Is Dry January sexist? A look into the gendered politics behind Gen Z’s favourite wellness trend
In mid-January, roughly a week before Donald Trump’s inauguration celebrations and around the time that 88 per cent of people began to abandon their New Year’s resolutions, The New York Times columnist, professor, and MacArthur fellow Tressie McMillan Cottom published a piece called Dry January Is Driving Me to Drink. Some might call these fighting words—ragebait even—but I think the journalist makes a pretty prevalent point.
“The science is clear,” McMillan Cottom writes. “Abstainers are doing a good thing for their health. I am happy for them. Still, despite a marked decline in my own taste for alcohol, I am not joining them.”
The professor is the first to admit that some of her reasons are pretty “petty.” For example, she strongly resents the “cute social media campaigns,” but what disturbs her more is the question of who, exactly, benefits from one of the most successful health campaigns in recent years.
What started in 2013 as a British health initiative by the non-profit Alcohol Change UK is now a full-blown, international brand, with an avalanche of trending Instagram Reels and pop-coloured listicles to prove it. And where money and branding go, says McMillan Cottom, politics—and power—follow.
“Consumer-driven health campaigns that get this kind of traction do not happen in a vacuum,” she writes, and this particular one happens to be targeted most intensely, on social platforms especially, at women.
The gendered politics of Dry January
Following her piece, McMillan Cottom took to TikTok to further clarify her stance: “When the branding around not drinking, being sober, or going dry uses so much female gendered branding [and] messaging and links to demographically-evident concerns that binge drinking is particularly a problem for middle-class women, then it starts to feel a little sexist.”
Not unlike dieting, detoxing, and the various other goop-ified cleansing trends that go viral on any given day in the name of “health” (which, in diet culture, is often used as a synonym for perfection), the rise in popularity of Dry January has increasingly become a badge of honour for women who want to maximise their lifestyles, aka, tackle longer to-do lists, build tauter bodies, and do better mothering.
If those goals sound eerily similar to tradwife culture, well, there’s a reason for that. “A broader modern temperance movement promoting ‘clean’ living traffics in moral superiority and old racist ideas,” McMillan Cottom notes. It’s also, she observes, a sign of an era that trafficked in a “self-defeating politics of individuality.”
And therein lies the rub: Dry January may be over (until next year), but its expanding implications—in 2025, more people than ever participated—also signal a growing abstinence-versus-moderation debate that’s echoing across TikTok and, increasingly, pressuring women to drink less.
The dark side of skinny booze and Girl Beer
If Dry January seeks to control women’s bodies through abstinence, McMillan Cottom’s TikTok followers have also been quick to cite parallels in other alcohol-related brands that target women all year long.
“If you want to discuss the whole ‘skinny alcohol’ weirdness, I’m here for it,” writes one user. In a video reply, McMillan Cottom calls the category an “intersection of fat bias and alcoholism, gender, class, race.”
“Drinking for women (but not to excess) is also about men maintaining access to women,” another user replies. “They want their ladies tubercular, wide eyes, visible bones, tipsy & lost,” adds a second netizen.
Indeed, women-branded beverages aren’t going anywhere soon, especially in the wellness world. Real Housewives of New York City alumni Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl brand rose to fame more than a decade ago, but it’s still credited with why skinny Margaritas are on menus worldwide in 2025. And, it seems Gen Z isn’t immune to the trap of the “skinny” meets “girl” phenomenon.
Toward the end of Dry January, at a Whole Foods tucked next to a Lagree Pilates studio chain in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles, a massive “new product” display is stacked high, pyramid-style, with minimalist silver cans of Girl Beer. Each label screams: “LIGHT BEER, 100 CALORIES, 0 GRAMS OF SUGAR, BLUEBERRY LAVENDER.”
Upon further research, Girl Beer is a brand made by women for women that initially “set out to change the stigmas in the beer industry,” however it seems to have entirely missed the point.
McMillan Cottom drops this final drop of wisdom in her column: “Our anxiety about how institutions are failing us makes going dry feel empowering, but it does not build power.” On a follow-up TikTok, she suggests that we could all stand to pose the question more often: Does it only feel empowering, or does it build power?
Look, if sobriety is your journey, stick with it. Moreover, abstain a few days a week if you hate feeling sluggish in the morning after a couple of glasses of wine. But if you find yourself feeling pressured to reduce your drinking by a gendered social media campaign, give McMillan Cottom’s advice a go: ask why.
