The XX Factor: What women really think.

Do Women Drink To Replace What Was Lost When We Got The Pill?

Jennifer,

I don't think my reaction to 'Gender Bender' was so different from yours. Ultimately I just found it unsatisfying. Because you're right: it's a problem both genders share. So why? What does it signify? And what can be done?

About 10 years ago I took a class with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who was in the process of publishing a book called The Great Disruption about the breakdown in social capital or "trust" in the Western World that resulted from the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. "Trust" -- the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes -- is also, in Fukuyama's view, what made Toyota the undisputed leader of the auto sector and much of East Asia such a manufacturing powerhouse. And I would argue that "trust" is largely what many members of my generation --"Kate" the bitchy I-banker who drinks to  seem more "fun" around her male colleagues included -- is trying to replace when we get bombed.

And that is where feminism becomes relevant. Fukuyama famously blamed the Pill, among other innovations, for destroying social capital in the process of emancipating women from the confines of monogamous, procreative relationships. (You might call it "procreative destruction"!) In hindsight Fukuyama's singling out of the Pill seems somewhat packaged to appeal to his then-neoconservative "base," because I do remember thinking it was secretly subversive. Because the political right had long since replaced America's belief in "trust" with a crippling fear of the "moral hazard" that might accompany it. Right now we mostly equate moral hazard, which describes the shift in behavior that accompanies the removal of risk from a certain activity, with the reckless financial institutions in which the Fed is now "injecting" funds. Those financial institutions now seem equally bent on convincing us that renegotiating mortgages for people facing foreclosure would create a similar "moral hazard" just as welfare creates the moral hazard that people will be lazy, the Pill perpetuated the moral "hazard" that women who took advantage of it would have more sex earlier and fewer children later in life and being thrust from suburban automobile-reliant upringings into a city with a bar downstairs that's open till '4 might disincentivize abstemiousness.

And yes, all that has happened. But life without "social capital" is no life, and we must take it as part of a virtuous overall phenomenon that our generation devised a few ways to replace it during those years during which we put off having kids. We repopulated cities, we found "virtual" friends through blogs and grassroots political movements. Where real estate was too costly -- and it has generally been so for my peers in the ever-downsizing industries -- we figured out how to meet regularly with one another in public spaces. And it so happened that bars were a natural, not generally being managed by corporations bent solely on increasing turnover times or transaction size. They're open late. They're everywhere. And many of them -- and many of their regulars -- have been around for generations, connecting us with our pasts and a less complicated period in history in a way that is comforting.

And sure, drinking five nights a week is a less-than-ideal way to achieve all this. But it can't be denied that to patronize a bar regularly, tip forty percent or whatever you can afford, catch up with a regular group of friends, spend nine dollars at the jukebox playing songs you just heard on your iPod because they sound better in the presence of other people and escort home anyone who overindulges all in the confidence that the phone you forgot will be there in the morning -- all that generates and sustains trust. Hazards also: every densely-taverned town invariably houses an equally-fertile network of AA meeting places, halfway houses, and rehab centers, staffed in large part on a trust basis by people who invariably spent a big chunk of their lives being highly un-trustworthy. Maybe a larger percentage of my generation will wind up patronizing the latter category of venues in our imperfect quest to fulfill this basic human need, but in the meantime behind the slips and slurs and self-mockery exists an earnest effort to prevent that from happening to the people we care about. If anything, Alex Morris's story is merely evidence of that.