Masculinity and Alcohol in Postfeminist Popular Culture: Teenage Boys Consume Music Videos
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Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. Masculinity and alcohol in postfeminist popular culture: Teenage boys consume music videos Samuel Lindsay 2015 Masculinity and alcohol in postfeminist popular culture: Teenage boys consume music videos A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In Psychology At Massey University, Wellington, NZ Samuel Lindsay 2015 Abstract Within a highly liberalised New Zealand market, excessive alcohol consumption by young men remains concerning for its relation to a raft of poor health and social outcomes. Various media formats construct alcohol consumption as desirable through gendered discourses, particularly the music video. Music videos are easily accessible through online platforms, are aimed at teenage audiences, and are increasingly linked to the alcohol industry. This research explored first, how masculinity and alcohol consumption are constructed within four mainstream pop music videos and second, how young teenage boys talk about these music videos after viewing them. Critical multi modal discourse analysis was employed to analyse the lyrics, music and visual content of the music videos, and discourse analysis to examine the talk of eleven boys, aged 13-14. The boys were recruited from a co-educational urban secondary school in New Zealand. The videos constructed discourses of provision, extreme consumption, and various forms of freedom and together they offered specific subject positions, including the playboy and female objectification. These findings are discussed in terms of post-feminist capitalist culture and hegemonic masculinity. The teenage participants took up the discourses constructed in the videos but in both resistant and accepting ways. They drew on discourses of enjoyment, animalistic/biological, feminist, and moral/ health discourses, and employed several discursive strategies to position themselves as critics of the popular culture that the videos represented. However, discrepancies and contradictions within the boys’ responses were found. These included the use of a ‘slut’ discourse, as well as a discourse of women’s enjoyment, to accept the objectification of women in the videos. Although the participants largely rejected alcohol as bad through a moral/ health discourse, certain acceptances of the artists’ authenticity, the videos’ visual content, and minimisations of alcohol content suggested ways in which alcohol might be accepted. The findings are analysed and discussed in relation to issues of post-feminism and hegemonic masculinity theory. Potential future directions and implications are explored, such as more sophisticated media interventions targeted at the complex ways in which powerful post-feminist and hegemonic discourses obscure their operations. i Acknowledgements Firstly, thank you to my supervisor, Prof. Antonia Lyons, for reading all my many words, and your invariably insightful comments in response. Thanks for your patience, positivity, helpful suggestions, and good humour. Your encouragement helped a lot, and I feel truly lucky to have had the benefit of your supervision. Thank you to the participants who volunteered their time and talk for this project. Your level of insight is valued; and your critical perspectives are encouraging. Sophie, thanks for being so understanding and helpful throughout the whole time. To little Rose, thanks for being an endless source of laughter and inspiration. And thanks to my family, Ali, Jasper, Alicia, Ben, and particularly Dad and Joe - for being excellent masculine exemplars! I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to anyone else that helped me get this done! You know who you are… ii Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction 1 Historical overview of alcohol in NZ 3 Vested interests 4 Youth Drinking 5 Chapter Two: Masculinity and alcohol 7 Hegemonic masculinity 7 Criticisms and modifications 8 Drinking as masculine practice 9 Context and complexity 11 Post-feminism and the heterosexual matrix 14 Hegemonic femininity 17 Chapter Three: Music videos, alcohol, and masculinity. 20 Alcohol in music 20 Do music media influence youth drinking? 22 The Youtube revolution 23 Big business 24 Genre, meaning and legitimacy 25 Power: from video to viewer, and back again 26 Summary: Chapter three 27 Stage one research questions 28 Chapter four: Critical multimodal analysis of four popular music videos 29 Selection of videos 29 The four music videos 30 Timber 30 Wild Ones 30 Sorry for Party Rocking (LMFAO) 31 Hangover 31 Analytical approach 32 Analytic procedure 34 Stage One Results 34 Provision 35 Extreme consumption 37 Freedom 40 Alcohol as facilitator of freedom 43 Alcohol as facilitator of sexual freedoms 45 iii Dominant positions created across discourses 47 The playboy 47 Women as objects 51 Gender conceptualisations: Post-feminism, new sexism, ironic lads, and hybrid masculinities 54 Post-feminism, new sexism 54 Ironic lads 56 Hybridisation: metrosexuality 58 Hybridisation: race, authenticity, and gangsta-masculinity 59 Summary: Spectacular consumption 61 Chapter five: Reception of the videos by teenage boys 64 Research approach 64 Recruitment 64 Groups and Participants 65 Procedure 67 Ethical considerations 67 Reflexivity 68 Analysis of focus group data 69 Findings 69 Enjoyment 70 Animalistic/ biological discourse 74 Feminist discourse 82 Slut discourse 84 Moral and health discourse 87 Chapter six: Discussion, limitations and future directions 92 Discussion 92 Limitations 96 Implications and future directions 97 References 99 Table 1: Focus group composition 65 Appendix A: Shot breakdown extract for multimodal analysis 115 Appendix B: advertisement for school notices 120 Appendix C: parent consent form 121 Appendix D: focus group confidentiality agreement 122 Appendix E: Parent information letter 123 Appendix F: Participant information brochure 125 Appendix G: interview schedule 127 iv Appendix H: Ethics Approval 128 Appendix I: Transcription guidelines 129 v Chapter One: Introduction “It’s not the drinking, it’s how we’re drinking” (NZ Government advertisement, 2008) Concern about alcohol abuse in Aotearoa/ New Zealand (NZ) reaches back to the early 1800s, when European whalers introduced it to the indigenous Māori population (Law Commission, 2009). Where such interactions took place, a culture of heavy drinking, violence, and vice developed, facilitated by the fledgling colony’s geographic isolation which, for a time, put it out of reach even from the long arm of the British law. In the Bay of Islands, alcohol and a state of lawlessness helped grow Kororareka’s (Russell’s) ignominious reputation as the “hellhole of the Pacific” (M. King, 2003). Charles Darwin commented upon visiting Kororareka, “There are many spirit shops and the whole population is addicted to drunkenness and all kinds of vice" (Darwin, 2001, p. 384). Approximately two hundred years on, a colourful report in the Waikato Times (2014), echoed Charles Darwin’s sentiment in describing scenes Revelers out of Control in Central City on a weekend night in Hamilton, NZ: ‘There are hundreds of males high on liquor and testosterone and females whose busts and thighs verge on explicit at every bounce […] this girl, in a leopard-skin mini-skirt, is hunched up on the curb vomiting into the gutter. Vomit has splashed onto the footpath and soiled her five-inch heel […] and a man in his forties, a builder that you'd expect to be a good citizen, king hits this guy out of the blue (Bowen, 2014). As today’s scenes of drunken revelers spilling out of nightclubs onto the streets of Hamilton, or any other urban NZ locale graphically illustrate, heavy drinking is still very much a part of NZ’s culture, inspiring much reporting on the issue and generating genuine concern about what is to be done. As seen above, this concern no longer centres exclusively on men’s drinking. Gendered discourses permeate discussions about drinking; reflected above in the differential concern with a woman’s attire that ‘verges on explicit’ and a man’s violent behaviour at the mercy of testosterone and alcohol. As the extract above also hints, the traditional and exclusive association between men and alcohol that existed in the drinking culture of pioneering Pakeha men (Phillips, 1987) has given way to increased consumption by women (McPherson, Casswell, & Pledger, 2004), forcing renegotiations of gender within drinking contexts (Willott & Lyons, 2012). Yet although women are ‘catching up’ worldwide, it is still men who engage in the heaviest alcohol consumption (Rahav, Wilsnack, Bloomfield, Gmel, & Kuntsche, 2006; White et al., 2011). For some men, dangerous health behaviour 1 such as excessive drinking is a way to construct masculinity as strong (Courtenay, 2000). These distinctions between men and women’s drinking highlight the value of continued examination into the links between masculinity and alcohol. Youth drinking culture has, in recent years, received much attention in NZ (eg., Chainey & Stephens, 2014; Fergusson & Boden, 2011; McCreanor, Barnes, Kaiwai, Borell, & Gregory, 2008; McCreanor et al., 2013; L. A. Smith, 2014). A steady stream of newspaper reports dedicated to NZ youth's dangerous and occasionally lethal encounters with alcohol indicate that many of today’s binge drinkers are young males. Although they may or may not