Why girls deserve a drink The doomsters miss out the joy

Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? The energy rising lightly in your solar plexus and making your cheeks ache from smiling; and how time would drop away, so that there was only now, tonight, this? And what a thrill it all was? I still remember, just about. And I did so this week as I read various handwringing responses to the question of why British teenage girls are allegedly getting bladdered so often. A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organisation last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th. Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioural manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honour of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early. Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the piss at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs.

Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.

In short, few seem to remember how much fun it can be to be a drunk teenage girl (or just a drunk teenager, full stop). Unlike the discourse around male drinking, there is little mythologising of female drinking culture to leaven the relentless doom mongering. We don’t have our own Lucky Jim, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, or Bertie Wooster. At a push, we have Dorothy Parker for our finer alcoholic moments and Jean Rhys for all the others. Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamourising cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core. Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male. Impersonal accounts of possible causes — rising anxiety, say, or the influence of social media — miss out this crucial part of the explanation. And I’m not sure we should expect or even want anything different. William James wrote of alcohol’s power to “stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”, arguing that while “sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no, drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”. And who should be saying yes to life more than mystically minded, big-hearted, uproarious teenagers? There is nothing more developmentally appropriate. In a society where so many of them seem isolated in dark rooms, either metaphorically or literally, the odd outbreak of intensely sociable drunkenness seems like a small worry to have overall. Of course, it would be remiss to tell a one-sided story about the joys of drink without paying due deference to the pitfalls. Here is James again, coming over all puritanical to offset his enthusiasm only moments before: “it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.” Though in retrospect the average hangovers of a teenager look fine when compared to their senior versions, and certainly not “poisoning”: put up with a nasty head for a few hours until you can face the trip into the outside world for painkillers, a pint of some lurid coloured fizzy liquid and a fry up, and your virginal liver will do the rest. Inebriation makes you vulnerable in other ways, though — and perhaps especially so in the case of girls. The disinhibition it brings, and the subjective dislocation from time and space, spell trouble in the wrong company. Alongside the report about teenage drinking, this week there has also been a lot of discussion of Pakistani grooming gangs on X; and the two make for uncomfortable juxtaposition. Extracts circulated from court transcripts underline that alcohol and drugs were the main means used by child rapists to subdue their underage working-class victims. And yet social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity, in a way which somehow made the girls more culpable than the psychopathic men abusing them. One social worker accused the terrified mother of an exploited 14-year-old engaged in “repeated incidents of severe intoxication” of not being able to accept that her daughter was “growing up”. A 12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house while the accompanying adult males were left unadmonished. In other words, an adultification bias was thriving; and when it comes to persistent stereotypes of fresh-faced young innocence and the “right” sort of victim, it seems that years of feminism have failed to touch the sides. So much celebratory alcohol use is transitional, taking us from the end of one thing to the beginning of another thing: from day to evening, for instance, or from working day to weekend. In taking the drink that indicates the changeover, you are not simply marking a shift in attitude as creating one out of nothing, wrestling it into being with your intention that things will be brighter and better now. Much teenage drinking is transitional like this too: by necking the stuff, typically you indicate an intention to leave something childish behind and become your own more adventurous person for a night, whatever that means. Of course that doesn’t mean you succeed, as thousands of undignified exits from teen parties can attest. Still, the pleasure is in the attempt, and it is an agenda apparently ferociously pursued by middle- and upper-class teenagers in particular, with few lasting consequences except for the very unlucky. One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fuelled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognise what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalised for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.

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