Why You Got Cut Off at the Bar and Your Friend Didn’t

Say you and a group of friends are out at the bar on a Monday night (Mondays are, after all, the new Fridays), throwing back shots and guzzling beers and Instagramming poorly lit selfies and buying the same Prince song 14 times in a row on the jukebox. You’re all wasted, you’re all going drink for drink, and you’re all happily overindulging. You’re absolutely killing it at Big Buck Hunter. You see yourself in the bathroom mirror and can’t believe how handsome you are.

You head back to the bar for an eighth gin and tonic, and the bartender swipes his hand in front of his neck, indicating that you, my friend, have been cut off. It’s over for you. You are blacklisted, 86’d, done-zo. But then your friend—who moments before, was writhing on the floor under the booth looking for her drug bag—staggers up for her tenth vodka-soda and is immediately served. Wait, what gives?

Apparently, you aren’t imagining that something is up. A new study published in the medical journal Addiction has found that despite your overwhelming likelihood of being overserved to the point of total idiocy, you’re a lot more likely to be cut off by your bartender if you’re a dude.

Researchers sent nine very-wasted-seeming, twentysomething male and female actors on 425 different “purchase attempts” at various bars in the three biggest cities in Norway: Trondheim, Bergen, and Oslo. (It’s illegal throughout Norway to serve alcohol to anyone who appears intoxicated.) Eighty-two percent of the attempts were successful overall, but the research team broke it down to find some very interesting characteristics.

Poor lighting, for instance, was a correlating factor with likelihood of being served, which makes sense: if it’s harder to see how trashed someone is, it’s easier to give the the benefit of the doubt and pour them another stiff one.

Women were also more likely to be continuously overserved, especially when the purchase attempt took place in the wee hours of the morning (post-midnight). In fact, 95 percent of the female patron attempts were successful when they took place in poorly lit clubs and bars that were playing loud music—while only 67 percent of men were overserved when in tamer, better-lit environments.

There are a couple of different reasons why that could account for this difference in service. For one, bartenders may be less concerned about female patrons becoming aggressive or getting into fights, as bar fights are most often instigated by males. Or the bartenders might have been less able to interpret the body language of the female patrons and determined that they were way over their limits. Less optimistic, but possible, is the notion that bartenders might intentionally overserve women in order to render them more vulnerable to sexual advances.

Men, if you’re trying to get your really really really crunk on even though you’re already three sheets to the wind, you should probably just go home and fall face-first into your bed.

But if you insist on staying out, you can ask your female friends to buy the next round. As long as you help to fend off any hovering creeps.