Whiskey Bar
Ann Friedman complains about stereotypes and alcohol marketing:
I mean, sure, women’s bodies process alcohol differently than men’s, but whiskey is no more potent than vodka, which is perceived as a girl-friendly liquor. It’s clear that these comments are a symptom of old-school stereotypes and the relentlessly male-centered marketing of whiskey, bourbon, and scotch. I mean, looking at some of these ads, you’d think whiskey is something on the level of Axe or Maxim — something only a douchebag could love. (Yes, I used the d-word.) Firmly in the realm of “things for straight manly men.”
In the real world, I actually think a majority of the people I know who tend to take whiskey as their first-choice drink are women. That said, marketing aside I think the real underlying stereotype here isn’t so much about the alcoholic base (i.e., whiskey vs. vodka) as it about the sweetness of the drink. As an NYT article Ann links to says “I’ve noticed more than a tad of residual resistance to the notion that the female of the species can drink hard liquor unadorned by grenadine or chunks of oxidizing pineapple.”
On the other hand, Sara’s always telling me that there’s systematic gender differences that lead women to like sweet-tasting stuff more than men do. So I thought I’d try to look that up. This study says that male rats prefer mildly sweetened water whereas female rats like super-sweetened water. A similar result is notes in Jill Becker, et. al., Behavioral Endocrinology. The internet is full of references to this alleged greater female proclivity for sweet-tasting things, but the sources that cite specific references all seem to come back to a handful of studies done on rats. This is a bit curious since it seems like it should be possible to do some kind of research in this regard on human beings or, at least, primates.
What we may have here is a case where there’s a strong preexisting stereotype (girls like sweet stuff, including sweet cocktails) so the emergence of a slender reed of scientific basis for that belief (a handful of rat studies) swiftly becomes accepted as authoritative. You see this a lot, especially in the popular treatment of behavioral psychology. Any piece of research about gender differences in sexual preferences that can be construed in a stereotype-bolstering way seems to get immediate widespread media attention, while dissonant research doesn’t get much attention.
68 Responses to “Whiskey Bar”
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September 27th, 2008 at 8:40 am
So you’re saying we should feed whiskey to chimpanzees? Somehow I don’t see that ending well.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Mr. Yglesias appears to have taken too many “Women’s Studies”, “Feminist Philosophy” and other nonsense during his time in college, and didn’t spend enough time taking a solid course in animal behavior.
There is overwhelming evidence that many differences between men and women come down to essential and natural differences, not ‘cultural conditioning’ or whatever nonsense Mr. Yglesias and the ’second wave feminist’ crowd like to invoke.
Women are, by their essential natures, more religious than men. Less promiscuous. Less willing to divorce sex from love. More interested and tender towards children. More likely to value obligations to specific people rather than obligations to abstract ideas. Less politically radical. Less variable in a variety of physical and intellectual attributes. Weaker in term of muscle strength but stronger in terms of resistance to pain and disease. Less reckless. More forward-thinking. And, apparently, more fond of sweet things.
Only men could have been dumb enough, of malicious enough, to subject the world to that three-centuries-long denial of God which ended in the Holocaust.
These are not the effects of culture, they are the effects of nature, and only someone as silly as a second-wave feminist (i.e. an apostle of abortion) would think otherwise.
Tolstoy said that the ‘feminists’ of his day sought to make women more like men, whereas a true feminism would seek to make men more like women. He was right.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:51 am
but bourbon is way sweeter then vodka
September 27th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Whisky Bar? Yeah, I miss billmon, too.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Hector forgot to mention that women, in general, are much more nostalgic about the Crusades, and are also more likely to mutter darkly about the Muslims taking over Europe. Right?
September 27th, 2008 at 9:03 am
I don’t think Hector knows many real women. That said, I do however appreciate his bizarre womb-centric POV, which he frequently cites in his many cut-and-pasted posts, though. And who else would bring up abortion and the Holocaust in response to a rather tepid nonsequiteur about the relative sweetness of vodka and whiskey?
How many wingers name-check Tolstoy? That’s quality crazy (as was Tolstoy himself). I thought one of the main conservative criticisms of feminism was that it made men more like women.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:13 am
What’s weird is that so many wimmen I’ve dated are regular drinkers of whisky cocktails: Seven and Seven, Jack and Coke, Whisky Sour, etc. Whisky, yes, but often with a sweet mixer.
As anyone who’s ever woken up hung over from a whisky bender, that shit makes you STINK from every pore. Maybe that has something to do with it.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Hector’s not a winger. He’s a hard-core Catholic Marxist-Leninist, or maybe Marxist-Leninist Catholic. He’ll give you the run-down of the particular Peruvian regime he favored if you want.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Corporations do surveys and market research to figure out who their customers are. I used to be a bartender too. Women really do tend to order sweet-tasting drinks, with a small contingent of those who will order something like scotch.
This isn’t some silly conspiracy; it’s something that anyone who sells liquor could tell you was an actual fact. The ads you see simply reveal what folks prefer. Women tend to get a lot more passionate about chocolate than men do too.
Nature, nurture – who knows?
September 27th, 2008 at 9:17 am
El Cid,
1) I’m a socialist, not a Marxist.
2) I’m a high-church Anglican, not a Catholic.
3) I think that Lenin was a disaster for Russia and I wish that the Socialist-Revolutionaries (i.e. the agrarian peasant radicals) had defeated the Bolsheviks.
As for my post, every single assertion I cited was drawn from the evolutionary psychology literature. Is there any particular one you would like to deny? Yglesias made the (common, but false) claim that gender is a matter of cultural conditioning, not of essential natural difference. I countered that claim. That is all.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Whisky Bar? Yeah, I miss billmon, too.
FYI, he/she’s at DailyKos now:
http://billmon.dailykos.com/
September 27th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hector: My apologies — I must have missed a few of your posts. I will update my stereotype accordingly.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:29 am
In my opinion, these off-topic posts dilute the impact of your blog.
Who cares? Can’t you have a personal blog for stuff like this? I value your opinions when they are about politics, but you are neither an evolutionary biologist, nor a behavioral psychologist, nor a sociologist. You don’t sell liquor. You aren’t in advertising and don’t have any access to the demographic studies that – I guarantee – these companies commission before they roll out their ad campaigns. Which is fine! But just get it off your blog, sheesh. These posts are so weird.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:46 am
“Yglesias made the (common, but false) claim that gender is a matter of cultural conditioning, not of essential natural difference. I countered that claim. That is all.”
ah, no. that is a lie.
yggles nowhere in the above post made the claim you attribute to him. maybe he made it somewhere else, but maybe you just made it up out of your own fevered imaginings of what libruls say.
“There is overwhelming evidence that many differences between men and women come down to essential and natural differences”
yeah, maybe so. if so, then you can cite it.
all that yggles did was to say: is there research out there to support this particular claim of essential difference?
and then he went and looked for said “overwhelming evidence”. and on *this* question, it turned out the evidence was far from overwhelming.
he did not deny that there may be essential differences elsewhere, or deny that there may be evidence for such differences.
you are simply an abysmal reader and a shallow ideologue.
and keep your hands off the fucking holocaust, too, mr. high church anglican.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Tolstoy said that the ‘feminists’ of his day sought to make women more like men, whereas a true feminism would seek to make men more like women. He was right.
For the record, I think Hector is great, and I’m glad he participates here. I disagree with him much of the time, and I also don’t think that all of his ideological positions mesh very well together, but he actually takes intellectual positions and, at least on a good day, is prepared to defend them. I also think that part of Hector’s position is right: it would be a better world if men acted more like women, rather than the other way around, although it is deeply unfair to blame feminism.
And, fwiw, he *is* drawing all that stuff from the evolutionary psychology literature. Evolutionary psychology has its problems, but it *is* a serious intellectual program.
That being said, I think evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed intellectual program. There have been several compelling critiques of it written by philosophers of science: I recommend Robert Richardson’s Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, out last year from MIT Press. Check it out of you get a chance, Hector.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:08 am
mason, perhaps you’re unfamiliar with precisely what the hell a blog is, and why Matt’s has been so successful. As you say, it’s very often insightful, and engaging. He posts more than anyone (except maybe Sullivan), so there is always something going on.
A chunk the posts are very much “man at the bar,” ie, he has no fucking clue, but hey, this is what he thinks. (This post is way above normal in that he actually consulted some data.) These are often the best posts, because it brings commenters out of the woodwork who know TONS about the topic, and are inspired to share their insight. The only downside is it also inspires dumbasses like you who, despite being totally ignorant of the format, are arrogant enough to criticize.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:13 am
nolaboyd: I am well aware that some netizens believe that the blog format means “You can post any shinola that comes into your brain”. Believe me, that doesn’t make you right.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I actually think a majority of the people I know who tend to take whiskey as their first-choice drink are women.
I think the people who drink “whiskey” tend to be women or men. “Whisky” drinkers, however, are overwhelmingly male.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am
It would seem that Kahlua or maybe Irish cocoa would be the mother of all lady drinks, given ladies’ genetic proclivity for chocolate. This is a trend waiting to happen. There should be a lot of money in it for someone. I have no idea why it hasn’t happened already, given the scientific ev-psych realities of the case.
Kahlua should try for product placement in the soap operas. A beautiful young woman has been behaving erratically and no one knows why — and then one day her best friend visits and finds the room littered with empty Kahlua bottles.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Hector’s bizarre mix of truisms and absurdities expressed as if they were truisms apalls me. As a Jew and an Atheist, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry when he asserts that the Holocaust came from Europe’s atheism, rather than Europe’s religious tradition.
And of course Hector didn’t grapple with the substance of Yglesias’s post, a substance that as pointed out upthread is likely flawed: the data do likely exist. Matthew didn’t find the human preference data in the public psychological literature, which surprises me, as I’d think such an easy study would’ve been done a fair few times. But you can safely bet there’s reams of such data in companies’ proprietary product testing and market research data.
Still, I think my main response to Hector’s comment was just that it was as dumb as a bag of hammers. Manly, manly hammers.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Nature/nurture–I don’t know if the women I know actually go more wild for sugar than men, but we certainly make more noise about it, and it’s a permissible way for women to bond (”yay! chocolate!”). Which makes me wonder why more alcohol ads overall aren’t targeted toward women–a way for us to indulge our sweet tooth and bond. Alcohol marketed toward women tends to be liqueurs or alcohol designed for mixing–hence margarita recipes in an ad for Patron, as in a fashion mag I’m flipping through right now.
I notice a marketing with beer more, probably because I’m a woman and a beer lover and have seen exactly ONE beer ad clearly directed toward me that wasn’t a lite beer. (Bud, of all beers–there was a woman on the construction crew in an ad, and though I kept waiting for her to take off her hard hard stripper-style, she was just one of the workers.) There’s still this perception of beer as a working-man’s drink that has slowly shifted to allow high-end beers into the market–but it’s still seen as a man’s drink, even though beer is consumed equally by men and women. Maybe because it’s sweet!
September 27th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Any gender research on sweetness preferences in coffee? My anecdotal impression is that women rarely drink it unsweetened.
Second ogo’s point about bourbon being sweeter than vodka. Note also bourbon’s incompatability with tart mixers.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Our taste buds change over the years to prefer less sweet stuff, I think. I’m a woman and tried converting to whiskey at age 22–because I thought it would get me some sort of cred with the boys (which it did, actually). I never liked it and finally stopped pretending. Years later, I picked it up again and liked it. I haven’t run into any raised eyebrows as a result of drinking it as a 32-year-old woman, though I did 10 years ago. So.
So I wonder how much of this is based on college-age drinking preferences. The boys drink cheap beer and the girls drink cheap, sweetened liquor, but age up ten years and you don’t see as much of a variation.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I think some of this has to do with the fact that newbie drinkers are more likely to prefer sweeter drinks–or at least those made with a mixer–over straight 80-proof liquor, and a higher percentage of women in any given bar / party are newbie(ish) drinkers. I think it’s also the case that there’s a mild social pressure for men to avoid sweet drinks (whether they’re alcoholic or caffeinated) as vaguely effeminate, which pushes guys to try non-sweet drinks earlier and more often in their drinking careers.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:47 am
“In my opinion, these off-topic posts dilute the impact of your blog.”
I dragged myself to the ‘puter at 7am, hoping to catch some post-debate analysis from Matt. I expected to be greeted by a photo of an angry/old McCain staring into my soul with his lifeless eyes. Instead, there was a bottle of Maker’s Mark…staring into my soul. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I think it’s also the case that there’s a mild social pressure for men to avoid sweet drinks (whether they’re alcoholic or caffeinated) as vaguely effeminate…
Well, there’s this product called Coke that seems to have some success.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Honest question — I love a great tequila (and there are many), but not too many whiskeys. What’s the best whiskey for relatively low cost?
September 27th, 2008 at 11:18 am
25: So true!!!
September 27th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Vodka is a “girl-friendly” liquour? Somebody needs to crash their nearest college dorm party, because vodka is pretty much the hard alcohol of choice for 100% of the student population. I can’t remember the last time I saw scotch and bourbon on campus. There may be issues of price involved with this, but I think that the old stereotypes about gendered drinks is kind of moot with my generation.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:28 am
El Cid: If there’s a Trader Joe’s near you, you should be able to get Rebel Yell Bourbon for $10 or less. Creamy and substantial.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Order your drinks neat. Problem solved
September 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
One of my research colleagues had a job feeding monkeys cocaine and PCP. She’d get shipments of drugs on a monthly basis to her office, all sent by the U.S. Government.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:51 am
It depends on whether the rats are fans of Sex and the City. (They tried the study on chimps, but they turned out to be too smart to watch the program.) But seriously, can’t one take a deep breath and notice how fashions like that have changed. I hadn’t heard of cosmos all that long ago.
And can’t one try just a little obvious cross-cultural comparison? In Poland, women will be more likely to drink vodka (nearly tasteless), and in Ireland whiskey (relatively dry), while men in certain parts of America (or around me in college in New Jersey) were drinking American whiskey (relatively sweet). The American concept of light beer hadn’t penetrated England and Ireland at all until recently.
If it were about sweetness, then women would be more likely than men to pour ketchup over meat, whereas I suspect it’s the opposite. But really that, too, is about a certain image of what’s feminine. Women are more likely to order white wine still these days than red (either of which can be sweet or dry), because it’s perceived as somehow light. Never mind that it’s not all that different in calories, say.
Matt can be so incisive when he comments on pundits, which I guess is what popular bloggers do well. When it comes to other thoughts, especially cultural generalizations, it can get embarrassing. Besides, shouldn’t we notice that the post, too, is culturally induced? We’re in a conservative age that in America at once distrusts science and yet looks to genetic explanations for everything. Both reflect a hunger for absolutes, which is why morons like McCain and Palin still have a chance.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Children are notoriously sweet-seeking and bitter-averse. Pregnant women are notoriously bland-seeking and bitter-averse. Scientists have offered theories (if not evidence?) that both phenomena are a response to the bitter alkaloids in semi-edible plants: when we were hunter-gatherers, adults and especially men often benefited from calories-with-mild-toxins while children and especially fetuses risked death from them.
I have no idea if these theories are true or, if true, can be extended to non-pregnant adult women. But they make sense.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
What the hell are you people doing writing about whisky at 8 in the freakin morning on Saturday? I got up a short while ago after a whisky-filled night last night, and this conversation is making my hangover worse. Can’t this wait until after 3 at least?
El Cid; it’s a little hard to find, but WL Weller is ridiculously cheap (like $12 a bottle cheap) and as good as something two or three times the price.
September 27th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Maker’s Mark is the proof of a kindly and benevolent God in a harsh and cruel world. This is a fact, and it is indisputable.
September 27th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
El Cid: Old Overholt is an OK rye whiskey for around $12 or $13 a bottle.
September 27th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Matt, only view this at work I guess but….
http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/
September 27th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
My mother has a sweet tooth, but her sister can’t stand sweets. She like fried, hot, salty food. There’s another woman in my family like that.
On the other hand, that might just be a South Indian thing. Snacks there are various kinds of fried, hot, salty starch. The sweets they make are atrocious — condensed milk and flour deep-fried in butter and then covered in sugar syrup. One spoonful is a heart attack. Fortunately, you’d never want the second.
September 27th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Spurious,
I’m of (mostly) South Indian extraction and I agree with you about the desserts. Heart attack on a plate.
Actually to be honest I’m not sure if those atrocious sweets are of North Indian origin….they tend to have North Indian sounding names, don’t they?
September 27th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Besides, shouldn’t we notice that the post, too, is culturally induced? We’re in a conservative age that in America at once distrusts science and yet looks to genetic explanations for everything.
–yup. I’d add that the academic left absolutely got its collective ass kicked in the culture wars; hence people like Hector can write from a “left” perspective as if everybody from the Frankfurt School to Stuart Hall never existed….
September 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Nick,
WHo is Stuart Hall?
September 27th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Matt,
95% of the human race enjoys acting out their own sex’s sexual stereotypes. Indeed, the richer and healthier people get, the more they act manly/girly. It’s fun. It’s a sign of life, of health, of sexiness. So, marketers of hard liquors, which are all exactly the same functionally — they get you drunk — invest a lot in creating a particular aura of masculinity or femininity for each one.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I think the people who drink “whiskey” tend to be women or men. “Whisky” drinkers, however, are overwhelmingly male.
Huh? “Whiskey” is the Irish and, thus, American spelling, and “Whisky” is the Scottish and, thus, Canadian spelling. That’s the difference.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Whiskey” is the Irish and, thus, American spelling, and “Whisky” is the Scottish and, thus, Canadian spelling.
The correct spelling, of course, is somewhat different . . .
TA praise o’ ouskie, she will kive,
An’ wish in klass aye in her neive;
She tisna thought that she could live
=Without a wee trap ouskie, O.
For ouskie is ta thing my lad,
Will cheer ta heart whene’er she’s sad:
To trive bad thoughts awa like mad,
=Hoogh! there’s naething like kood ouskie, O.
Oh! ouskie’s kent, an’ ouskie’s cran,
Ta pestest physick efer fan;
She wishes she had in her han’,
=A kreat pig shar o’ ouskie, O.
Ta lallan loon will trank at rum,
An’ shin tat frae ta Tutchman come;
An’ pranty – Fleugh! tey’re a’ put scum,
=No worth a sneesh like ouskie, O.
Ta shentlss they will trank at wine,
Till faces like ta moon will shine;
Put what’s ta thing can prighten mine?-
=Poogh! shust a wee trap ouskie, O.
Ta ladies they will klour and plink,
Whene’er tey’ll saw’t a man in trink;
Put py temsel tey’ll never wink,
=At four pig dram o’ ouskie, O.
An’ some will trank a trashy yill,
Wi’ porter some their pellies fill;
For Loch Ard fu’, a sinkle shill
=She wadne gie o’ ouskie, O.
Some lads wi’ temprant rules akree,
An’ trench their kite wi’ slooshy tea;
She’s try’t tat too, but nought for me-
=Is like a wee trap ouskie, O.
What kars her roar, and tance, and sing?
What kars her loup ta highlan fling?
What kars her leuk as pault’s ta king?
=Put shust a wee trap ouskie, O.
Whene’er she’s towie, fex, and wae,
Whane’er ta cault her nose maks plae,
What cheers her heart py night an’ tay?
=Hoogh! shust a wee trap ouskie, O.
=======ALEX. FISHER
September 27th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Er, female here. For the record, when I drink, I prefer my Glenlivet, Maker’s Mark, or Jameson’s either straight up, or on the rocks. When I’m feeling puny, I’ll take it with a bit of branch. Thanks.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
nick, did you just say that Hector writes from a left perspective? My mind is reeling.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I should clarify. I don’t think the left has any place for someone with conservative cultural views these days. I guess that means I don’t see any tiny little box to put Hector in.
Meaningless labels anyway, of course.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Alan,
I think that ‘the Left’ in, say, Peru or Russia would have plenty of room for people with conservative cultural views. The reigning Left-wing government of Bolivia is against abortion, pro-natalist, and for corporal punishment.
September 28th, 2008 at 3:36 am
Matt,
You’re too young to have noticed this yet, but what you will eventually realize is that most of the feminist ideology that you’ve been indoctrinated with is most actively propounded by the small % of women who don’t feel very feminine (i.e., lesbians and the like). It’s their revenge on more feminine women, their attempt to raise their status at the expense of other women.
September 28th, 2008 at 4:29 am
I think it is all covered in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epa5YZIJU8I
September 28th, 2008 at 9:56 am
re: #50 – ah, the pain of rejection. ‘Course, most people don’t turn it into a part of their political worldview . . .
September 28th, 2008 at 10:01 am
And I like the “too young” – what Yglesias doesn’t understand . . . it’s like the time I took the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones . . ”
Hey, about as relevant.
September 28th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Hector -
You could be right about the origin of those sweets. Are Mithai and Burfee north Indian? I’m also thinking of damrot (white pumpkin, milk, ghee, sugar, spices). That one sounds south Indian to me. Awful stuff.
September 28th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
But the composition of the alcohol portion of whiskey and vodka is actually pretty different apparently, with a greater amount of congeners (other alcohols than ethanol) in whiskey:
(Swift and Davidson, 1998)
Perhaps there are physiological differences between men and women in processing congeners as well?
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