, way!' The memes, hashtags, mimosa brunches, and Insta pics of moms drinking cocktails to deal with their kids—they were enabling me and I loved it."
Did I, Halley, or any of the thousands of other mums drinking our way through the days ever pause to fully contemplate who was generating a large proportion of this social-media content (the liquor industry), the cynical reason they were pushing it out across cyberspace (to promote their products and increase their profits), and what their messages were actually saying to us (that we weren't fit to handle motherhood without regular doses of liquid drugs, and that our kids were so intrinsically awful we needed to blur our brains to cope with them)?
Anna, one of the women I interviewed about her relationship to alcohol, reads very clearly the underlying message we're sending every time we click, like, comment and share. "It's really sad. You're putting on Facebook about how you can't cope with everything so you're taking drugs. We're saying, 'Look at us, we fall apart at the end of the day, we can't cope'."
Joanna, another woman I interviewed, also reads the messages loud and clear and it grates: "I hate with a passion that whole thing of 'wine o'clock'. I just hate it. I see so many women I know on social media posting about their drinks, and I just think, Do you not get what you are promoting here? Maybe it's okay for them. But then most of the ones who put those photos up online, I know that they're not okay."
And therein lies the problem with the Wine Mum culture. It masks the truth. It makes light of something that is often very heavy. It sells the idea that all is fun and laughter when it comes to mums and alcohol, when often it's anything but. It creates the illusion that everyone is having an uproariously great time on the wines, when in truth we're not. And, most damaging of all, it isolates mums who are struggling.
If you're feeling even slightly conflicted or worried about your drinking, or you're someone who is newly sober and emotionally fragile, there's nothing more confronting and isolating than seeing a bunch of photos and posts singing the praises of booze. It can really mess with your head. If you're even slightly on the outside of the boozy vibe, Wine Mum content only serves to make you feel like a lonely, miserable loser. The posts that might have once made you feel amused and included can very quickly turn sour and begin to impact on you in a negative way.
Memes show images of mums guzzling from ginormous wine glasses under the words 'I wish my tolerance for my children would increase as much as my tolerance for wine', writes Lotta Dann. Photo / 123rf
When I first quit drinking and was hellishly vulnerable and raw, being on social media was hugely problematic. I'd spot a glossy photo depicting happy mums raising their glasses under the caption "And on Wednesdays we drink wine" and I'd feel the sharp barbs of aloneness. A cartoon meme chirping "The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink!!" would stab like a knife. (Somehow the meme format with professional-looking illustrations and fonts made me feel particularly on the outside of the joke.)
Now that I'm solidly sober, it's much easier to read into and dismiss social media's alcohol-related content for what it is — a curated, distorted, narrow, manipulative and sometimes outright dishonest version of reality. But if you're not in that solid place, if you're feeling fragile, lonely or low (which, let's face it, many mums are at times for a multitude of reasons), it's super easy to be negatively impacted emotionally. It's super easy to forget that much of what we see on social media isn't real. It's super easy to take in just the surface "funny ha ha" messages and not properly register the more destructive, isolating and hurtful messages underneath. And it's super easy to forget that we're goddam warriors who already have everything it takes to be kick-arse mums inside of us.
Yes, the days are long and hard and we often feel isolated, irrelevant, exhausted, bored and a million other tricky emotions — but, ladies, we've got this. We can do motherhood without copious amounts of wine. We don't need to guzzle a liquid drug that blurs our brains, numbs our emotions and disconnects us from our children, our partners and ourselves. We don't need to model to our kids that the only way to cope with them (and with life) is by drinking every night. We don't need to keep sharing content that pokes fun at our drunkenness while sending underlying messages that we're incapable of parenting in the raw.
We don't need to make a show of everything being light, and we can instead embrace gloriously messy imperfection. We don't need to 'smooth the edges' and can instead relish our bumpy emotional landscapes. And we certainly don't need to keep sharing content that promotes the products sold by an industry that cares only about its profits, not empowering women to be their best selves. We are not Wine Mums; we're Warrior Mums—strong, courageous, dedicated, hardworking, vulnerable, resilient and capable. Go stick that on a meme.
The Wine O'Clock Myth
The Wine O'Clock Myth By Lotta Dann published by Allen & Unwin NZ Out June 16 RRP: $36.99
