You Are What You Drink
Another 'human universal' is important here: in all cultures where more than one type of alcoholic drink is available, drinks are classified in terms of their social meaning, and these classifications help to define the social world. No alcoholic drink is ever 'socially neutral'. In England, as elsewhere, 'What's yours?' is a socially loaded question, and we judge and classify people on their answer. Choice of beverage is rarely just a matter of personal taste.
Among other symbolic functions, drinks can be used as indicators of social status, and as gender differentiators. These are the two most important symbolic functions of alcoholic beverages among the English: your choice of drink (in public at least) is determined mainly by your sex and social class, with some age-related variations. The rules are as follows:
* Working-class and lower-middle-class females have the widest choice of drinks. Almost anything is socially acceptable - cocktails, sweet or creamy liqueurs, all soft-drinks, beers and so-called 'designer' drinks (pre-mixed drinks in bottles). There is really only one restriction: the size of glass from which lower-class women may drink beer. Drinking 'pints', in many working-class and lower-middle circles, is regarded as unfeminine and unladylike, so most women in this social group drink 'halves' (half-pints) of beer. Drinking pint glasses of beer would classify you as a 'ladette' - a female 'lad', a woman who imitates the loutish, raucous behaviour of hard-drinking males. Some women are happy with this image, but they are still a minority.
* Next on the freedom-of-choice scale are middle-middle to upper-class females. Their choice is more restricted: the more sickly-sweet drinks, and cream-based liqueurs and cocktails, are regarded as a bit vulgar - ordering a Bailey's or a Babycham would certainly cause a few raised eyebrows and sideways looks - but they can drink more or less any wines, spirits, sherries, soft-drinks, ciders or beers. Female pint-drinking is also more acceptable in this social category, at least among the younger women, particularly students. Among upper-middle-class female students, I found that many felt that they had to give an explanation if they ordered a 'girly' half rather than a pint.
* The choices of middle- and upper-class males are far more restricted than those of their female counterparts. They may drink only beer, spirits (mixers are acceptable), wine (must be dry, not sweet) and soft-drinks. Anything sweet or creamy is regarded as suspiciously 'feminine', and cocktails are only acceptable at cocktail parties or in a cocktail bar - you would never order them in a pub or ordinary bar.
* Working-class males have virtually no choice at all. They can drink only beer or spirits - everything else is effeminate. Among older working-class males, even some mixers may be forbidden: gin-and-tonic may be just about acceptable in some circles, but more obscure combinations are frowned upon. Younger working-class males have a bit more freedom: vodka-and-coke is acceptable, for example, as are the latest novelties and 'designer' bottled drinks, providing they have a high enough alcohol content.
The Rules of Drunkenness - and the 'Become Loud and Aggressive and Obnoxious' Method
Another 'universal': the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. In some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia), drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures) drinking behaviour is largely peaceful and harmonious. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption or genetic differences, but is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations regarding the effects of alcohol and different social norms regarding drunken comportment.
This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. The English believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when they are given what they think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic 'placebos' - they shed their inhibitions: they become more flirtatious, and males (young males in particular) often become aggressive.
Which brings me to the third method the English use to deal with their chronic, incurable social dis-ease: the 'become loud and aggressive and obnoxious' method. I am certainly not the first to have noticed this dark and unpleasant side to the English character. Visitors have been commenting on it for centuries, and our habit of national self-flagellation ensures that not a week goes by without some mention of it in our own newspapers. Football hooligans, road rage, lager louts, neighbours-from-hell, drunken brawling, delinquency, disorder and downright impudence. These infelicities are invariably attributed either to a vague, idiopathic 'decline in moral standards' or to the effects of alcohol, or both. Neither of these explanations will do. Even the most cursory scan of English social history confirms that our current bouts of obnoxious drunken disorder are nothing new and, even leaving aside the placebo experiments, it is clear that many other nations manage to consume much larger quantities of alcohol than us without becoming rude, violent and generally disgusting.
Our beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol are certainly at least partly to blame, as they act as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you firmly believe and expect that alcohol will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. But this still leaves the question of why we should hold such strange beliefs. The notion that alcohol is a dangerous disinhibitor is not peculiar to the English: it is shared by a number of other cultures, known to the anthropologists and other social scientists who take an interest in such matters as 'ambivalent', 'dry', 'Nordic' or 'temperance' cultures - cultures with an ambivalent, morally charged, love/hate, forbidden-fruit relationship with alcohol, usually the result of a history of temperance movements. These are contrasted with 'integrated', 'wet', 'Mediterranean' or 'non-temperance' cultures - those for whom alcohol is simply a normal, integral, taken-for-granted, morally neutral part of everyday life; generally cultures that have been fortunate enough to escape the attentions of temperance campaigners. 'Integrated' drinking-cultures, despite usually having much higher levels of per-capita alcohol consumption, experience few of the 'alcoholrelated' social and psychiatric problems that afflict 'ambivalent' cultures.
These basic facts are, among my fellow cross-cultural researchers and other dispassionate 'alcohologists', so obvious and commonplace as to be tedious. We are certainly all very weary of repeating them, endlessly, to English audiences who either cannot or will not accept their validity. Much of my professional life has been spent on alcohol-related research of one sort or another, and my colleagues and I have been trotting out the same irrefutable cross-cultural and experimental evidence for over a decade, every time our expertise is called upon by government departments, police conferences, worried brewers and other concerned agencies.
Everyone is always highly surprised - 'Really? You mean there are cultures where people don't believe that alcohol causes violence? How extraordinary!' - and politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It's like trying to explain the causes of rain to some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch-doctors and rain-makers. Yes, yes, they say, but of course the real reason it hasn't rained is because the ancestors are angry because the shaman did not perform the rain-dance or goat-sacrifice at the correct time and someone allowed uncircumcised boys or menstruating women to touch the sacred skulls. Everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that drinking alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and start bashing each other's heads in.