'Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male.' Image credit: How to have sex.
Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? The energy rising lightly in your solar plexus and making your cheeks ache from smiling; and how time would drop away, so that there was only now, tonight, this? And what a thrill it all was? I still remember, just about. And I did so this week as I read various handwringing responses to the question of why British teenage girls are allegedly getting bladdered so often.
A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organisation last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th.
Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioural manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honour of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early.
Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the piss at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs. Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.
In short, few seem to remember how much fun it can be to be a drunk teenage girl (or just a drunk teenager, full stop). Unlike the discourse around male drinking, there is little mythologising of female drinking culture to leaven the relentless doom mongering. We don’t have our own Lucky Jim, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, or Bertie Wooster. At a push, we have Dorothy Parker for our finer alcoholic moments and Jean Rhys for all the others.
Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamourising cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core.
Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male. Impersonal accounts of possible causes — rising anxiety, say, or the influence of social media — miss out this crucial part of the explanation. And I’m not sure we should expect or even want anything different. William James wrote of alcohol’s power to “stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”, arguing that while “sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no, drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”. And who should be saying yes to life more than mystically minded, big-hearted, uproarious teenagers? There is nothing more developmentally appropriate. In a society where so many of them seem isolated in dark rooms, either metaphorically or literally, the odd outbreak of intensely sociable drunkenness seems like a small worry to have overall.
Of course, it would be remiss to tell a one-sided story about the joys of drink without paying due deference to the pitfalls. Here is James again, coming over all puritanical to offset his enthusiasm only moments before: “it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.” Though in retrospect the average hangovers of a teenager look fine when compared to their senior versions, and certainly not “poisoning”: put up with a nasty head for a few hours until you can face the trip into the outside world for painkillers, a pint of some lurid coloured fizzy liquid and a fry up, and your virginal liver will do the rest.
Inebriation makes you vulnerable in other ways, though — and perhaps especially so in the case of girls. The disinhibition it brings, and the subjective dislocation from time and space, spell trouble in the wrong company. Alongside the report about teenage drinking, this week there has also been a lot of discussion of Pakistani grooming gangs on X; and the two make for uncomfortable juxtaposition. Extracts circulated from court transcripts underline that alcohol and drugs were the main means used by child rapists to subdue their underage working-class victims. And yet social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity, in a way which somehow made the girls more culpable than the psychopathic men abusing them.
One social worker accused the terrified mother of an exploited 14-year-old engaged in “repeated incidents of severe intoxication” of not being able to accept that her daughter was “growing up”. A 12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house while the accompanying adult males were left unadmonished. In other words, an adultification bias was thriving; and when it comes to persistent stereotypes of fresh-faced young innocence and the “right” sort of victim, it seems that years of feminism have failed to touch the sides.
So much celebratory alcohol use is transitional, taking us from the end of one thing to the beginning of another thing: from day to evening, for instance, or from working day to weekend. In taking the drink that indicates the changeover, you are not simply marking a shift in attitude as creating one out of nothing, wrestling it into being with your intention that things will be brighter and better now. Much teenage drinking is transitional like this too: by necking the stuff, typically you indicate an intention to leave something childish behind and become your own more adventurous person for a night, whatever that means. Of course that doesn’t mean you succeed, as thousands of undignified exits from teen parties can attest. Still, the pleasure is in the attempt, and it is an agenda apparently ferociously pursued by middle- and upper-class teenagers in particular, with few lasting consequences except for the very unlucky.
One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fuelled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognise what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalised for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.
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SubscribeCheers, Kathleen.
Trebles all round!
I suspect you’ve had a few too many over the holidays Kathleen and are feeling maudlin. Oh well, god be with the good old days of a few cans with the boys, I will miss them forever.
“You’re no fun anymore.”
M. Python Esq.
A thoroughly reasonable take and a fine antidote to the puritanical, pearl clutching, nanny state enabling, vapor catching scolds. Brava!
Love it!
I was always oddly proud that Brits topped every bad league table for drink/drugs/sex etc, and I certainly contributed to it all while I lived at home. I always thought the other countries must have been rather boring in comparison, long may the drunkenness continue!
Not necessarily drunkenness BB, just the conviviality of the Great British Pub, unrivalled throughout the world.
Whilst old ‘backstreet boozers’ might be closing, their offspring: former retail premises re-fashioned into real ale / wine bars are springing up at an extraordinary rate. In addition, the Brewery Tap is the place to neck the freshest variety of life-enhancing nectar in the civilised world.
Although in London at least its increasingly difficult to find pubs with cask ales – since Covid they prefer to have kegs on tap which apparently keep better, and more popular with younger drinkers. My closest local is a lovely old pub with a real fire during winter, but more often than not has no ale.
What is this, a promotion by Inbev/Diageo? A call for a national inquiry into Pakistani abuse gangs that DPPikea ignores because the victims were white? Who cares, ‘just do it’ ‘because you’re worth it’……
I can’t make head nor tail of this comment so could you explain it again? Are you complaining because young Miss Stock enjoyed a drink (presumably older Dr Stock does too but if she’s anything like me the the spirit is willing but the body isn’t as strong as it once was)?
No, no complaint at all, why shouldn’t women have a drink, they can decide for themselves, of course. There are, as much as may be denied, consequences. Intoxication is a state of incapability that may be exploited. Such cases as inexcusable as they are will occur and must be prosecuted without bias. These incidents may be few and far between but nonetheless do and will happen (to men and women alike). The promotion (Eg InBev/Diageo – Drink responsibily!) of actions (drinking to incapability) especially where the actor may be open to exploitation because they may be inherently vulnerable , needs to be understood. To ignore the potential danger of this vulnerability is overlooked (just do it; because you’re worth it) for convenience by agencies concerned only with sales/consumption/profit.
Too much drink is too much drink no matter who’s doing it… This is not to say anyone ever deserves to get abused as a result…
And your point is?
A brief history of my own drinking:
Being given cheeky nips of whisky from my dad’s glass when I was about 8 must have been my first taste of alcohol. I though it was exciting in an unmanageable sort of way and couldn’t imagine drinking any more than that wee smudge.
Drinking the “s–t mix” (i.e. a plastic bottle containing all manner of alcoholic beverages that some friend or other had concocted by skimming off a little from our parents’ drinks bottles, but not so much they’d notice) in some dark alleyway or in the cemetery (so respectful) of the little Yorkshire town where I went to school, thinking a) it was horrid, but b) I was cool and that this was necessary to have friends. (I also remember being very, very cold as I was busting out the classic British girl move of not wearing a coat on nights out so you didn’t have to pay for the cloakroom – if you ask me this is just as worrying a trend as the alcohol consumption.)
After I could drink legally: many, MANY Archers and lemonades. While wearing many, MANY sparkly butterfly clips in my hair: this was the late 90s after all.
First 2 years of university; did not drink a drop
Erasmus year in Munich, trying desperately to understand law lectures in German and failing. Hit the drink in response, notably cocktails and Glühwein, drunk in the smart Schwabing district and on Christmas markets respectively.
Spend rest of my 20s thinking I am a hybrid of Carrie and Miranda from SATC and drank many, many Cosmos (not in Manhattan, but in Vienna which was a good approximation, I thought)
Mid 30s; alcohol tolerance drops off a cliff.
Christmas 2024, age 42: spend a whole day in bed after consuming half a glass of Belgian beer.
THE END (maybe.)
Ha! There’s no ‘bottom of the glass’ for someone whose glass is always half-full!
Something I observed while living in Scotland, though it may be a general rule, is that the more uptight and restrained a culture is most of the time, the more the need to let off steam with alcohol at the weekend.
Perhaps more relaxed cultures are happier with more moderate drinking and feel less of a need to binge.
I had an acquaintance (long dead) who had an old national service friend from the Ulapool area who he visited regularly over the years.
As he told it, the Presbyterian Churches grip on the community was akin to that of the Taliban (padlocking playground swings and no hanging out washing on a Sunday, woman expected to wear hats outside the house and so on) save that did not apparently have an issue with drink and even drunkenness was socially acceptable
Alcohol in my teenage was socially irresistible. Alcohol in my twenties and thirties was a way to have fun. Alcohol in my forties and fifties was an all pervading social lubricant. Alcohol in my fifties became something to be seriously appreciated in expensive wines. Alcohol in my early sixties worried me as I saw the lives of more friends and relatives badly damaged ( and even ended) by it and my concerns about my own possible addiction grew. In my late sixties I stopped taking alcohol . It was surprisingly easy. I found that I appreciated the whole of every day with no part muddled or obscured by alcohol. It also occurred to me that I had too little time left and too aged and neglected a constitution to risk losing any more time or experience to the confusing and limiting effects of alcohol. Now well into my seventies I wish I had made that choice in my twenties. My life has been a lucky and rich one, but I believe it might have been even better without the drug of alcohol being so present in it. I too look back on the joys of youthful discovery with a grateful smile – but I am no longer sure that alcohol was a benefit . It could have been a gross deception – as my smoking of tobacco most certainly was.
These are merely my personal reflections. Others’ lives will differ!
Perhaps it needs to be approached with more care, and more time for your body to recover, even when young.
Older people who are still getting plastered all the time is a bit sad. Not just for the health risks, but because they seem not to have found any real fulfilment. Their lives have been about work, money and booze. The work stops, and only booze is left.
In the 1970s we were lucky, off to the pub most Friday nights from the age of 15 onwards, publicans turned a blind eye in those days providing you behaved yourself, which we did, we were there to socialise not get drunk. The place was full of boys and girls from the local high schools + a few parents and even teachers. Happy days. What did I drink ? Cinzano and lemonade, G and T, Rum and Coke, cider, Pernod and blackcurrant.
It’s interesting that the tightening up of the laws around teenage drinking seems to have led to much more drunkeness. I suppose because it has made the drinking of alcohol a private affair instead of one that used to happen openly in a pub alongside adults of all ages.
There used to be a song back then, “Give me one more rule, and I’ll break it . . .”
The price of beer in the pub overtaking g the price of beer in the shop was an all round bad thing.
Ah isn’t that a nice story. And let’s all ignore what has happened. Let’s all look the other way. Well done.
What a strange article even by Unherd’s standards. A paean to teenage girls’ drinking and then a throwaway paragraph linking it to the ongoing rape-gangs- grooming scandal (carefully not mentioning Pakistanis) and then to make it even more absurd, the commentators below reminiscing about getting drunk and signing off ‘cheers.’
What a weird, previously unheard of for me, Unherd world!
This glorious piece of writing from Professor Stock is worth the year’s subscription. Made my day!
Hello Kathleen, tell me about the first time you were violently sick after drinking and the hangover that followed.
Nostalgia and alcohol have softened the brain. You can get a bigger and better high from climbing a col on a top-end carbon bike, but that requires effort and training.
Rather a strange article for Kathleen. The alcohol industry promises a lot, but fails to emphasise the dangers of its products. We can all be taken in by the glamour, especially as teen-agers, eager to become adults. It’s easy to side with anti-puritan sentiments, too: ‘what’s the harm in a little drink, after all’? Well, there’s plenty, and rather than copy their mother’s mistakes, young women would do better to learn from them. Drink isn’t going away, and does provide pleasure, but encouraging young women to ‘get bladdered’ cannot be good. Mentioning the connection with grooming gangs in a casual way also seems odd. What begins as seemingly harmless and trivial may not remain so.