9781990160462 – Blind Drunk: A Sober Look at Our Boozy Culture

By Veronica Woodruff

Sample Chapter

My parents, Jeff and Diane, were traditional in their ideas of relationships, content to define love in terms of social expectations, etiquette and traditional roles for men and women. Diane was not caught up in the feminist movements of the time and was happy to become a kept woman provided for by a successful and wealthy husband. Jeff was a great catch in this regard, a corporate lawyer destined to be an excellent provider, able to give Diane a luxurious and secure future. Diane was beautiful and well-suited to the social role of charming wife that Jeff required in his business dealings. They both were extroverts, happiest when socializing and entertaining. They had a mutual love of fine things, a strong friendship and, most importantly, a lifelong partnership. Diane and Jeff were devout Catholics, satisfying their transcendental needs through the church. It was essentially a mutually beneficial contract, defined by the social norms of the previous postwar era. Esther Perell, world-renowned relationship expert, portrays this type of conventional love differently to our expectations in the modern day. She contends that this was a time where relationships were codified with rules, defining expectations within the gender roles that were not up for debate or negotiation, and the contractual nature of this agreement suited both Jeff and Diane.

They were married at St. Steven’s church in Sillery, Quebec, on July 1, 1970. Diane wore a pale blue wedding dress with a twenty-foot train and Jeff booked them into the penthouse suite at Manoir Richelieu, a five-star chateau on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. There was no time for a honeymoon, as Jeff was required to be in Bathurst, New Brunswick, in three days’ time to negotiate the terms for a new Kmart. The newlyweds made the most of it, travelling there together and returning via Detroit where Kresge’s, Kmart’s parent company, was headquartered.

While Jeff was in business meetings, Diane spent the days with the other executives’ wives, who taught her how to access personal shoppers and maximize spending on the limitless company credit card. She developed an appetite for luxury goods and extravagance that Jeff loved to indulge. He had long decided that, to be successful, you had to look and act successful. And his new job opening Kmarts across the country was funding this vision.

By the 1970s, Kresge’s had surpassed $1 billion in revenue and, despite a recession that started in 1973, Kresge’s Kmart expansion was wildly successful. In 1977, 271 Kmart stores opened in North America, giving them the distinction of being the first retailer to launch 17 million square feet of retail space in a single year. Jeff was a key actor in the Canadian expansion, ceremoniously presented the keys to multiple cities across Canada for introducing such an important community amenity.

Jeff’s demeanor and professional existence almost perfectly emulated Don Draper’s, the fictional advertising executive portrayed by Jon Hamm in AMC’s hit show Mad Men. He not only sported the square jaw, stylish suits, unflappable confidence, and quick wit; he had also perfected the three-martini lunch, a business practice so ubiquitous that it prompted calls for tax reform by US presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Advocating for change, Carter proclaimed that the nation was subsidizing the wealthy businessman’s $50 martini lunch.

In professional circles, the martini has long signaled sophistication and importance, acting as a lubricant when negotiating contracts and closing deals. Fashioned as the drink of professional and powerful men, meeting in smoky, dark-panelled, low-ceilinged steak houses, served by waiters in bowties and white gloves with a white napkin draped over their forearm, it symbolized transactional influence. Writing in Forbes Magazine, Joseph Thorndike observed, “The three-martini lunch was deeply male. This was not the sort of midday meal consumed by ‘ladies who lunch.’ It was a men’s meal, associated with men’s work in male workplaces.”

The three-martini lunch, in theory, took all the helpful effects of alcohol—physical tingling in your arms and legs, flushing, relaxation, increased heartrate, and happiness—and applied them to business dealings. Because alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream, rather than digested, this can happen quite quickly. In his book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled our Way into Civilization (2021), Edward Slingerland describes alcohol as a “pharmacological grenade”: its ability to circulate unimpeded in the bloodstream is more efficient than other intoxicants that are targeted to single regions of the body and are carried there in less efficient ways. In the context of managing business clients during a luncheon, one of its first effects is to dampen the logical and cautious functioning overseen by the prefrontal cortex responsible for focusing attention, impulse control, managing emotional responses, planning, calculating risk and inhibiting behaviour that may be perceived as hazardous. The neurotoxic properties of alcohol cause people to immediately say and do what they think rather than tempering their words with due consideration. Associated behaviour includes speaking louder and increased hand talking.

For a grown man, drinking three martinis over a two-hour period would bring his blood alcohol content (BAC) to about 0.08, the level at which it is illegal to drive a vehicle throughout much of North America. The effects would be more pronounced for women who were still struggling to gain a foothold in the male-dominated legal profession.

Nonetheless, drinking on the job is important as a lawyer, as some studies have even linked alcohol consumption to increased income. As a lawyer friend recently confided to me in 2023, he couldn’t do his job properly if he wasn’t drinking.

In 1977, a class-action lawsuit was settled against ten major New York law firms for practicing gender discrimination in their hiring practices. The outcome required the firms to implement policies that would eliminate barriers for women entering the legal profession. This was followed by a massive jump in women practicing law, from 14.4% of women practicing in large firms in 1975 up to 40.3% by 2002. Data from 2019 in Canada shows that 46.4% of practicing lawyers are now women. By every measure, women born in the 1970s are now either equal to or surpassing men in attaining higher education and in occupying prestigious and high-income roles. And coincidentally or not, the rates of problem drinking for highly educated, professional women have also been on the rise. The hard-won fight for gender equality required women to integrate into a professional ethos dominated by men. This paired with a strong culture of permissive drinking while on the job, as well as a relied-upon method for stress relief in an extremely high-stress environment. This has resulted in the legal profession having one of the highest rates of problem drinking among similar expert career. A study published in 2021 stated 80% of attorneys considered themselves as drinkers compared to 55% of the general population and further noted that women lawyers were engaging in much higher rates of risky and hazardous drinking than their male counter parts. All of this is to say, that while the three-martini lunch may give the illusion of profitable business deals, it may be more productive in the long run to stick with soda water or coffee.

Jeff and Diane settled into a life of luxury. They stayed at the best hotels wherever they were in the world, ate at the best restaurants and wore the latest designer couture. Wherever Jeff closed deals, they celebrated with elected officials and wealthy community members, showing off their cultured ways while tossing back martinis and champagne.