Thanks to Joann K and the “Hartford Courant” for running this story on women and alcohol marketing by large corporations, featuring a few thoughts from this media educator.

Women’s Libation

As Females Gain Equal Right To Imbibe, `Girlie Drinks’ Beckon

STORY BY JOANN KLIMKIEWICZ COURANT STAFF WRITERPHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MARK MIRKO THE HARTFORD COURANT

March 13 2006

The cocktail menu at Trumbull Kitchen in Hartford is brimming with sweet, fruity drinks and chocolate concoctions. Poured in pretty glasses and garnished with flair, they’re branded with names of the “-tini” variety: Espresso Martini, Bellini-Tini, Valentini.

The chance that a tray of these dainty drinks is headed to the trio of strong-jawed men in the corner?

“Slim,” restaurant manager Jennifer Derleth says over the din of the evening crowd. “Very slim.”

Don’t misunderstand, Derleth says. These drinks pack an alcoholic punch.

But with sweet, creamy flavors that mask the bite of liquor, these - she hesitates on the phrase - are “girlie drinks.”

“They’re the kind of drinks that are more appealing to women,” says Derleth.

And they’re the kind of drinks moving females from the coffee klatch to cocktail klatch, appealing to the sensibilities of stylish young women who are holding off marriage and have more disposable income tucked in their designer purses.

“You’re just more likely to meet for drinks than coffee after work,” says Derleth. “And it’s always just a good way to let off some steam.”

It’s a cocktail culture spawned by Carrie Bradshaw and her chick-lit peers, a free-spirited lifestyle in which everyone looks better-dressed with a martini glass - after work, on a girls’ night out, at the spa, even on a girls’ night in.

“Taboos associated with women drinking, even sitting at bars by themselves, are really falling by the wayside,” said Margie Fox, president of the New York marketing firm Maloney & Fox. “It’s a much more confident woman these days, drinking not just cocktails but bourbon and beers. And they want a cocktail or signature spirit that reflects their style.”

The alcohol industry is responding with products that appeal to the taste buds of these young urban females, from fruit-flavored vodkas to sweet, fizzy malt beverages - so-called alcopops - that go down as easy as cherry soda.

Ads pepper glossy fashion magazines and run during popular female-targeted programs such as “Sex and the City,” the television show (inspired by Bradshaw’s writings) that helped give rise to this fun, flirty drinking culture. (The show’s Kim Cattrall even signed on to represent Bacardi’s new rum concoction, Island Breeze.)

“The alcohol industry studies all these social demographics trends, scratches their heads and says, `How can we construct a very appealing marketing message that taps into these very real demographic changes?,’” says Rob Williams, a professor of history and media studies at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt.

And if the message that has penetrated the male psyche associates drinking with masculinity and sexual conquest, he says, the one for women is “be a good girl by day; shed your inhibitions at night.”

“They’re saying it’s OK to consume as much alcohol as the guys,” says Williams. “In fact, it’s a way to sort of claim your womanhood, claim your female status.”

It’s reminiscent of the “You’ve come a long way, baby” cigarette campaign of the 1970s and 1980s, when Virginia Slims equated smoking with women’s liberation.

Similarly, Williams says, the message is: “Drink alcohol; strike a blow for crafting your own female identity.”

Gary Galanis, vice president of corporate relations for Diageo, an alcoholic beverage company whose North American headquarters is in Norwalk, says the company doesn’t consider the female market any more important than others.

“Adult consumers [of all markets] expect innovation and expect new brands and flavors,” says Galanis.

Fox says female drinkers can expect to see new alcohol products incorporating teas and chais, their campaigns borrowing from the serene elements of spa culture.

It’s that sensibility that helped her craft a successful “Chocolate for Charity” campaign around Godiva Liqueur, produced by Diageo, in December 2004. Fox’s firm connected with stylish women by teaming up with the Louis Licari salon during a time when celebrity blondes were going brunette. The brand donated $50 to the Step Up Women’s network for every woman who darkened her hair. Women mingled with celebrities, sipped luscious cocktails and chose from a hair color menu inspired by the liqueur’s various flavors.

The result, Fox says, was stellar media coverage that helped boost sales 92 percent in California and 12 percent in New York.

It seems like harmless fun - women kicking back and connecting with each other over tasty new drinks.

But sometimes the underlying messages can be troubling, says Williams.

“The message from the alcohol industry is, as a young woman, if you drink, you’ll somehow become more free, more womanly, more independent, more mature,” he says, “when in fact, alcohol has exactly the opposite effect. It makes you less free, less independent, less capable of making healthy, informed judgments about any given social situations.”

Some industry critics worry about the health and behavioral risks associated with female alcohol consumption - heart disease and date rape, for example - especially among younger women.

While binge-drinking gets a lot of attention on college campuses, and while the “Ladette” drinking culture has been well-documented in the United Kingdom, risky drinking among young American women appears to be flat. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports no significant change in risky drinking among women between the ages of 18 and 29 in the past few years.

But of concern, and getting much media attention in recent years are the fizzy alcopop drinks - beverages like Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Silver. Youth advocacy groups point to a recent study by the American Medical Association showing these drinks particularly attract teenage girls. Critics call them a gateway beverage, a young drinker’s transition from soda to alcohol. And they say boys know to ply girls with these drinks to take advantage of them sexually.

According to a 2004 study by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, 71 percent of eighth grade boys reported drinking an alcopop in the last 30 days, compared with 86 percent of girls. For 12th graders, the gap becomes clearer: 57 percent of boys compared with 74 percent of girls.

“It’s the product design, the taste, the color. It goes down easy,” says James Mosher, a lawyer and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Enforcement Policy in California. One of the most vocal critics of the drinks, he’s working to change their classification from “beer” to “distilled spirits,” which would curtail their advertising to the youth market.

Galanis, of Diageo, which produces Smirnoff Ice, says the company has a tradition of advocating teen education and responsible drinking. He says the company only advertises in venues where 70 percent or more of the audience is of the legal drinking age - a standard critics call inadequate.

In Connecticut, Diageo is supporting a new law that would toughen penalties for adults who provide alcohol to minors.

“The younger a girl will start to drink, the more likely she is to develop a dependent, some would say addictive, relationship with alcohol,” says Champlain College’s Williams. “That’s great business if you’re the alcohol industry, but it’s a really troublesome problem if you care about the public health of society as a whole.”

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant

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Crashing The Gate: The Trade-Offs Of “Netizen-ship”

What do you get when you cross two high-powered progressively-minded citizen activists with the “information superhighway”?

The answer: a new book called Crashing The Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. Co-authored by liberal blogmeister Markos Moulitas Zuniga of www.dailykos.com and www.myDD.com founder Jerome Armstrong (two of the most popular progressive bloggers in the country), the book makes a compelling and occasionally frustrating case for re-tooling the brain-dead (some say) Democratic Party for the Internet Age.

Wait a second, you may be thinking. Stop right there. Please speak in English. What’s a “blog,” for starters?

Back up twenty years. Like any other new communications technology (think the telegraph, the radio, or the television), the Internet’s arrival during the 1980s brought with it the usual mix of hyperbole and hot air that accompanies the invention of the same. And, of course, during the first two decades (so far) of development, the Internet has moved from being a promising public forum for cutting edge electronic community discussion to an orgiastic corporate commercial sales vehicle. Anyone who uses e-mail or surfs the web is now confronted with the latest and greatest in pop up and banner ads touting everything from online porn pictures to penis enlargement procedures, while electronic “cookies” keep track of our every mouse click. Surveillance society indeed.

But Armstrong and Zuniga belong to that heady group of citizen activists who effectively have used the Internet to tap into Americans’ frustration with politics as usual. “Fueled by the new technologies – the web, blogging tools, Google – this new generation of activists helped spark some life into the Democratic Party establishment,” they write, “and the online medium allowed a level of participation nonexistent in traditional media.” To answer the question above: A “blog” (short for “web log)is an electronic journal, of sorts, that creates an online arena for conversation – individuals log in to a blog site, read people’s posts, respond with thoughts of their own, and voila – first an extended conversation, then a community, then a movement is born.

Or so the argument goes in “Crashing The Gate.” And make no mistake – this is not a book about policy-making. (In fact, some reviewers have suggested the book might benefit from a more wonky flavor, though I disagree with this assessment). Instead, the authors have written a slim and accessible book about the process by which citizens engage in politics using the Internet, and Zuniga and Armstrong are our tour guides intimately familiar with the progressive e-landscape, having played central roles in shaping it.

After setting the stage by emphasizing the problems associated with the traditional Democratic Party approach to politics (at once too centralized, hierarchical and unfocused) and related fears about a well-funded and well-organized Republican Party machine, Armstrong and Zuniga recount their various battles with Establishment Democrats, and the successes they’ve had in creating electronic communities of like-minded progressive activists. “A whole new generation of reformers – from the online world of the netroots, to new multi-issue groups, to new labor, to new big-dollar donors – is engaged in a two front war,” they observe, “battling to knock Republicans off their perch while jostling for control of the Democratic Party.”

And this “insider’s perspective” makes for fascinating reading.

Perhaps the best piece of advice Zuniga and Armstrong give is the need to build a progressive infrastructure – not the “sexiest topic,” as they say – but vital to the long-term success of any political effort. And complicated by the fact that your average American, hustling to work several jobs in an effort to “put food on the family” (to quote the White House’s current occupant) doesn’t necessarily have the time, energy, money, resources, or interest in entering the “blogosphere” for extended conversations about how to “take back our country.”

The e-alternative – the weekly bombardment of e-mail missives urging action on specific issues from the likes of such groups as MoveOn.org (now with 3 million members) – has some utility in alerting and organizing citizens around certain issues – but, paradoxically enough, feels exhausting after a while.

While Zuniga and Armstrong have written a vital book about the high-tech promise of “people powered politics,” we all might do well to remember the words of famed Boston Democrat “Tip” O”Neill: “all politics is local.” The face-to-face conversation and organizing efforts that take place in pubs, schools, churches and communities have never been more important in an age where relationships are continually mediated. While “Crashing The Gate” offers a useful roadmap, then, it is but one part of a much larger 21st century political story all of us are authoring.

And you can be sure that those of us in the peaceable secession effort – frustrated conservatives, progressives, libertarians, Greens, and liberals alike – will remember this moving forward.

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Valley Players Acoustic Triple Header!
A Saturday Night Mix Of Poetry and Politics

Just when you think you’ve heard it all at the Valley Players Showcase, VPS organizer Bruce Jones assembles an event that arrests the ear. Three – count ‘em – three of the country’s most compelling singer/songwriters are sharing the stage in Waitsfield town, and I guarantee that sparks will fly. Northampton’s Jim Henry, who I’ve been listening to since picking up the acoustic guitar, will be sharing the stage with longtime friend and collaborator Tracy Grammer. Grammer’s new CD “Flower of Avalon” was consistently voted one of the best independent CDs of 2005, and with good reason. The collection is chock-full of some of her finest work to date, composed and interpreted in the wake of the untimely passing of her longtime musical and personal partner Dave Carter. “Avalon” boasts a wide mix of tunes, from traditional-sounding fiddle/mandolin/guitar numbers like “laughlin boy” and “gypsy rose” to contemporary political commentary like “hey ho.” Now, I could tell you that the U.S. government is the world’s biggest arms dealer, or that war is incredibly profitable for giant multinationals that make and sell weapons, but Grammer sings it all so much more provocatively:

Hey ho and so it goes/
The point of sale the puppet show
The merchant kings of war and woe/
Have turned their hands to labor/
Sound out the trumpet noise/
The cannons bark and jump for joy/
Someone’s dread and darlin boy/
Has fallen on his saber

And it sounds even better when put to a toe-tapping fiddle.

But the most exciting aspect of the evening for me is having a chance to hear, for the first time, the music of Anais Mitchell, whose new CD “Hymns for the Exiled” is jaw-droppingly good, some of the most moving stuff I’ve heard in some time. Why? As a musician, Mitchell weaves together the most private moments with the most public images of our 21st century post-911 pre-apocalyptic landscape, a sort of “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” meditation on fortress America, where nothing and no one can be trusted, not even, it appears, our closest friends or lovers.

And Mitchell does all this with the most vulnerable and plaintive of voices, lending her images all the more power in the singing of them, over simple guitar riffs and finger-picking licks. Like this moment, from the CD’s opening track called “Before The Eyes of Storytelling Girls.”

I could tell you stories like the government tells lies/
Oh but no one listens any more/
In the rooms the women come and go/
Talking on the telephone/
And the television talks about the war

Or this introduction to a tune called “1984,” a little ditty that’d make George Orwell proud, where Mitchell again combines the intimate and personal with big picture political changes post-911 and a little bit of an artist-formerly-known-as-Prince reference:

Down at headquarters there’s a big database/
With black and white photos of the side of your beautiful face/
And library records of all your test scores/
And an invitation to party like its 1984

Or this moment, from “Cosmic American,” a song which distills volumes of critiques about the ephemeral and ultimately impersonal nature of our 21st century media culture into an arresting series of images that together, turn out to be a shivering ballad of lonely lost love:

I’m a live wire I’m a short wave radio/
Do you copy/
I’m a flash of light from the tower to the runway/
If I leave you I’m gonna do it/
Semi-automatically…

To quote any more would ruin the song. Not since Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road” have I heard such spine-quivering lyrics from a female artist. I’ve heard it said, too many times to count, that the events of 9/11 have changed everything. Now, Anais Mitchell has done something remarkable and new, capturing the truth of that now-cliched and banal utterance in some of the most stripped-down, beautiful and honest music I’ve heard in a long time.

Don’t miss this Saturday night at “Valley Players” – it is rare to see an acoustic triple-header like the one Mr. Jones has arranged for us.

See you there.

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