A hobbit becomes a man when he no longer drinks from half pints.
“Drinking spaces always excluded women, until fairly recently,” Clare Herrick, a geographer at King’s College London, told me. There was also the idea that “women should drink sweet sherry, or have a half-pint, not a pint.” This, she argues, came from the fear of women becoming more masculine than men, competing with men, drinking the same drinks as men. I remember experiencing the tail-end of this culture when ordering beers as a student. The barman pulled a pint for my male friend and then reached, without asking, for a half-pint glass for me.
