Masculinities of drinking as described by Swedish and Finnish age-based focus groups

Abstract

This article deals with masculinities in drinking by analysing how focus groups from Sweden and Finland discuss male and female drinking in diverse drinking situations. It argues that women's strengthened independency in working life, their increased drinking in domestic and public settings, and their entrance into drinking situations that used to be male dominated have challenged the cultural domination of traditional masculinity in drinking and made drinking styles a more diverse and heterogeneous phenomenon within and across gender groups. The analysis shows that the focus groups construct masculinities in which manhood is associated with creativity, depression, violence, virility, flâneurism, nurture, homosociability, business masculinity and weakness. These masculinities oppose, interlace or intermingle with femininities and change the shape depending on the situation, drinking company and the perspective of the viewer. Their broad spectrum shows that, in Finland and Sweden, there are multiple independent and strong drinking masculinities and femininities, none of which is given a self-evident hegemony over the others. Thus, the study points out that the masculinities and femininities of today are not reducible to any single hierarchy of dominant and subordinate masculinities. For the current hegemonic masculinities, it seems to be typical that they vary locally, regionally and globally, intersect in specific ways with class, age and generation, and form multidimensional, paradoxical and tension-driven relationships with each other and with femininities.