It's a little late in the week to be squeezing this in, but believe me when I say I have been BUSY. Like, beyond belief huddle in a corner and cry between jobs busy. So this post is my TGIF post, where I celebrate the fact that in five hours, I will be more free than I am now and at the very least, I can enjoy a good beer in the midst of the chaos that is this week.
I'll try to delve into the vast selection of marzen beers soon as I know many of you are probably anxious to begin celebrating Oktoberfest, that joyful time when the only solid foods you should be eating for 16 straight days are sausages and all liquids should be bubbly fermented gold. But this year, for me, Oktoberfest just means that October is coming entirely too soon. What happened to summer? Wasn't Fourth of July just last week?
Beside the point.
This weekend will be filled with me laying around my house drinking away this entire week... in moderation of course. So I'm sure I can get a review in there somewhere.
And to be honest, this post was going to be BEER SWAG, because I found this really well done calendar that had illustrations that resembled those of Eric Carl, and contained beer and food pairings for every month. I was going to explain that this calendar is sadly no longer produced, but with enough votes it could go back into production. You can see said calendar here.
And this is what it looks like.
But I don't really want to talk about that today.
Maybe it's because this week has been so exhausting and I'm just grumpy. Maybe some subliminal trigger occurred this week to set me off on this (slight) tangent. But I would rather post today about something else, something I'm feeling more passionate about than this calendar, awesome as it may be.
I want to talk about women and beer. Because yes, this is somehow still a topic of controversy, even in 2013.
I'd love you to keep reading, but if you don't have the time, this post can be summed up briefly.
You have a penis. Awesome. Congratulations. I don't and that is equally as awesome for me. Let's go have a beer because we both enjoy beer and can drink whatever we choose to because beverages don't have gender.
Every time I hear someone apply gender to a beverage, I cringe. This week so far I have heard people say "that's a man drink" or "that's a girly drink" at least six times, and that's on the low end because I haven't been to a bar in the past six days. And what's even more upsetting is that calling something a man's drink continues to be a positive association, whereas telling someone they are drinking a "girly" drink (but more than likely they use a more derogatory term than girly), they're making a very poor attempt at an insult. It is a painful reflection of a society that still deems everything feminine as lesser.
So when did beer become a man's beverage? After all, the oldest recorded mention of beer is from the Sumerians, who believed that beer was brought to them by the Goddess Ninkasi. In ancient Mesopotamia, brewers were almost exlusively women. Because beer was safer than water, both genders drank beer plentifully throughout history.
During the Temperance movement in America, it was women who were the driving force, but that was because of the domestic violence that resulted from the overconsumption of alcohol by their husbands during a time when divorce was just not an option.
But for almost a century we've pulled away from that, and the audience for beer has expanded as rapidly as the craft beer industry has across America. But instead of embracing that growing audience, somehow we're still stuck in a country that advertises beer exclusively for men and actively discourages women from drinking anything but low calorie cosmopolitans.
The biggest issue here is that we as women are tragically underrepresented in the beer industry. I have had numerous occasions where I have tried to have conversations with people about my interest in beer, but all I see reflected in their eyes is this:
It's an issue of respect. Unfortunately, there's still a chunk of our population that thinks that women don't belong in certain industries, beer being one of many. And not only men, but women as well, are part of this group that perpetuates the idea that women cannot be respected in the beer industry because.... well, there's just no reason for it besides the fact that society deems beer a man's beverage. That marketing tells us we deliver the beer in bikinis to our male counterparts, but never drink. And if we do drink beer, we're probably wearing a soaking wet white tank top and cut offs. And also probably heels. Or maybe cowboy boots if we're really progressive.
It is hard not to be offended by articles targeted at women to "help them understand the confusing world of beer." It's hard not to send a nasty response when I see questions on yahoo answer like "Do women drink beer?" and the comments are even more ignorant than the question itself. And then of course, there's stuff like
this, which is just sexism masked by "good intention."
But at the end of the day, I, just like countless other women, am sick and tired of not being able to discuss the estery qualities in some high-gravity beer without feeling like the man you're talking to is borderline predatory. Or possibly worse, a male "expert" who laughs off what you're trying to say because you're just a silly girl in a man's world. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stop working with and enjoying beer. It just means that we continue to have our obstacles to overcome.
So to everyone, males and females alike, please be conscious of each other's passions. We are all who we're meant to be, and we can drink whatever the hell we want. No one should be judged by the beer (or whatever drink) they have in their hand. It's time to move past this.
