Inhabiting the contradictions: Hypersexual femininity and the culture of intoxication among young women in the UK

Abstract

This paper contributes to debates on post-feminism and the constitution of contemporary femininity via an exploration of young women’s alcohol consumption and their involvement in normative drinking cultures. We view femininity as a profoundly contradictory and dilemmatic space which appears almost impossible for girls or young women to inhabit. The juxtaposition of hyper-sexual femininity and the culture of intoxication produces a particularly difficult set of dilemmas for young women. They are exhorted to be sassy and independent – but not feminist; to be ‘up for it’ and to drink and get drunk alongside young men – but not to ‘drink like men’. They are also called on to look and act as agentically sexy within a pornified night-time economy, but to distance themselves from the troubling figure of the ‘drunken slut’. Referring to recent research on young women’s alcohol consumption and our own study on young adults’ involvement in the culture of intoxication in the UK, we consider the ways in which young women manage to inhabit this terrain, and the implications for contemporary feminism and safer drinking initiatives.

“Girls will be served until you have to carry them out”: Gendered serving practices in Oslo

“…As one of the male informants in the study by Parks and Scheidt noted: " if there's no woman in the bar, I ain't going to be in that bar" (2000, p. 933). Clearly, traditional cultural associations between alcohol and gender have not disappeared (Griffin et al, 2013).…”

“…However, female drunkenness is still heavily stigmatized (Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, Mistral, & Szmigin, 2009;Griffin et al, 2013;Mackiewicz, 2012). The same is found in Scandinavian countries.…”

“…In the UK, for example, young women play an active part in a new and widespread culture of intoxication but drunken women are still regarded as unfeminine (Griffin, Szmigin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, & Mistral, 2013).…”

Significant absences: The luxury of “being less critical”

“…As I have argued elsewhere, the juxtaposition of post-feminism and the culture of intoxication produces a challenging set of dilemmas for young women (Griffin et al, 2013). They are exhorted to be sassy and independent -but not feminist; to be 'up for it' and to get drunk alongside young men -but not to 'drink like men'.…”

“…Tutenges and Sandberg view the frequent reference to "easy women [and] dumb blondes" in their participants' drinking stories as forms of "grotesque imagery" in "a world turned upside down", citing Bakhtin (1984) and Turner (1963). This misses an important point, since one of the hallmarks of contemporary culture is the juxtaposition of 'new' forms of transgression that appear to offer young women a license to transgress long-established codes of heterosexual patriarchal social relations, just as those codes and the sexual double standards they engender, remain in force (Griffin et al, 2013).…”