Katy Waldman considers why “bartenders and waitstaff often expect their female customers to order ‘juicy or sweet’ beverages, [while] those who defy convention with a whiskey neat get vaulted to cool-girl glory”:
Only tough people seek out stuff that tastes “bad”—think about the virile rumble in phrases like “stiff drink” and “hard liquor.” Subjecting yourself to strong spirits implies a kind of Trojan indestructibility, as if the really great thing would be if the bar were a Cormac McCarthy novel so you could publicly not care about the apocalypse, but since it’s not, you’ll just have a Jameson.
“Liking hard drinks is related to other indicators of badassery,” says Anna Newby, a Washington, D.C., bartender and Slate contributor. “It’s finding out a girl boxes instead of running for exercise. Why do we care how people work out? But we do.” Newby notes that whole nooks of drinking culture are propped up by the desire to “prove something”—no one assumes that people enjoy keg stands or tequila shots, but they’ll do them for street cred. And yet other types of self-punishing willpower—the feminized kinds—only attract scorn: “I’ve seen people roll their eyes at a table of girls ordering vodka sodas,” Newby says, “which is perceived as the anorexic drink. It’s like, one girl orders it, and they all do.”
(Video: “Girl Drink Drunk” from Kids in the Hall)
The Dish 