'If I don't look good, it just doesn't go up': A qualitative study of young women's drinking cultures and practices on Social Network Sites (2016)

Background: Young women in the UK often partake in a culture of intoxication in the pursuit of pleasure and friendship fun. Experiences of intoxication and drinking spaces remain highly gendered, and relative to men, women continue to find their behaviours in drinking spaces more constrained and scrutinised. Simultaneously, young women now express themselves via Social Network Sites (SNS), where they display drinking experiences and where they perform, negotiate and display contemporary femininities.
Methods: The research explored young women's experiences of drinking and intoxication, the use of SNS in their drinking cultures and the display of drinking practices on SNS through group interviews (n = 12) with women (n = 37) aged 16-21 from one city in the North-West of England, UK.
Results: The practice of uploading drinking photographs to SNS played an important role in displaying young women's popularity, enhancing friendship fun and belonging, and in positioning the hyper-sexual feminine look as the norm in drinking spaces. Both intoxication and the hyper-sexual and feminine look challenged traditional notions of respectable femininity, while the highly groomed feminine look itself was threatened by drunkenness. As such, young women invested much work and effort in self-surveillance and in managing the display of their drinking behaviours on SNS.
Conclusion: The dilemmas in contemporary femininity created by the juxtaposition of hyper-sexual femininity and the culture of intoxication are reproduced on SNS. Controlling and restricting certain content on SNS with the aim of achieving the 'right' feminine self-presentation resulted in a narrowly set of body oriented and behavioural feminine attributes being presented as the norm, and an overly positive online representation of young women's drinking experiences.