According to an OECD report released in November 2023, the biggest female binge drinkers in the world are ... British women. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) compared alcohol consumption across 33 countries.
The Daily Maily spread the Pink Drink Thesis, safely dismissed by the majority of people living and thinking in the 21st century, stating that the infantilised female drinker just cannot help accepting offers. Being the Daily Mail, the tabloid also hypothesised that British women drank to excess because they were "unattractive and classless".
In the scramble to explain this, the following ideas have been floated, mainly by the Daily Mail: British women are uniquely susceptible to marketing pressures, including but not limited to pink drinks, supermarket offers, bottomless brunches and nice pubs. The 20th-century settlement in drinking culture – that you can have your fill, so long as you’re prepared to do it in a smoky back room with laminated tables and carpets that smelt like the urinals – was overturned in the late 1990s, during what we might call the All Bar One revolution (that chain was founded in 1994). Pubs became airier, more chic and inviting, women went into them voluntarily, and it was noted on the profit upswing that, where women went, men went also.
In an article published in The Guardian, Zoe Williams points out the importance to consider generational differences when discussing alcohol consumption:
(...) the sociologists Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands ascribed the “feminisation of the night-time economy” by 2001 directly to the transformation of the labour market and the increase of female spending power. Arguably, the ladette as cultural artefact – the woman for whom drinking six pints, which by the way is considerably more than six units, was a direct expression of her emancipation – came into being as a way to accommodate this new, independent femininity. If you could slot it into established versions of masculinity, it would be fun and not terrifying. In a trend that has probably been noticed before, where alcohol is concerned, once we started, we didn’t stop. (via)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
photograph of Marilyn Monroe drinking champagne via
No comments:
Post a Comment