It might not work out: binge drinking and the media

Dear Daily Mail. I’ve tried so hard to love you. I ignored other people when they told me you were insidious. I refused to listen when they said you were shallow, only interested in trivialising current affairs and producing thinly-veiled misogyny wearing the mask of reportage. I thought beyond your penchant for terrible puns, you were just trying to do the right thing: tell the nation the truth.

The truth, that the UK is in fact populated by knicker-flashing ladettes who – when they’re not vomiting over walls and decorating traffic lights with their comedy hen headwear – are terrorising the law-abiding menfolk with their brutal beatings and street justice. That this ‘frightening’ wave of ladette violence (up 300% in seven years) in the ’streets of no shame’ comes from our schoolgirls (the ‘worst for binge drinking in Europe’) who graduate to ‘marathon pub crawls’ in headline-hitting freshers weeks before drinking to ‘hold their own’ with male colleages in the workplace.

And that, Daily Mail, is why we can never co-exist peacefully. Not because I don’t like your ‘truth’ and the bizarre power you’ve afforded women and their tanked-up reign over the city streets after dark. Not because your selective shots of the nation turned to a circle of sambuca hell bear a sinister resemblance to the candid images of female celebrities you deride on a daily basis. No, it’s because you’ve willfully jumped on the Binge Britain bandwagon and refused to connect it with a history of over consumption combined with dubious stastistical analysis.

People get drunk. Even the Institute of Alcohol studies concedes that ‘heavy sessional intake’ and ‘drinking to get drunk’ are not a new phenomenon; it is reported ‘at least as far back as the Vikings’. This – binge – is not a new thing. Take London. It was notorious in the thirteenth century for the ‘immoderate drinking of the foolish’. In 1751, Henry Fielding remarked on the ‘new kind of drunkenness’ that sprang from gin and threatened to ‘destroy a great part of the inferior people’. Dostoevsky, that ‘everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility’ (1832). So no surprise then that in 2008 over 1/3 of adults exceed the daily drinking limit (ONS).

What the Office of National Statistics doesn’t highlight in bold with an alliterative, apocalyptic headline is that the survey format that collects drinking data has changed since its inception in the 1970s. Whereas the survey now asks about the size of wine glasses it didn’t originally. A trivial detail perhaps, but one worth factoring into judgements about drinking habits. Especially since wine consumption seems to have doubled in the last ten years.

I know, I know. Statistics just aren’t considered sexy unless they’re inflated to the size of a newly-divorced celebrity glamour model, but it’s worth mentioning that the standard error of this survey has increased between 1997 and 2008.

And the profile of these burgeoning ‘bingers?’. The kids, by statistical accounts, seem to be alright. 19% of men and women over the age of 65 conduct their heaviest drinking sessions alone. 22% of men and 14% of women over the age of 65 drink every day compared to 8% of men and 25 of women aged 16-24. And the knicker wielding women of front page fame? It seems that on the day they has most to drink, women drinkers were ‘most likely to have been drinking with a spouse or partner’. Try googling ‘posse of senior citizens wreak havoc and wreck civic amenities in happy hour gone horrible’, or ‘degenerate housewives: women in relationships drink more’. Any luck? Not even on google image?

Dear Daily Mail. Alcohol causes serious problems. Its abuse and misuse is a serious problem which causes untold damage to hundreds of thousands of people, their families, friends and loved ones in this country each year. It puts a strain on the health system and emergency services. It is not a pastime, a defence for date rape or a harmless hobby. But equally harmful is ridiculous journalism that refuses to engage with the issues and favours publishing pictures of hen parties with cellulite because that satisfies a sense of schadenfreude. If you must indulge in trite titillation, please do so responsibly and only in moderation.