They suggest that ‘binge’ drinking is currently portrayed as a youth issue, despite evidence that single-episodic drinking is performed by various age groups, 2 highlighting a potential area of media misrepresentation of population drinking behaviours. Herring et al 17 describe binge drinking as a ‘confused concept’ that has historically been, and continues to be, defined inconsistently.
Similarly, Atkinson et al 16 found that UK magazines targeted at teenagers depicted women's drinking as more problematic than men's, and portrayed women as ‘behaving like men’ in male spaces, sexualised and highly emotional.Īs Nicholls 15 found, ‘binge drinking’, also called single-episodic drinking, is a key focus of media representations of harmful drinking “problem drinking is less commonly associated with dependence and more commonly associated with binge, harmful and hazardous drinking”. Nicholls 15 found that UK television and newspaper news associated men's drinking with violence (both as perpetrators and victims) and women's drunkenness with unfeminine and undignified behaviours, such as loss of consciousness or partial nudity. Lyons et al 14 found that both young women's and young men's magazines framed binge drinking as normative, adult and professional, with young men's magazines associating men's drinking with traditional masculine images and deriding young women's drinking behaviours. Conversely, Wood et al 13 found that UK newspaper coverage of proposed minimum unit pricing (MUP) policies presented women as being at ‘risk of harm’ from male aggression. They found that men were framed as violent, but partial responsibility for men's violence was attributed to women, who were framed as sexual predators invading traditionally male-dominated drinking environments. Day et al 12 found that UK newspapers frequently characterised women as departing from idealised notions of femininity in terms of appearance (eg, weight gain, deeper voices, loss of good looks) and motherhood (eg, reduced fertility and unborn children). Research illustrates a clear gender divide in media portrayals of drinking behaviours, with men's drinking normalised and women's problematised. Nonetheless, exploring media representations of men's and women's drinking behaviours allows us to examine how shared cultural values around alcohol are articulated and constructed, 10 which might inform efforts to improve media representations, and therefore public understandings, of harmful drinking behaviours.
9 Media content analysis cannot tell us if, and how, specific content influences audiences' understandings and behaviours, and content analysis findings must be considered with that inherent limitation in mind. 5 In light of this shift towards gender neutrality in alcohol consumption guidelines, it is timely to consider how gender differences in drinking behaviours are represented and perceived.Īs with most health issues, popular perceptions of drinking are likely to be influenced by mass media representations, 6–8 and, in turn, differences in representations of women's and men's drinking are heavily influenced by how societies regulate gender roles. 2 National guidelines have typically issued different alcohol consumption guidance for men and women, with women being advised to drink less than men, but the UK have recently joined Australia and Portugal 3, 4 in issuing the same low-risk consumption guidance for men and women, drawing on evidence that the health risks posed to each gender are similar at low-risk levels of consumption. While the gap between women's and men's excessive and harmful consumption of alcohol in the UK has narrowed in recent years, 1 men still drink more than women, 2 experience more drink-related health and social problems and face twice women's alcohol-related mortality (15.9–7.8 deaths per 100 000 population, respectively, in 2012).