Pet Peeve Corner: Sober Celebrities With their Own Liquor Brands
J.Lo: a gal who can really pound them back. HUGE drinker.
One of the stressors that apparently led to what I will ALWAYS call Bennifer’s divorce was Lopez’s decision to get into the liquor business by launching her own line of pre-made cocktails she promises are lighter and healthier than what’s currently on the market.
This surprised a lot of people, such as myself, because Lopez doesn’t drink. She refrained from drinking and pursued a sober lifestyle for all sorts of valid reasons, including being the ex-girlfriend of Sean Combs, who is both an alcoholic and, until recently, a major player in the hard liquor game due to the popularity of his Ciroc vodka brand. Being around a problem drinker and all-around monster like Combs would be a powerful incentive to stay sober.
I was surprised as well because until recently, Lopez was married to Ben Affleck, whose struggles with alcoholism have long been tabloid fodder.
In a puff piece promoting the launch of Delola cocktails accompanied by images of Lopez in a bikini, the “Jenny from the Block” hit-maker talks breezily about how excited she was to serve Delola cocktails to friends and family at dinners and social events.
Get a load of this rummy. Hey rummy, bet you'd love some rum right now!
Being a recovering alcoholic, Ben Affleck can’t ever drink again without imperiling his health, happiness, future, and career. He stopped drinking for the same reason many people stopped drinking: it threatened to destroy a charmed life and ruin the relationships that were most important to him.
Now, all that Affleck is addicted to is Dunkin Donuts, which is healthier and less destructive in some ways than being an alcoholic. If I were Affleck at Thanksgiving dinner and my wife gushed about her new line of yummy premade cocktails and invited everyone other than me to indulge in their fruity deliciousness, I would not feel like my sobriety was being respected.
In the piece, Lopez shamefully concedes that she pursued a sober, alcohol-free lifestyle for decades but had cocktails now and then.
In her fifties, however, Lopez figured that it was time to really start boozing it up, to get tore up from the floor every night and establish herself as a beer pong player to be feared. She apparently forgot that two of her most important relationships are with Combs and Affleck, one of whom overcame his addiction, the other of whom will have plenty of time to dry out during his decades in prison.
Drink this. I don't!
If you were feeling cynical, you might suggest that Lopez didn’t actually feel passionately about the need for a lighter, healthier premade cocktail alternative but rather saw how much money people like Diddy were making from their liquor lines and wanted to get in on the action. There is a fuck-ton of money to be made from launching a successful liquor line.
Lopez already has a shit ton of money, but she is both human and American, which means that she’ll always want more money, even if she has to actively promote something that nearly destroyed someone she was married to until recently.
Lopez is not alone in promoting something that hurt someone very close to her. Metallica has its line of Whiskey, Blackened, despite singer James Hetfield’s public battles with alcoholism.
You could argue that Hetfield is only part of Metallica and that the other members of the band are not alcoholics, but it nevertheless feels morally dicey.
Lopez is far from the only sober celebrity with a lucrative liquor line. Despite having made songs with titles like “High All the Time,” 50 Cent does not smoke marijuana or drink alcohol. He’s seen the harm it can cause and the devastation it can wreak and wisely chose to abstain.
That wouldn’t be a big deal if he weren’t in a genre where it’s assumed that everyone smokes weed and drinks and also if 50 didn’t have his own line of liquors. 50’s very public sobriety hasn’t kept him from aggressively promoting Branson Cognac and Le Chemin Du Roi champagne on social media in every one of his posts.
Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss do not drink, but they have no problem taking the money off those who do. They’ve got their own line of Drink It Up hard liquors named after their songs. Kiss are whores. They’ll do anything for money, including sell fans something they themselves would never use.
It’s becoming increasingly common for celebrities to launch their own liquor lines regardless of their own histories with alcohol.
Of course there are plenty of people who drink responsibly and have a healthy relationship with alcohol. These are the celebrities who should be getting into the liquor business.
It can be hard to turn down large amounts of money no matter the source. “Weird Al” Yankovic famously turned down a multi-million dollar beer endorsement because he is sober and didn’t want to be a bad role model/influence on his young fans.
It takes integrity to do something like that, and that is in short supply in a city that I will always call Hollyweird.
I’m not sure why sober celebrities promoting alcohol consumption bugs me. I guess it’s the hypocrisy of trying to convince the public to buy something that you yourself never use.
This has long been a pet peeve of mine. Judging from the backlash Lopez’s liquor launch received, I’m apparently not the only one.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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