Women and Alcohol: A Study in the South of Italy

• Author: Cersosimo, G.
• Position: University of Salerno - Italy
• Pages: 9-24

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov • Vol. 5 (54) No. 1 - 2012

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law

WOMEN AND ALCOHOL: A STUDY IN

THE SOUTH OF ITALY

Giuseppina CERSOSIMO1

Abstract: This research [1] outlines the typologies and symptoms of female

alcohol addiction in Southern Italy. Among the socially existing

dependencies, female alcohol addiction has its own autonomy that goes

beyond the mere act of drinking. As the resu lts of this research show,

women’s drinking, which is often considered deviant, ridic uled (an d

stereotyped) by society, is instead a form of self-expr ession, support,

achievement and maintenance of identity. On this basis, telling and referring

to the lives of women, giving them leave to speak, means being aware of the

need of listening continuously to the silent sh out of daily life in relation to the

consequent social dynamics, keeping in mind the evident individual roots of

social crisis.

Key words: alcohol, consumption, social and cultural capital, identities.

1 University of Salerno - Italy.

1. Introduction

Women’s drinking, with particular

regard to young women, has been the

subject of many studies that have

examined such behaviour’s social and

individual drives and the will to stigmatize

it, by decontextualizing its contradictions,

thus focussing on deterrence only. So the

numerous contradictory situations in which

women choose to take to drink (ranging

from restless adolescents trying to enhance

their identity in the peers’ group to the

ageing woman who feels she has no sex

appeal anymore, on to the housewife who

celebrates her own loneliness by her

relationship with alcohol and so on) remain

hidden, as well as the normality of the

social pathway that led to such choices.

As a matter of fact, wh at goes unheeded

in many studies is the solitude of women’s

life, their isolation within their home walls,

their getting lost in a love story that comes

to its end or in a more or less desired

pregnancy, their experience of other family

members’ crises mirrored by their own

condition, their sense of time that passes

by and makes them dro p the habit of

looking at themselves in t he mirror, in a

state o f loneliness that often characterizes

the real daily life of individuals (both

women and youth).

As a matter of fact, when we talk about

organized crime, we are reckoning with an

opaque figure that does not allow us to

quantify its overall size; in the same way,

when we talk about substance abuse,

especially alcohol abuse, we find ourselves

in a situation of relative ignorance

concerning who (especially women) and

how much he or she drinks. And the fact

that this female consumption takes place

within the home walls shows that statistical

surveys are mainly conducted out of social

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov • Series VII • Vol. 5 (54) No. 1 - 2012

10

organizations, thus leaving us unaware of

what happens inside the house, in the more

or less prolonged solitude of women of

different ages, who draw their life balance

through alcohol every day, sometimes

sharing it with other companions.

Therefore in many cases the researcher,

in looking at the wealth of data on young

women and alcohol cropping up even at

the international level, should include in

his own analysis of other especially female

social realities a presumed relation with

alcohol.

We should not forget th at people like

drinking, alcohol is tasted like wine, beer

or whisky. Each addiction also contains its

own negation of the friendly substance that

changes in an ambivalent way and comes

up again and again t hus showing its now

almost inextricable b ond to that body-

person.

The study surveyed a mainly rural

territory that anyhow shows some

peculiarities typical of globalized societies’

time and space acceleration. The research

follows three main axes [2]: first, drinking

and the lexicon that represents it among

adult subjects, both women and men;

secondly, the analysis o f the impact of

social and cultural capital upon choices

both in drinking and in ways to control

unrestrained drinking; thirdly, the dir ect

investigation into the world of alcohol

abuse through women’s stories.

2. Why do they drink?

Women, together with young people, are

seen as the new category of consumers of

alcoholic drinks. Since the second post-war

period women’s drinking habits have

started to change, showing an increase in

the quantity of alcohol and in alcohol-

related problems, in ever more visible

situations due to the growing social

participation of women of all ages.

The distinctive ways in which women

drink are related to the amount of alcohol

they drink, when and where, like for

example housewives at home, working

women on their way home, young women

with the peers group. As compared to men,

who usually drink a lot in a short time [34],

women’s drinking is slower, stressed by

their own doings as well as by their

solitude, in between relations and

absences. Women drink, as soon as they

can, even modest amounts of alcohol

(spirits, ”bitters”, and even beer or wine) to

“feel oneself and not to feel oneself, to

lighten your day a bit”.

Women’s drinking, mainly but not only

in the case of adult women, has been for

long, and still is in many cases, hidden,

lonely and concealed behind the house

walls, where you can escape any social

criticism. Women’s drinking, hardly

tolerated in convivial contexts, especially

when several women drink, is usually

labelled as degrading, at other times it is

seen as suggestive of behaviours that

foreshadow promiscuity, sin, escape from

one’s own role and from self-control. From

a male perspective, while a state of light

drunkenness is welcome in a woman, as it

is synonymous with disinhibition and

“ease”, her being drunk very often arouses

embarrassment, annoyance, contempt,

unless there is a will to deviate the relation

toward sexual abuse.

As to the distance between the

individual, concrete need and the abstract

evaluation of female behaviours that such a

condition can express, Franco Basaglia

reminds us that there is a close relation

between behaviour and control: “Rules of

behaviour, b eing a set of abstract

codifications that do not mirror the real

life of the majority of people ,then act as a

checking and controlling mechanism, both

by threatening sanctions fo r those who

break the rules and by levelling and

flattening out experience” [11, p. 284].