Yet the writer evinces those same stereotypes in his effort to dispel them.
New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov has a point. He set out to make it, however, in the safest manner available to a Times scribe: casting a scornful look at American right’s talker class from the Olympian heights he presumes to occupy.
Right-wing talkers — Asimov settles on two Fox News personalities to make his case — have taken to sneering at the female left-wing activists overrepresented these days at protests, demonstrations, and other venues where anti-Trump dissent can catch a videographer’s eye, as “wine moms.” He objects.
The phrase, he writes, “conjures up ludicrous images — women holding babies in one arm and brandishing bottles in the other, legions of them marching forth in zombie lock step.” Your mileage may vary on that one, but Asimov’s tacit admission that the insult is effective has merit. In his view, it harkens back to “other wine-related tropes used to flag self-righteous elitism.”
And yet, the writer evinces those same stereotypes in his effort to dispel them.
“Wine may be a beverage cherished by humanity for thousands of years, but in the United States it’s a handy signifier for snobbery,” he writes with a discernable note of contempt for the beverage’s undeserved cultural reputation. Fair enough. After all, there’s a reason why pollsters ask Americans whom they’d “rather have a beer with” to measure a politician’s relatability. Beer is accessible. Wine conveys standoffishness. But so, too, does Asimov.
“President Barack Obama, whose perceived gaffes as president included wearing a tan suit in the Oval Office and preferring mustard to ketchup on his hamburgers, knew better than to enjoy a glass of wine publicly,” the author continued. That’s the sort of thing you’d only write for an ideologically homogeneous audience for whom that untruth reinforces a sense of political identity. They are unrefined, picayune, ill-mannered, and gratuitously cantankerous. We are not. It’s hard to blame the average beer-drinker for picking up on the subtle derision therein.
It is true that Obama maintained a carefully manicured public persona — one designed to mask his true self to the voting public, whom he and his handlers never trusted. For a time, Obama’s allies in the media navel-gazed over the former president’s inability to relate on a human level to his fellow Americans. “Is President Obama too rational to be likable?” read a typical lead sentence – this one via NPR – in one of many articles that set out to criticize the president’s animatronic demeanor without failing to flatter their audience (and, of course, the report’s authors).
“If real men drink, the thinking goes, they drink beer or spirits,” Asimov wrote, channeling a real albeit exaggerated critique of the wine-drinking set. In cultural products like television shows and movies, wine is “effeminate.” It “reeks of intellectuality and contemptuous Europeans.” To many, its drinkers project a sense of “smug superiority.”
There’s something to be said for this. My readers, critics of my cable news appearances, and even my loved ones have never shied away from accusing me of betraying a certain smugness. But that has little to do with my taste in varietals. Nor can I imagine caring whether my preference for a less filling, uncarbonated alcoholic beverage with a marginally higher alcohol content than beer but less than a typical cocktail says about my masculinity.
The fact that the epithet “wine mom” merited pushback in the Times at all wasn’t inspired by Asimov’s resentment over the portrayal of male wine drinkers as figures of “dubious moral character, like Olivia Pope’s father in Scandal.” The piece merited publication because the nickname sticks. And it sticks because the people to whom it applies (as the stereotype goes) are highly excitable, emotionally high-strung, and seem to have a lot of time on their hands to engage in political activities.
The “wine” part conveys frivolity on the activists’ part — a flippant disregard for the consequences of their agitation, which can be quite serious. Any alcoholic beverage will do for the purposes of this metaphor. They could just as easily be “margarita moms” or “spiked-seltzer moms.” The charge has a hint of truth to it due, in part, to the “overrepresentation of young women has become the norm in progressive activism,” as Quillette’s Claire Lehmann put it. The slur stings even more because it suggests its targets exhibit all the sound judgment of an inebriate.
You can’t blame Asimov for taking offense, even if it is more on behalf of his political allies than the product he studies and reviews. The moniker is designed to offend. But the “wine” part isn’t the problem. It would be presumptuous to speak for the activist moms or Barack Obama, but I, for one, came by my effete smugness honestly. Our good taste in libations has little to do with our political judgement, or, in the case of those who are offended by this new byword for the besotted and self-important, a notable lack thereof.