Pleasure, profit and pain: Alcohol in New Zealand and the contemporary culture of intoxication

This book details the rich, complex and often contested role of alcohol in New Zealand society. It explores the three fundamental alcohol rights that continue to fight for dominance of the national drinking culture: the rights of individual drinkers to enjoy the pleasures of alcohol, the rights of society to protect itself from the harms of alcohol, and the rights of the alcohol industry to profit from the sale of a legal commodity. Historically, most of our intoxicated drinkers were adult males and drinking was typically separated from family, food and entertainment. With the sweeping social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, women and later young people, increasingly engaged with alcohol. A growing proportion of these groups have since joined men in a culture of intoxication, or binge drinking culture as it is often termed. New Zealand is not alone however, in having a culture of intoxication, with similar alcohol consumption patterns evident in many other developed nations. This book identifies the local and the global influences that have affected New Zealand society (and much of the rest of the world) since the late 1900s and details how these influences have sustained the contemporary culture of intoxication. Finally, this book will propose that to implement effective change to our national drinking culture, the rights of the alcohol industry and of individual drinkers will need to be pulled back from the liberal excesses that the 1980s and 1990s provided. A re-balancing is required in order to strengthen and sustain society’s right to protect itself from alcohol-related harm

The effect of victims’ social support on attributions of blame in female and male rape

The effects of perceived social support of the victim, victim gender and participant gender on attributions of blame in rape were examined. The impact of Attitudes Toward Gender Roles were also investigated for their mediational role between participant gender and blame. One hundred and twenty-one participants read a report of an incident of rape and evaluated the victim and the perpetrator. Two ANOVAs showed that social support and participant gender influenced blame attributed to the victim, while victim gender influenced blame attributed to the perpetrator. Socially supported victims were blamed less than unsupported victims. Men were more blaming of rape victims than women, but further analyses showed this was mediated by attitudes towards gender roles. Men held significantly more traditional attitudes toward gender roles than women, and this accounted for the effect of participant gender on victim perceptions. The perpetrator of male rape was blamed less than the perpetrator of female rape. Findings are discussed in terms of the differential attributional mechanisms that may underpin men's and women's reasoning about different types of rape

Social media platforms as complex and contradictory spaces for feminisms: Visibility, opportunity, power, resistance and activism

YesThis special issue on feminisms and social media is published at a unique point in time, namely when social media platforms are routinely utilised for communication from the mundane to the extraordinary, to offer support and solidarity, and to blame and victimise. Collectively, social media are online technologies that provide the ability for community building and interaction (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), allowing people to interact, share, create and consume online content (Lyons, McCreanor, Goodwin, & Moewaka Barnes, 2017). They include such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tinder, and Snapchat among others

The role of alcohol in constructing gender & class identities among young women in the age of social media

Research suggests young women view drinking as a pleasurable aspect of their social lives but that they face challenges in engaging in a traditionally ‘masculine’ behaviour whilst maintaining a desirable ‘femininity’. Social network sites such as Facebook make socialising visible to a wide audience. This paper explores how young people discuss young women’s drinking practices, and how young women construct their identities through alcohol consumption and its display on social media. We conducted 21 friendship-based focus groups (both mixed and single sex) with young adults aged 18–29 years and 13 individual interviews with a subset of focus group respondents centred on their Facebook practices. We recruited a purposive sample in Glasgow, Scotland (UK) which included ‘middle class’ (defined as students and those in professional jobs) and ‘working class’ respondents (employed in manual/service sector jobs), who participated in a range of venues in the night time economy. Young women’s discussions revealed a difficult ‘balancing act’ between demonstrating an ‘up for it’ sexy (but not too sexy) femininity through their drinking and appearance, while still retaining control and respectability. This ‘balancing act’ was particularly precarious for working class women, who appeared to be judged more harshly than middle class women both online and offline. While a gendered double standard around appearance and alcohol consumption is not new, a wider online audience can now observe and comment on how women look and behave. Social structures such as gender and social class remain central to the construction of identity both online and offline

Flaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity

Copyright © Antonia Lyons; Tim McCreanor; Fiona Hutton; Ian Goodwin; Helen Moewaka Barnes; Christine Griffin; Kerryellen Vroman; Acushla Dee O’Carroll; Patricia Niland; Lina Samu Print publication available from: http://www.drinkingcultures.info/Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/ video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research project explored the ways in which new technologies are being used by a range of young people (and others, including marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies impact on young adults’ behaviours and identities, and how this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori [indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European descent]), social classes and genders. We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative methodologies across three data collection stages. In total 141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups) while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture software and video recordings. Popular online material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps, and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across these multimodal datasets were undertaken. Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a crucial role in young adults’ drinking cultures and processes of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for most of the young adult participants, and social network technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures. Facebook was employed by all participants and was used before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to young people’s drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook ‘work’ to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging photos. Being visible online was crucial for many young adults, and they put significant amounts of time and energy into updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with material regarding drinking practices and events. However this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged with drinking cultures and new technologies in different ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure. Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around gender than males, and described particular forms of online identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination). Participants from upper socio-economic groups expressed less concern than others about both drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage in their own everyday practices of ‘celebritising’ themselves through drinking cultures online. Alcohol companies employed social media to market their products to young people in sophisticated ways that meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively appropriated by young people and reproduced within their Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate social interaction, construct identities, and more generally develop cultural capital. These commercial activities within the commercial platforms that constitute social networking systems contribute heavily to a general ‘culture of intoxication’ while simultaneously allowing young people to ‘create’ and ‘produce’ themselves online via the sharing of consumption ‘choices’, online interactions and activities

Transformation and time-out: the role of alcohol in identity construction among Scottish women in early midlife

Despite the increase in drinking by women in early midlife, little alcohol research has focused on this group. We explore how alcohol is associated with the construction of gender identities among women aged 30 to 50 years in the west of Scotland, United Kingdom. We draw on qualitative data from 11 focus groups (five all-female, six mixed-sex) with pre-existing groups of friends and work colleagues in which women and men discuss their drinking behaviours. Analysis demonstrated how alcohol represented a time and space away from paid and unpaid work for women in a range of domestic circumstances, allowing them to relax and unwind. While women used alcohol to construct a range of identities, traditional notions of femininity remained salient (e.g. attention to appearance, drinking ‘girly’ drinks). Drinking enabled women to assert their identity beyond the roles and responsibilities often associated with being a woman in early midlife. For example, some respondents with young children described the transformative effects of excessive drinking which allowed them to return temporarily to a younger, carefree version of themselves. Thus, our data suggest that women's drinking in early midlife revolves around notions of ‘idealised’ femininity but simultaneously represents a way of achieving ‘time out’ from traditional female responsibilities such as caring for others. We consider these findings within a broader social and cultural context including alcohol marketing, domestic roles and motherhood and their implications for health promotion

Exploring disorganized attachment style among Malay mothers in Malaysia: a study using the Attachment Style Interview

This article explores emerging themes involving disorganized attachment style among Malay Muslim mothers using the Attachment Style Interview (ASI). Analysis of the 18 mothers with disorganized attachment style (those with combined anxious and avoidant styles) utilized themes deemed important from the attachment research literature and selected based on a careful reading of the narrative cases. These include more extreme negative interpersonal experiences than found in other insecure attachment style descriptors, and included partner violence and related isolation/social exclusion. It also indicated more complex cognitive-affective disturbance including mixed or contradictory dependency patterns and both angry and fearful attitudes to others. We discuss the concept of disorganized attachment style in relation to abuse, social exclusion, and its implication for psychopathology, intervention, and treatment