If 18 is the age of adulthood then I became an adult in the era of ‘the lad‘, a time of getting sloshed, FHM, tubthumping and cheerily and cheekily refusing all and any responsibility. And if it was good enough for the lads it was good enough for the girls. They too could join us down the pub, go on the pull, drink themselves silly and, almost but not quite, be equally free of the consequences.

Fortunately the era of the lad and the ladette has passed but some are still paying the price. At aged 31 journalist Hazel Martin was told she had damaged her liver as a result of binge drinking. Except she didn’t think of it as binge drinking, just drinking.

Britain has a growing problem with alcohol and men, unsurprisingly, are most at risk. What is more surprising is the rising number of women dying from failed livers: “According to the most recent ONS statistics, from 2018, liver disease is consistently among the top three causes of death each year among women aged 39-45.”

Work backwards and you’ll find that something very unusual happened at the end of the 20th century.

Women’s drinking pretty much doubled in a really short period of time… about 10 years,” Prof Fiona Measham, a leading expert in drink and drug culture from the University of Liverpool, tells me.

Her research suggests that in the 1990s and 2000s, the alcohol industry zeroed in on female drinkers, targeting them with products such as alcopops and shots – and using feminism, female empowerment and liberation as a marketing tool.

She thinks these practices established a drinking culture in a whole generation of young women that would leave a lasting legacy.

‘I had no idea being a social drinker would damage my liver by 31’

The article has a halfhearted go at the alcohol industry for ‘gender-based marketing’ as if that isn’t everywhere. The industries though didn’t create the ideas, they just tried to find the angle to make money from it and when they had, they did.

But the article didn’t question whether included in the ideas package of ‘feminism, female empowerment and liberation‘ were some bad ideas. The freedom to copy other people’s stupidity is indeed a real type of freedom. What it is not is any kind of wisdom. There is a world of difference between ‘you can do this’ and ‘you should do this’ and the Eves of the 1990s were no wiser than the first one.

Hazel’s own reflection was, “For me growing up, alcohol felt normalised and I don’t think I was fully aware how much pressure there was to drink until I was forced to give it up.”

It’s an interesting sentence because it is devoid of personal responsibility. The culture normalised it. There was pressure to drink. I was forced to give it up. She didn’t want to start and she didn’t want to quit when she had. It’s not very empowered not liberated. When the freedom we desperately seek enslaves us we don’t really know what to do.

Yet even though she is healthier now, she mourns her loss of false freedom: “I haven’t touched a drop for nearly a year and feel much better for it – but I still mourn it in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.”

She mourns for the thing that was literally killing her.

But Hazel is not the only one who reacts and responds like this. Pretty much everyone does with something. It was the culture. There was pressure. It wasn’t my fault. As Christians we can sometimes treat sin as something we’ve been reluctantly forced to live without it, we bemoan the boring righteousness we’re now forced to live in. We mourn for the thing that was killing us.

But slavery to alcohol, to sin, to pornography, to anything other than God brings death and we have to see it for what it is and what it was doing to us. We were dead in it. The good news is that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.