By Rachel Kramer Bussel

I stopped drinking, pretty much for good, over two years ago. I don’t tend to stare longingly at people drinking in bars, or feel too wistful, but the times when I’m overwhelmed with temptation for alcohol are usually times when I’m consumed by the desire for…desire–for getting fucked, along with getting fucked up.

To put it simply, I miss drunk sex. Well, one kind of drunk sex. I certainly don’t miss the “I’m going to drink so I get up the courage to put the moves on someone.” I tried that last year and while I got my much-fantasized-about makeout session, it was so not worth it, and was also just a one-time thing (as opposed to the let’s-move-in-together relationship I’d pictured). So now every time I see the person, I feel like an idiot. I also don’t miss waking up in someone’s bed and not knowing their name, or getting drunk just so I could get in the spirit of sex. Nor do I miss drinking in the hopes that it would make me look more attractive to someone I wanted to get with.

But I am a bit nostalgic for the sweet, swoony buzz from a good drink or two–the kind that used to make me feel warm and liquid and a little light-headed. The kind of buzz that made me both ferociously horny and oblivious to who saw me making out (or more) in taxis, restaurants, wherever. I miss the bliss of getting lost in both the alcohol and the person I’m with so that it feels like there is no tomorrow.

It’s hard to get to that place of utter focus on sex and just sex, for me, anyway, with the umpteen thoughts, doubts and uncertainties racing through my head. When I am able to reach that place of body over mind, of sensation over stress, though, sex provides both pleasure and relief, along with a way to feel closer to my partner.

The whole reason I stopped drinking is that it didn’t obliterate my thoughts, doubts and uncertainties; at least, not permanently (if it did, well, maybe I’d return to vodka). As soon as the buzz wore off, my feelings would just return with a vengeance, and no amount of hot sex or even being in love could make them go away.

I remember exactly when I stopped drinking, pretty much for good. I was buying fifteen of my closest friends dinner and martinis to celebrate a book deal (ah, hubris!) and getting increasingly wasted. I told everyone I had to leave at 9 for a podcast interview. About sex, my primary beat. Well, 9 rolled around, and went, and I was getting perilously close to the appointed time. I wound up calling in from my taxi home, then blathering away about orgasms from my bed while the room spun around me.

Some things are fun to do drunk, and maybe it’s just me, but trying to act serious and professionally knowledgeable isn’t one of them. I later became good friends with the host of the show, who said she had no idea, but still. I knew.

(Listen here if you want to determine for yourself whether I sound smashed: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/datingroadkill/2007/02/13/a-surprise-valentines-day-show).

I was never one of those savoring-the-fine-wine types of drinkers. I was more like, “Which drink will get me out of my head fastest?” The drunken podcast was the culmination of one too many mornings waking up feeling like I’d made a fool of myself the night before. That, plus coming from a family of alcoholics, made me decide that the best course of action was to quit cold turkey. I allowed myself the occasional (once or twice a year) drink, but even that–I’ve recently decided–is a bit too much for me to handle.

I don’t know if not drinking makes me a better lover or not. I think it probably makes me a boring date. The other night a really hot girl asked in a way that could only be called overtly flirty what I wanted to drink. “A seltzer?” I said in the hesitant way I still have, knowing that’s about as big a buzzkill of an answer as one can provide, since I’ve also sworn off Diet Coke. “I’m a cheap date,” I tried to joke.

“A seltzer with…” She looked at me so intensely, I truly wished I could add something boozy, if only to let her know that I thought she was hot and that I was potentially interested. I think some people take my non-drinking as an automatic sign that I’m not interested in them, which just isn’t true. I hate that drinking is so often the way we define our sexual interests, as if those of us who don’t booze it up are also celibate.

That being said, the kind of sex I’m most likely to be having right now is with my boyfriend, and it is, with rare exceptions, wild, kinky, rough. There’s spanking and choking and bondage and dirty talk and blowjobs and it all happens really fast and furious. There’s no way I could relax enough to submit sexually to him if I were wasted, and I wouldn’t want to be anything other than fully present. I need to be alert to make sure that what we’re doing is safe, to fully process and enjoy it. If I were drunk (or if he were), I’d fear that we might go too far and do things we might regret. With my thinking faculties intact, I can exult in the enjoyment of pushing boundaries.

Perhaps for some people, being drunk gives them permission to “go wild” in a sexual way, but if I’m with someone I want to be with, I don’t have those qualms at all. I like kinky sex, I like pushing my own personal erotic envelope. I get off on the occasional moments of fear or uncertainty that come with trusting someone else to set the tone, rules, and course of the sexual action. If my senses were dulled by drinking, I’d miss out on all the nuances of our play. I trust my instincts more when I’m sober.

That doesn’t mean every time I have sex it’s perfect and magical. But when it’s not, I deal with it; I figure out a way to either make it better or pause and restart another time. When I drank, I rarely checked in with myself like that. I thought I needed sex, and the feeling of being attractive, to “make” me feel better. Now I know that even the hottest sex isn’t a panacea.

Still, sometimes when my boyfriend orders a drink, I’m tempted to have one of my own. It looks fun, easy, comforting. In some ways, it’s not so much about sex as wanting to fit in, because not drinking makes you stand out in most any bar, and for someone who craves others’ approval, that’s not always easy. It’s not that I’d spiral into nightly drunkenness if I had one drink, but it’s infinitely healthier for my psyche, not to mention my body, if I abstain.

Maybe simply remembering my days of drunken sex, as hazy as they are, is enough, but even if it’s not, it’s the choice I’m making. I’ll leave the hot, drunk sex to someone else. May they enjoy it!

Rachel Kramer Bussel (rachelkramerbussel.com) is a New York-based author, editor and blogger. She’s edited over 25 anthologies, including The Mile High Club, Do Not Disturb, and Best Sex Writing 2009, and is host of the monthly In The Flesh Reading Series (inthefleshreadingseries.com). In her PG life, she blogs at Cupcakes Take the Cake (http://cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com), for which she’s appeared on The Martha Stewart Show.

It will come as no surprise that drinking lots of alcohol often goes hand-in-hand with bad decision making. But up until now, scientists had yet to come up with a direct cause and effect relationship regarding alcohol and unprotected sex.

In the January issue of the journal Addiction, a new study reports that researchers in Canada conducted 12 experiments to test the theory. The results–yes, rather obvious–confirmed that drinking alcohol affects decision-making, and the more alcohol one drinks, the more impaired the decision making. As the results show, for every 0.1mg/mL increase in blood alcohol level, study participants were 5 percent more likely to engage in unsafe sex.

While the findings may not seem overly newsworthy, they do confirm the direct connection between alcohol and sexually transmitted diseases. The study’s conclusion states that  ”alcohol use is an independent risk factor for intentions to engage in unprotected sex, and as risky sex intentions have been shown to be linked to actual risk behavior, the role of alcohol consumption in the transmission of HIV and other STDs may be of public health importance.”

“Drinking has a causal effect on the likelihood to engage in unsafe sex, and thus should be included as a major factor in preventive efforts for HIV,” said principal investigator Juergen Rehm of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, in a statement. “This result also helps explain why people at risk often show this behavior despite better knowledge: alcohol is influencing their decision processes.”

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Last week, in a victory for women, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 6-3 that there can be no sexual consent in law when a woman is unconscious.

Simple, right? Not so fast. The 3 dissenters (all men) argued that it would “further women’s right to autonomy to create a new doctrine of ‘advance consent,’ so that unconscious women can have ‘sexual adventures.’” Huh?

“But can unconscious women enjoy sexual pleasure or exercise autonomy?” law professor Elizabeth Sheehy wrote in the Vancouver Sun. “Unconsciousness is the very antithesis of autonomy. At the very least, this view represents an impoverished understanding of ‘autonomy.’It is also terribly abstracted from the reality of women’s lives, in which the sexual assault of women who are unconscious, whether from intoxication, medications, episodic disability or other causes, is a serious and widespread social problem.”

The Court’s decision makes no exceptions for husbands and wives, or cohabiting couples: You can literally get arrested for sexually touching your sleeping partner.

But honestly, how many people are going to report their partner if everything is okay between them. The law is meant to protect women in violent relationships, where “consent” may mean coerced under pressure or threat of abuse to consent.

Granted, the case in question was complicated: a woman supposedly “agreed” to being strangled unconscious, bound and penetrated with a dildo. The Court was not allowed to consider the context, which was that the offender was an abuser with a criminal record of weapons and violent offenses, including two previous convictions for assaulting the complainant.

I’m sure we can all think of many possible, complicated scenarios and loopholes (what if a woman is drunk, says yes to sex, and then passes out in the middle of it?)

But this is an important start. The bottom line is: The Court reinforced the idea that consent should be “conscious, continuing, contemporaneous with the sexual activity and revocable at any point.”

Perhaps there are some women who get off on strangulation—the “unconscious sexual adventure” the dissenting justices were most likely referring to. But, as professor Sheehy states, “strangulation is a significant risk factor for intimate femicide. Allowing ‘advance consent’ would have risked normalizing abusive and potentially lethal behaviour. It also would have made it effectively impossible to prosecute the assault of unconscious women. The high court’s clear ruling that unconscious women are sexually unavailable is a welcome and clear message for the Canadian public.”

To further the message, Canada has an edgy new ad campaign, with a woman passed out on a couch, liquor bottles surrounding her, and the message: “Just Because She Isn’t Saying No, Doesn’t Mean She’s Saying Yes.”

Amen to that.

Bartenders serve up so much more to their customers than just booze: therapy, jokes, stories, simple companionship, matchmaking, moderation management. Why not offer protection?

Beyond the Bar, a new program in York, PA, trains bartenders and servers to recognize potential sexual abuse situations and prevent them from happening. Who better to look out for sexual predators than the eyes and ears of a restaurant or bar?

“Alcohol is implicated in sexual violence more than any other drug,” according to Kristen Sechrist, who works at the YWCA to help men and women recover from the aftereffects of date rape.

“People are taught to watch for predators in their workplace, school and neighborhood,” Sechrist said, “but who is looking out for them when their guard is down and they’re enjoying a night out?”

The program, led by York County Victim Services, ACCESS-York and Planned Parenthood, includes a free 30-minute training program. Bars are then given informative coasters and consent packets for their customers, filled with a condom, breath mint and tips for how to ask for consent.

But bartenders and servers still play the most important role: they are taught to be proactive and look out for certain warning signals, like a man sipping one drink all night while he buys a woman multiple shots. They can also watch for unattended drinks, offering to refresh or change the drink if they suspect the use of a drug.

The most striking element of this program is that bartenders are expected to actually step in and take action: discussing the situation with patrons and making sure they feel safe, asking patrons if they need a taxi or help calling a friend, walking them out of the restaurant or bar and even offering them a ride home.

This sounds like an amazing program to me, with one caveat: offering a drunk patron a ride home could lead to big trouble for the bartender, and stopping a sexual predator in his or her tracks could be potentially dangerous, so I’d hope there are safety measures put in place.

The key factor here, though, is the effort to counteract the bystander culture so common in bars, the “It’s not my problem” mentality. That, to me, is a great thing. What do you think, readers?

Do you need to get buzzed or drunk to have sex?

According to a new study from the UK, most women do. Nearly half of the women surveyed said alcohol helps them to lose their inhibitions and feel more adventurous during sex, with 75% of women in committed relationships reporting that they enjoy drinking before doing the deed.

Why? Well, a good buzz helps women transcend the body image issues and insecurities most of us seem to have.

Problem is, according to sex expert Dr. Laura Berman, while one glass of wine can help you relax and get in the mood, a few drinks can have the opposite effect—numbing you and detracting from the experience. Two, three or more drinks can make achieving orgasm more difficult.

So what’s a woman to do? Dr. Berman says practice. Practice turning off negative thoughts (first, look for where they’re coming from). Practice self-stimulation and fantasizing, which can help you channel your sexual energy into your relationship.

She also suggests ditching the granny panties, and finding lingerie that flatters.

Rachel Kramer Bussell wrote a great piece for this blog on learning to have sex while sober, called “Drunk Sex, How I Miss You (Sometimes, Anyway).”

What do you think, readers—how do you prefer your sex? Sober, after one glass of wine, or soused?

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“I was but a shot away from what is referred to as a “black-out state.” —Karen Owen

By now, many of you have probably heard of Duke graduate Karen Owen’s Powerpoint Presentation, in which she described in salacious detail thirteen hookups with top athletes at her alma mater. She said it was meant for three friends, but the document quickly went viral.

While some have hailed her as a feminist role model (of the “Do Me” feminist sort, since she initiated the hookups), others have vilified her as a party girl gone wrong.

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan has another take on Karen Owen—while she comes on with swagger, if you read between the lines of her presentation and her subsequent comments, there’s regret, sadness, and ultimately, the sour aftertaste of rejection.

Irin Carmon, who interviewed Karen Owen for Jezebel.com, takes issue with Flanagan’s portrayal of Owen as a “sad, slutty, drunk girl”:

The decade-long hysteria over a “hookup culture,” imperiling young women who have been brainwashed into binge-drinking away their ingrained biological desires for cuddling and babies, doesn’t match any reality I’ve seen or heard of beyond pseudo-concerned trend stories. There are some people who are more interested in casual sex, sometimes; some of them are women, and some of them are drunk at the time, and it’s not a death knell for a committed relationship somewhere along the way if that’s what you want. It’s not that gender inequality doesn’t inform the power dynamics of casual sex, on campus or elsewhere. It’s that it’s hard to believe these handwringers are interested, in good faith, in creating a better environment of safe, enthusiastic consent when they’re so busy ignoring the fact that women like sex too. Or judging us for it.

Whether you see Karen Owen as a feminist icon, a sad woman, scorned, or as a lightning rod for debate about women’s sexuality, there’s still the fact of the booze.

Almost all of her hookups started at a campus bar called Shooters. Most of the time, Karen was drinking. All judgment aside, it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if she never had a sip of booze. Would she still have pursued these hookups sober? Would they have been the same? (Rachel Kramer Bussell wrote a great essay for Drinking Diaries, called “Drunk Sex, How I Miss You (Sometimes, Anyway”).

About the culture college women face, Flanagan writes:

We’ve made a culture for our college women in which they have been liberated from the curfews and parietals that were once the bane of co-eds, but one in which they have also shaken off the general suspicion of male sexuality that was the hallmark of Andrea Dworkin–style campus activism; they prefer bikini waxes and spray tans to overalls and invective. So they have ended up with the protections of neither the patriarchy nor those old-school, man-hating radical feminists.

Maybe they’re all the better for it. Or maybe an awful lot of these young women at our very best colleges are being traumatized by what takes place during so much of this mindless, drunken partying when they’re steeped in alcohol, which brings out the least engaging aspects of their young selves.

I’m not sure I would describe a young woman’s sexuality as the “least engaging aspect” of her young self. Truth is, if you view the Powerpoint Presentation, it seems like most of the time, Karen Owen had fun. She was bursting with desire for these “fine male specimens,” and she fulfilled that desire. Maybe the only way many young women can feel comfortable claiming their desires is by getting drunk. Why is that?

Maybe that’s where the change begins—not with banning alcohol or using Karen Owen’s notoriety as a cautionary tale—don’t kiss and tell. Her story just points to the fact that, when it comes to owning their sexuality without shame, young women still have a long, long way to go.

Then again, most of the guys she hooked up with were drunk, too.

Why do teen girls binge drink? There may be many reasons, but Caitlin Flanagan sheds light on one possible reason, in an article in this month’s Atlantic: “Love, Actually: How Girls Reluctantly Endure the Hookup Culture.”

Here’s an excerpt:  ”At the other extreme–with very little middle ground–are girls growing up with scant direction or guidance about their sexual lives, other than the most clinical. Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity? Unlike the girls of my era, who looked forward to sex…as a way of becoming ever closer to our boyfriends, these girls are preparing themselves for acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst.”

In the article, Flanagan talks about how girls pine for good old-fashioned boyfriends, as evidenced by their interest in Taylor Swift’s innocent songs, and High School Musical, for example, where everything leads up to: a kiss. Even in Glee, where hookups abound, there’s a hefty dose of romance. Romance happens slowly, over time. Hookups, on the other hand, happen quickly, at a party, and pretty much ten times out of ten, alcohol is involved. Right? It seems hard to untangle hookups from alcohol.

One thing that stands out for me is that when I started drinking (in college), I started becoming freer with what I was willing to do, sexually. The problem is, when you wake up in the morning and remember–if your memory is more than hazy–you realize that your sober self may not have made the same decisions as your drunk self.

How did drinking affect your sexuality as a teen?  How does it affect your choices now? What can parents say to teen girls about the hookup culture?

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Recently, there has been a spate of novels, short stories, memoirs and non-fiction books published that touch on the topic of women and alcohol–Here is just a sampling:

MOMMY DOESN’T DRINK HERE ANYMORE by Rachel Brownell (memoir)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (personal essays written before the popular blogger/memoirist announced she was quitting drinking)

BLAME by Michelle Huneven (novel)

LIT by Mary Karr (memoir, see excerpt in Drinking Diaries)

“Intervention” a short story in Jill McCorkle’s collection GOING AWAY SHOES

TROUBLE by Kate Christensen (novel w/ lots of unapologetic drinking)

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr (young adult novel with alcoholic mother)

And for those of you interested in poetry, there’s FLAWED LIGHT: American Women Poets and Alcohol, a non-fiction book about women poets and alcohol.

Some of my personal, perennial favorites:

SMASHED by Koren Zailckas (memoir)

ROSIE by Anne Lamott (novel, featuring a woman struggling with her relationship to alcohol)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard (memoir, & she’s the daughter of an alcoholic)

What are your favorite books that touch on the subject of women and alcohol? Favorite movies? Poems? Please share!

According to a study published in a recent issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, women who drink a glass or two of red wine may experience greater sexual desire, lubrication, and overall sexual function.

According to the study’s authors, members of the departments of Urology and Public Health at the University of Florence in Italy, the results help give a clearer picture on the female sexual response cycle.

The study, supposedly the first of its kind, examined red wine intake and the sexual function of 800 women between the ages of 18 and 50, none of whom had ever reported a sexual health problem. The women were divided into three groups–one group drank one or two glasses, another group drank less than one glass and a third group didn’t drink at all. Those drinking more than two glasses of wine were excluded from the study.

The participants answered a questionnaire called the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), a questionnaire used by doctors to assess sexual health in women. The results revealed that the levels of sexual desire were higher in women who were moderate drinkers of red wine than in their counterparts who preferred other alcoholic drinks, or were teetotal.

Typically, medical studies on sexual health focus on men and dysfunction, so this was a welcome change. “Historically, the aspects of wine and sexuality have been well known since the time of Ancient Greece,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Nicola Mondaini, who was quoted in an article in the Wine Spectator and is publishing a book on the subject next month, titled Vino e Eros. “But the field of female sexual dysfunction is still highly unexplored.”

The researchers’ conclusion stated that “While this finding needs to be interpreted with some caution, because of the small sample size, self-reported data, and the lack of support from laboratory exams, it nevertheless suggests a potential relationship between red wine consumption and better sexuality.”

Any chance you’ll be testing this on your own?

By Deirdre Sinnott

Much like the Mickey Mouse Club, I too had my “Anything Can Happen” days. When I was drinking, Mickey might not have made an appearance, but other rodents did.

One of my messiest nights began at Macy’s. It was just before Christmas. Mary, a friend from a theater group I worked with, and I sweated on a long line waiting to buy a pepper grinder. This was the first simple, hand-cranking pepper mill I’d found after searching in various stores.

Mary was due to sing at the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. Each year the businesses at the Market set up bleachers made to resemble an isosceles triangle. Choral singers wearing green and red holiday outfits crowded the steps and formed a living, singing, Christmas tree. Mary pulled away from the checkout line. “I’ve got to go or I’ll be late. You don’t want to see some naked cherub dangling off the tree do you?”

We made plans to meet after she was done singing, but once I finally purchased my pepper mill I didn’t want to go directly downtown.

Soon enough, I was elbows on a bar, drinking a shot of scotch with a beer chaser. It was the first of the evening and as the burning liquid raced down my throat, I felt like the night had endless possibilities. I agreed with the bartender that one set deserved a companion and slammed down another two drinks. Soon my Macy’s bag and I were headed downtown.

Once at the Fulton Fish Market, I followed the sounds of the chorus until I stood before the display. It was glorious. Mary was near the top, properly dressed in a pointed green felt hat, red collar, and elf-like green jacket, exactly like the rest of the singers. There was an outdoor café and I squeezed my way up to the bar, turning sideways so that I could fit between the white guys in suits that dominated the scene. I put my Macy’s bag on the bar, ordered a new shot and beer combo, and watched the tree vibrate with holiday spirit.

“Fun isn’t it?” asked one of the suits. As I sipped my scotch, I assessed him. He was sort of chubby with an unruly lock of hair that skittered around his forehead in the breeze coming off the bay. He looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother.

“It’s not exactly my type of music,” I said. “I’m more partial to Blues than caroling.”

“You know a place?” he asked. I nodded and pitched my drink into my mouth, swallowing hard. I was ready to go. Mary was totally forgotten, secondary to an impulsive adventure. My Macy’s bag was almost forgotten too, only rescued by the quick-thinking bartender. Moments later we were in a cab heading to Dan Lynch’s on Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street.

At Dan Lynch’s I continued to indulge, putting down more drinks. When I stepped away from my stool and walked into the gloom to go the toilet, I realized that perhaps I had drunk too much. In the women’s room mirror, my pale reflection glowed blue from the fluorescent lights. I looked like the exhausted ghost of Christmas-yet-to-be.

When I got back to the bar, my suited companion was gone. “Is he in the bathroom?” I asked the bartender.

“Went the other way,” he replied, nodding toward the door. A large African-American man leaned against a barstool, surveying the action inside and giving the once-over to any new customers.

I asked him if he had seen my suit leave. He nodded. “Got into a cab,” he said.

Here is where it gets a little dicey. I can’t quite remember what I did next. I do remember the bouncer hugging me and, since I had been so unceremoniously dumped, asking me if I needed a little company. Apparently, with total willingness, I went downstairs into the office for sex. I remember a blowup mattress, already fully inflated, being thrown down on the floor. I remember, as I lay on my back hugging his solid body with my legs, seeing cases of beer and hard liquor ringing the mattress. I remember the smell of stale ale and the scratching noises of mice scurrying around the periphery. I remember begging the man on top of me not to come inside of me.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the subway traveling back to Astoria, Queens where I lived. I looked in my lap and saw the Macy’s bag. When I peeked into the box, my pepper mill was gone. I threw the bag onto the floor, much to the disgust of another passenger who loudly complained.

How could I explain myself? I opened my mouth to try, but couldn’t. Instead I sobbed.

This essay is a follow-up to Deirdre Sinnott’s well received Video Tour of a Few NYC Bars, a short, sassy “tour de glass” of her old drinking haunts. Deirdre’s work has appeared in the special nonfiction issue of the literary magazine Cadillac Cicatrix and she is a regular book reviewer for ForeWord Magazine. Her writing appears in Catskill Review of Books, World View Forum, Blue Collar Holler, Della Donna Webzine, and in two anthologies. Much more information and other stories can be found on her website www.DeirdreSinnott.com.

By Sari Botton

Al-Anon sucked. If I hadn’t been too broke for therapy, I’d never have taken a friend’s advice to attend those awful meetings.

They were worse than the AA meetings I’d been to in support of my string of alcoholic boyfriends over the years – three, if you’re keeping count.  The AA people, when they finally hit bottom, were brave, copped to shit, took responsibility for all the nasty things they’d done when they were trashed. The Al-Anonics were victimy and whiny.  Everything was someone else’s fault.

They were addict-addicts, people who NEEDed people in the worst possible way, and yet would counter-intuitively go for only the most unavailable, most uninterested, meanest people around. I, of course, did not see myself that way – she who was addicted to alcohol not by mouth, but on the breath of a difficult man.

Eric, my friend in AA, suggested I try his meetings instead.

“I’m not an alcoholic,” I protested.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “Go lock yourself in a room with a case of Jack Daniels and don’t come out until it’s all gone. Then, go directly to AA. Do not pass Go.”

I thought about it. While I was at it, I might try writing, too. I’d always wanted to try writing drunk. I imagined it would free me from my crippling good-girl inhibitions.

I couldn’t though. I’d sworn off drinking nearly four years before, initially for Steve. I kept my vow of sobriety as I moved on to Bill, and then to Evan. How, oh how, pray tell, would these poor, poor men stay on the wagon without the support of little ole me? That right there is what kept me hooked. Look at how all-important I was to another human’s well being. What power I could have. All while appearing saintly. Trade that in for the occasional glass of wine? No way. This was much more intoxicating.

Except that the buzz never lasted long. In a matter of time, each boyfriend would return to drinking, and I’d feel like the ultimate failure. The relationship would bust apart, maybe for a while, maybe for good.

Evan and I went back and forth a few times. He had the hardest time of all staying sober, and I had the hardest time walking away from him. A hot, long-haired musician always surrounded by women, he also had difficulty keeping it in his pants. He reminded me of my grandfather, the original drunk in my life, alternately affectionate and icy, and unfaithful to my grandmother.

Pappa could put away a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label a day.  I knew because I worked for him at his Seventh Avenue garmento firm. When my cousins heard I’d started working there, they joked, “What do you do, pour scotch all day?” Well, that was one of my jobs. It started at 10:30 a.m. He’d ask me to wash a glass, grab some ice, and pour some Johhny. I did that over and over until it was time to catch the train home. I knew that smooth, perfumey, malty smell so well. I had been breathing it in since I first sat on Pappa’s lap as a little girl. It simultaneously tantalized and lulled me, from the first.

Evan’s breath was infused with Vodka rather than Scotch, but it worked. My last go-round with him could have been avoided. I thought I had finally learned my lesson, and was ready to move on, not just from him, but from the Land of the Twelve Steppers. But he begged.

“I need to do this – I need to get sober for you,” he pleaded.

“But they say it never works when you get sober for someone,” I reasoned. I also instinctively knew he wasn’t ready, and doubted whether he ever would be. There were too many other women around him who were eager to do whatever he wanted in exchange for him making them feel important and powerful, too.

“Please.” He was serious. “You just have to promise you won’t leave me if I fall off the wagon. You have to stick around and help me back on.” It was the opposite of the frequently advised tough love, but I signed on anyway.

Things were great for a few weeks. Evan was so eager to try, and he’d replaced his fixation on alcohol with a fixation on me. He wrote songs about me, wrote me love letters, thanked me for having the courage to insist he go to meetings. I was higher than a kite, strung out on his complete adoration. It was so perfect.

But right on schedule, he fell. Hard. He’d never made it longer than a month, and we were rounding three weeks. Just in time, his last girlfriend, Melissa, sent him a Christmas card. He met her for a “friendly” dinner. He called me that night, and tried to hide his slurring, unsuccessfully.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I said. “I have to get off.”

“But you promised you wouldn’t leave me if I fell. You’d stay and help me get up.”

And so I did. I went to Al-Anon, bristling as people whined. Evan was supposed to go to AA. When he stopped doing that, I started dragging him there myself, sitting with him through meetings. Then he’d sneak off. He always had to be somewhere. I knew where, although I didn’t want to know. He’d call from payphones, and the names of the bars they were situated in would come up on my caller I.D.

The drinking got worse. Now I was the enemy.

“At least Melissa will drink with me,” he argued on the phone one evening. “You’re. No. Fun.” He had this way of punctuating his word when he was sloshed, in what seemed like an effort not to seem sloshed. “If you’d just come with me to the bar…” He fell asleep mid-sentence.

Okay. I’d go with him to the bar. Maybe sitting there, sober, across from him, I could somehow appeal to him. And get him to go back to AA. And change his ways. And save his life! And save our love! Because I am just that awesome and powerful.

For a guy who clung to the mid-90s grunge look, Evan had weird taste in bars. He liked these shiny mid-town tourist traps on the ground floors of hotels that especially appealed to high-class hookers and their business-men-in-from-out-of-town clientele. One well-dressed flight attendant type came back with three different men in the course of an evening as I sat there and watched Evan down six pints of draught beer, each one followed by a shot of chilled Stoli.

I stared as he pounded, wondering what it felt like inside his brain. I was fascinated with the idea of being blissfully anesthetized, but not quite tempted to go there myself. I found myself torn between wanting to be fun like Melissa, and wanting to get serious and save him. One minute I was laughing at his stupid jokes, positioning myself just so to receive his sloppy, fragrant, Vodka-flavored kisses, and the next, I was crying, pleading, “When will you be ready to get sober again?”

“This is just a bender, babe,” he said holding me tight, alcohol fumes wafting out his mouth and off his skin, enveloping me, caressing me. “I just have to go all the way through it to get to the other side. Stay with me. We’ll get there.”

More drinking. More dragging him to meetings, after which he’d run off. Then came the confession.

He’d cheated.

I punched him in the stomach. I stopped taking his calls.

“What about me?!” He shouted into my answering machine.“I want to jump out the window and kill myself, and you won’t even pick up the phone. Would you even cry if I died?” Imagine that. With just one phone call, I could save his life. I was getting tired of being so important and powerful.

That didn’t stop me from going back and forth with him a few more times. The night he chose to stay at Melissa’s and drink instead of coming to see me, sober, it was over for me. Well, almost. First, I needed to see what all the fuss was about. I needed to know what he and Melissa felt when they were knocking back shots. It never looked fun from the outside, but if he kept wanting to do it so badly, there had to be something to it.

I went to Detour, the jazz bar across the street from my East Village tenement. I hadn’t had a vodka drink since my 18^th birthday, when a single screwdriver had yielded bed spins and a terrible hangover. But now I wanted vodka. I knew the smell. Now I wanted to know the taste. And, hey, this might be my chance to write drunk.

There was a woman singing old standards accompanied by a guitar and bass. I ordered a vodka martini. After four years of not a drop of alcohol, I sat at the bar and sipped it slowly. It went right to my head. I felt like there was a bubble on it. The edges on the sounds got softer. People seemed to be moving more slowly.

A man at the other end of the bar sent over another one for me. I smiled at him, not feeling the least bit flirtatious or amorous. This made people want each other? Sip. Sip. Sip. I felt…out of it. Removed. Numb. The appeal was lost on me.

I stumbled back across the street to my apartment. As I lay down on the couch, exhausted, I noticed my journal on the coffee table. This was my chance. Inhibitions be damned!

The next morning I woke with a crushing headache. The notebook was on the floor. I picked it up. There were only two lines:

“I drank vodka tonight,” I wrote. “I can’t feel my face.”

Sari Botton’s articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Village Voice, MORE, Marie Claire, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and many other publications, as well as on WAMC radio and NPR. Her website is http://www.saribotton.com/and she blogs at www.rosendaleramblings.com

In a recent study done in the U.K., 3,000 women were surveyed about drinking before sex. The results showed that 75 percent of women preferred to drink one or two glasses of wine before getting into bed with their husband or boyfriend. 6 percent never had sex sober.

Seems that these recent findings are tied to women’s self-esteem. Sure, drinking can definitely loosen us up before getting into bed. And it certainly can boost our self-confidence, reducing our inhibitions about our body.

What’s your feeling about drinking before sex? Does it make you feel less inhibited?

Here’s a bit more about the study:   Why Do Women Drink Alcohol Before Sex?

By Andi Rosenthal

This year, in an act of supreme irony, the Jewish holiday Tisha B’Av—a day to reflect on the destruction of two temples in Jerusalem as well as the trials and tragedies our people have endured—falls on the anniversary of my rape. I refer to that date, July 30th, as the anniversary of my death–also known, in Hebrew, as a yahrtzeit.

Not that I can–nor is it appropriate to compare—a single personal tragedy to the world-changing, horrible events that my ancestors managed to survive.  But for me, July 30^th stands as the date that my life was destroyed, and from that moment, everything from my social life to my identity became, like the Temple, a rebuilding project.

On Tisha B’Av, we read from the Book of Lamentations. Eicha, or how, is the first word in that sacred text. Notably, we do not ask the question Lama, or why we were forced to endure these acts of destruction, but how they actually happened. After 22 years, I am still not sure I can answer the question of how it came to happen that I was raped. Rather, it is the why of the equation that I have always known.  It happened because I was drunk.

At 17, I was not much of a drinker.  Sure, I’d sip the occasional wine cooler on the tenth hole of Leewood during those sweet Saturday night golf course parties, or try – and ultimately fail to finish – a beer in the back of the bus during away games with the marching band.

But on that night, July 30, 1987, I was up against two forces that I clearly didn’t know how to deal with.  The first was a drinking game called “Turtle,” which admitted one into a secret society of handshakes and code words that most, if not all, of my friends belonged to.  The second was the unexpected appearance of someone from my past – a guy from the next town, two years older, whose attentions I had shot down the previous summer.  I knew only two things about him: first, he was not the smart, preppy, college-bound, socially acceptable type that it would have been OK for me to date.  And second, that he had the most stunning blue eyes I had ever seen.

It had been tough to turn him down.  The summer before, he’d been persistent.  We had met at a house party, had shared hours of kisses in a shadowy corner of the back garden.  But after a family vacation in August, I came back determined to put a stop to it.  He was 18 and without plans for college, meaning that I’d be stuck with him staying in town—and I pretty much knew where this was going, and what he wanted.  I was a 16-year-old Catholic virgin, and brimming with a fear of sin and ideas about who and what was right for me, in spite of those entrancing eyes.

One year later, my friend Eva’s parents were out of town, and we all gathered at her house on the lakeshore.  It was also the night that my friends and I decided that, despite my lack of drinking experience, it was time for me to become a Turtle.

I can’t remember much of the ritual; only that it involved chugging cups of heavily-spiked punch followed by shot after shot of some unnamed, bitter liquor.  We stood by the lake in a circle, reciting a made-up pledge of loyalty that I could barely articulate.  But I could hear the sound of the wind on the lake, the cooing of waterbirds in their nests, and see the glittering summer stars above my friends’ smiles of approval.  In spite of the drunken haze, I felt something like acceptance.  It was July; I was in with the cool kids.I was safe.

And then he found me.

At the beginning of the night we had avoided each other.  When the hostess – unaware of our previous acquaintance – introduced us, he pretended that he didn’t know me.  I saw how his eyes looked at me with some dark emotion I couldn’t name; dismissal, hurt, betrayal?  Newly Turtled, kneeling on the tiny sand beach by the lake, I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I looked up and into those amazing eyes.  Then he asked if we could talk, inside.

I let him lead me – unsteadily – to a small room in the basement right off the patio.  I didn’t notice when he locked the door.  I remember him telling me how hurt he had felt last summer, how special he thought I was and how he couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t date him.  I don’t remember what I said in response.  I remember being kissed, feeling the room spinning and swerving.  I didn’t fight him until he undid the button on my white jeans.  I remember saying no.  I remember his hands pinning my wrists; my legs being held down by his.  I remember that he called me a stupid bitch when I started to cry.

Afterwards, I put myself back together and unlocked the door to walk back outside.  He called me back in.  Then he pushed a piece of paper into my hand.  It was his phone number, he said.  He asked me to call him.  He said we had to talk about this.  He told me that he was so, so sorry.

I found my way back out to the beach and stumbled down to the shore.  I put my hands in the lake, washing my face with the cold, clear water.  When I looked down at my reflection it looked incomplete, broken.  There was nothing; and there was something—pain and a red haze behind my eyes.  I thought about how I was a Turtle, part of a gang, but no one knew what had happened. No one heard me trying to fight.  I could never be one of them now.

I think back on myself that night, not yet Jewish—without the words of Lamentation— before I knew that I would be okay, sitting on the shore, trying to figure out how it had happened: The enemy laid hands on all her treasures; she saw pagan nations enter her sanctuary—those you had forbidden to enter.

This is what happened next: I gathered myself up to leave.  Amidst the joy of my friends who kept reminding me of my new secret status as a Turtle, I said goodbye to them all as if I would never see them again.

For the next four years, I told no one what had happened.  I never called him.  I shut down friendships that had existed for years.  I gained weight in the hope that no one would find me attractive.  I did not attend parties, and tried to avoid drunk people.  After graduate school, I became a successful marketing executive.  I found solace in books and music and writing.  I wrote some poems about that night and what happened to me that were, unexpectedly, published.  I wrote a novel. I converted to Judaism.  And with rare exceptions, I never drank again.

Twenty-two years later, as I make ready to observe the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, I, too, am still mourning, still rebuilding, still struggling to look with hope at the future—a future where I can interact normally, or even just less fearfully: with men, with alcohol, with myself.  I still page through the possibilities of that night:  if I hadn’t been drinking, if I hadn’t rejected him so harshly, if I had realized his intentions, if I had been able to fight back.  In Lamentations, I hear echoes of my own grief.

Even now, as a successful and strong person, with most of the weight gain gone and even able to have a glass of wine with dinner; sometimes, very often at night, I can’t sleep.  I think about how I’m still afraid of that loss of control, how I still wake up inside the nightmare.  How I am afraid that the baggage and sadness and scars that live deep within will prevent a good man from ever loving me.  How I still can envision, in my mind, every petal of every flower in the pattern of the wallpaper in that basement room.

Drunk, I had allowed this boy to make me into someone I never thought I would become: a victim.  Sober, I had turned my back on him for any number of reasons.  I can’t say fairly that I saw or sensed the rapist in him before that night.  I rejected him mostly because he wasn’t appropriate.  Because I was supposed to be among the best and the brightest, a girl with promise and ethics and intelligence.  A good girl who is now dead.  A girl whose yahrzeit, whose Tisha B’Av, comes around every July.

Andi Rosenthal, a convert to Judaism, is a marketing director and freelance writer living in Larchmont, N.Y.  She is a graduate of the Temple University Masters Program in Creative Writing, she lectures and teaches about issues relating to interfaith life, and she is a frequent contributor at InterfaithFamily.com. Her first novel, The Bookseller’s Sonnets, will be published in August of 2010.  Find out more about her book at www.booksellerssonnets.net or visit her blog at http://avivamicah.blogspot.com.