Women’s Alcohol Consumption: Risk, Pleasure, and Gendered Discourses

This article, authored by Elinor Månsson and Alexandra Bogren, delves into the complex and often contradictory ways in which women’s alcohol consumption is portrayed in the media. Published in Addiction Research & Theory in 2014, the study draws on a summary and discussion of the authors’ previous research on Swedish media portrayals, specifically focusing on how these images relate to broader societal discourses of “risk” and “pleasure”.

The central aim of Månsson and Bogren’s work is to enhance the gender theoretical understanding of alcohol as a health issue. They argue that despite the media providing diverse instructions for women’s conduct regarding alcohol, both warnings and encouragements to drink are fundamentally framed within basic gendered assumptions. A key insight from the article is that the discourses constructing women’s drinking as either risky or pleasurable are not separate but are, in fact, “two sides of the same coin”.

The authors highlight a significant gap in much of the existing research on alcohol consumption and sex differences, particularly concerning women’s drinking, which often lacks a nuanced understanding of the gendered ideas and assumptions that frame and influence these practices. They adopt a poststructuralist perspective on risk, focusing on how risk is “brought into being through certain discourses, strategies and institutions”. This approach emphasizes that when health is conceptualized in terms of risk, it is simultaneously reframed as an individual responsibility, potentially blaming individuals for failing to stay healthy.

Key aspects explored in the article include:

• The Media’s Crucial Role: The mass media acts as a major source of health information, providing “technical repertoires for the conduct of conduct” and shaping selfhood and identity. However, individuals do not passively internalize these messages but actively negotiate them within complex social contexts.
• Contrasting Media Portrayals: The research differentiates between two prevalent media portrayals:
  • “Risk” Discourses (predominant in news media): Women’s drinking is problematized, often constructing them as a group at risk, despite men’s higher consumption and greater incidence of adverse consequences. Risks include biological (e.g., to fetus, hormonal effects), physical appearance, sexual (e.g., victimization, STDs), social (e.g., moral perception), and general health concerns like alcoholism. These portrayals frequently link women’s drinking to perceived gender (in)equality, sometimes framing it as a “misunderstanding” of equality or a consequence of societal inequalities like the “double burden”.
  • “Pleasure” Discourses (prevalent in women’s magazines): Drinking is presented positively, linked to well-being and a successful lifestyle. Pleasure is signified through self-indulgence, intimate “girlfriend” gatherings, and social partying. These images often normalize “reassuringly feminine” behaviors and are framed within a post-feminist discourse where consumption, including alcohol, is presented as empowerment and entitlement, under the assumption of an already gender-equal society.
• The Intertwined Nature of Discourses: The article asserts that both problematic and encouraging media portrayals of women’s drinking draw on similar underlying assumptions about gender equality and binary sex differences. The consequence of these contradictory messages is that individuals are required to navigate a “field of tensions between idealized and problematized” gendered positions.
• Recommendations for Researchers: Månsson and Bogren urge alcohol researchers to be sensitive to these contradictory discourses. They advocate for:
  • Recognizing power imbalances in judging women’s and men’s drinking by different standards.
  • Avoiding overemphasizing women’s drinking in biological terms, which can reinforce conventional, hierarchical binary gender constructions.
  • Avoiding an overemphasis on individual agency and choice in relation to drinking, especially in studies of commercial material, to prevent obscuring underlying power relations and social expectations.

In essence, the article calls for a critical examination of how societal discourses, particularly through media, shape understandings of women’s alcohol consumption, moving beyond simplistic binaries of risk versus pleasure or liberation versus victimization.

Reference:

Månsson, E., & Bogren, A. (2014). Health, risk, and pleasure: The formation of gendered discourses on women’s alcohol consumption. Addiction Research & Theory, 22(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.3109/16066359.2012.737874