Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the ways in which social factors influence how young women's alcohol issues in the United Kingdom (UK) are understood. Exploring current debates around neoliberalism, post-feminism and consumerism, together with my research on young women's articulations of femininity within the UK's culture of intoxication (Mackiewicz, 2012), I argue that femininity constitutes a hybrid of complex and contradictory discourses, which, in the context of drinking alcohol, is particularly dilemmatic for young women.

Women's alcohol consumption has been the focus of interest, concern and even hysteria for centuries. Historians tell us that there have been ‘waves’ of disquiet about women's drinking, and while intoxication is seemingly permissible for a man, it is not for a woman; not only has she transgressed the law and social convention, also ‘she [has] specifically violated the norms of being a “good woman” – the norms of appropriate femininity’ (Broom and Stevens, 1991, p 26). During recent decades, this focus has cultivated a series of ‘moral panics’ (Rolfe et al, 2009), often promoted by the mass media, of ‘the ignorance and prejudices of a world in which there persists a chronic antipathy towards the use of alcohol by women’ (Plant, 1997, p viii).

Young women in the UK today have been hyper-actively positioned within the context of a wide range of social, political and economic changes as the privileged subjects (McRobbie, 2009). By inserting and integrating women in these processes of change, various cultural aspects have, in the UK, been deemed ‘feminised’ (Adkins, 2001), including alcohol drinking. Alcohol plays a key role in UK culture, and young women's alcohol consumption has significantly increased over the last 20 to 30 years, particularly in drinking over the UK recommended weekly limits (Smith and Foxcroft, 2009).

Young women and alcohol consumption in the UK – facts and figures

In 2005, market analyst Datamonitor predicted that the amount of alcohol consumed by young women in the UK would significantly increase over the following five years, with women accounting for 38% of all drinking by 2010 (Rebelo, 2005). However, according to Measham and Østergaard (2009), the rise in young women's drinking peaked around the millennium.