Gendered Drinking and the Three Flavours of Cornetto
It is a curious thing that an alcoholic beverage can be designated as masculine or feminine, and it is something that has bothered me for a while. I work in a tiny craft beer shop in quite an affluent area of the North East, and I’m amazed how many times people ask if we stock any ‘girly drinks’ or women who visit my shop that scoff when I ask them what beer they like to drink “Well it’s not for me, of course”. It’s not just gendered to some people but the very idea that a woman might drink beer is preposterous to some.
This does not bare out in actual reality of course, I have male, female and non binary customers and there is no style of beer that is favoured by any one group. People like the sort of beer they like, it is not gendered.
Historically the notion that beer is not for women would have been confusing, in medieval times women were the ones who brewed the beer most of the time, a profession known as an ‘alewife’ that was considered a domestic chore. Beer was drunk by almost everyone, since the choices were beer or water, and most water was so unsanitary at the time that it could kill you.
Advertising is seemingly the biggest impactor on the masculine image of beer. Advertisers like to be able to define their target market, their age, gender and social class. Once an idea becomes entrenched advertisers will then target a specific group, the idea becomes self reinforcing. Because a large portion of society sees beer as ‘for men’, advertisers will make their adverts male focussed, and not try to advertise the product to women. There were a series of adverts for the Manchester beer Boddingtons that featured Melanie Sykes, among other actresses drinking the beer, except many of these ads have been produced to appeal to the male gaze, with one extreme example seeing the female drinker dressed up in S&M gear wielding a whip.
However, advertising is quite nakedly about changing people’s behaviours, advertisers want you to buy the product and people are very aware of this. They are aware they’re being sold to and not merely entertained. People can actively revel against advertising because they can sense this overt attempt to make them follow gendered patterns of behaviour. In short advertising it just too obvious to really work itself into our subconscious views.
Adverts also form only a small portion of our media consumption these days. The rise of streaming and subscription services is meaning we are seeing less and less ads than we were in years past. We spend far more time watching tv box sets and movies than we do adverts, and our guard is often lower for the effect of popular media on our behaviour and opinions. We don’t necessarily attach the same feelings to an advert as we do a favourite film or tv show, we become less critical of things we are emotionally invested in. So we need to look at British films and their depictions of drinking.
A perfect series of films to look at for depictions of Britishness and British drinking is Edgar Wright’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’. These comprise of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World’s End (2013). Am I about to ruin a beloved series of films for you by pointing out their shaky representations of gender?
Three Flavours of Unconscious Gender Bias
The films are all set in contemporary Britain and depict British drinking culture to different extents. Shaun of the Dead specifically; as the plot of the film is based around fleeing to the pub to escape the zombie apocalypse and The World’s End as it is based around going on a pub crawl amidst an alien invasion.
First of all, generally, the films are very male dominated in their casting. Each film has Simon Pegg in the lead role with Nick Frost in a major supporting role giving the beer centric films very little female representation to begin with.
Shaun of the Dead
The titular Shaun is played by Simon Pegg and his best friend Ed is played by Nick Frost. The film’s first shot is actually Shaun drinking a pint in their local pub, The Winchester. Ed hands him another pint at last orders which Shaun drains. Shaun’s girlfriend Liz is berating Shaun because they spend all their time in the pub and she’d rather do other things. From the beginning of the series, you have a male character drinking a couple of pints in the pub and his girlfriend not enjoying the activity. The pub and the pint is viewed as male and unattractive to women.
Later in the film when Shaun and Liz get into an argument it is revealed Liz had asked Shaun to switch from drinking beer to wine and is annoyed he has not done so. So now Liz is rejecting beer, it could be argued that wine is seen as a more middle-upper class aspirational beverage, but you still have the female character berating beer.
Liz breaks up with Shaun and he goes to the Winchester for a few pints with Ed to drown his sorrows. Ed and Shaun drink beer, the two female characters in the pub are shown drinking gin and tonic and whisky. The next morning the zombie apocalypse occurs and Shaun comes up with his plan to go and get Shaun’s Mum, Barbara, and Liz. With the intention of taking them to the Winchester, where he believes they will be safe. We see his imagining and narrating this plan on screen. At the end of the scene it shows Ed, Shaun, Liz and Barbara all sitting at a table in the Winchester smiling and having drinks. Ed and Shaun have pints of beer, Liz has what could be a vodka tonic and Barbara has a glass of white wine.
Not a single female character is seen drinking beer in the whole film and the only times a man drinks anything other than a pint of beer is Ed and Shaun having shots alongside their pints.
Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz is a British buddy cop movie, this time Simon Pegg plays PC Nicholas Angel and Nick Frost PC Danny Butterman. Nicholas Angel is portrayed as being an extremely straight laced and professional police officer with Danny being much more laid back. One story arc is that Nicholas orders cranberry juice and this is seen as odd by his co-characters, why isn’t he drinking beer in the pub? As Nicholas loosens up and gels to be friends with Danny; Nicholas switches to drinking lager.
One particularly telling scene is when Nicholas evicts all the underage drinkers in the village pub, and they are all boys. Not a single female underage drinker. Again, reinforcing the theme that pubs are a male space. I did my share of underage drinking when I was at sixth form college (only a few years before Hot Fuzz came out), the local pub accommodated the 16 and 17 year old drinkers and there were just as many girls in that pub as boys, this scene was not representative of reality.
Once again reaffirming the idea of the pint of beer being the default male drink and the pub being a masculine space. The singular woman in the pub? The Landlady, working behind the bar.
The World’s End
The final movie in the trilogy and the most beer focussed; as it follows five friends going back to their home town for a pub crawl. Simon Pegg this time plays Gary King, the self appointed leader of the group, Nick Frost plays Andy.
Both main characters are portrayed as having had unhealthy relationships with alcohol in their lives. Gary having gone to rehab but is still off the wagon, Andy having been sober for many years after a drink driving accident. To its credit the film does actually address the masculinisation of beer, at the beginning of the night Andy refuses to drink alcohol and orders a pint of tap water. Gary calls Andy ‘gay’ for drinking water. Andy goes on a speech about how it is actually more manly to be confident enough to drink water in a pub surrounded by people that might mock you for it, this message gets through to Gary in the end as at the end of the film he walks into a post apocalyptic pub and orders water. The point is somewhat lost though when halfway through the night, confronted with evidence that there is an alien invasion ongoing in the town, Andy downs five shots and starts drinking beer with the group.
They visit eleven pubs in total and apart from a round of the shots, the group of five men exclusively drink pints of beer.
The pubs throughout the film are shown as having overwhelming male patrons with the only notable exception being The Mermaid, the Mermaid is having a ‘school disco’. The patrons are adults dressed in school uniforms. This pub is about 50/50 male and female occupants. Drinkers are seen with ambiguous green bottles. I can’t say it’s not beer, but it could be alcopop; it’s unclear but this may be the only scene in the whole trilogy where you see a female character drinking a beer. The main characters themselves have pints not bottles in the Mermaid and no female extra is seen with a pint.
Sam, Gary’s love interest, played by Rosamund Pike turns up at various points throughout the film and her drink of choice is a vodka tonic which she has three times throughout the film, at one point in the film she meets her female friends ‘the twins’ and they are seen to be drinking what looks like coke, presumably a mixer for some spirit. It’s worth noting Sam is included with the group in many of the movie posters, as if an equal member of the group, but her role in the movie is much smaller than five male characters actually on the pub crawl. Could it be the film makers realised the overly male focus of the film and wanted to make it look as though there was a female main cast member?
There is a male character that drinks wine. The Professor, played by Pierce Brosnan, is an old schoolteacher of the gang and is waiting for them in Beehive pub. He has pints waiting for the main characters and for Sam of course he’s presumptuously bought her a vodka tonic. The Professor himself has a red wine, which in this occasion denotes his intellectualism and his upper classness.
All in all then there is maybe one scene of a women drinking beer in the whole three films. The pubs are portrayed as male spaces and the default male drink is a pint of beer. All these messages are delivered under the surface, they are not in your face like advertising – they are just quietly happening in the background.
Do I think Edgar Wright, as the director has set out with this intent throughout his films? Do I think, like advertisers, he has some sort of conscious agenda, something to be gained for perpetuating this gendered view of alcoholic beverages? Absolutely not and that is the sad thing. Edgar Wright has had the same socialisation from media that is then being repeated in his own creations. Edgar growing up will have seen the same representations of men and women on tv and film and has unthinkingly reproduced them. His female characters drinking vodka tonics, his underage drinkers all being teenage boys, his pubs filled with men because that is just obvious, it doesn’t require thought.
These kind of societal myths are insidious, they become self supporting and self replicating. Does this mean Edgar Wright is a bad man, should we shun him and boycott the films? No, not at all. They are still good films and I’ll still enjoy them, whilst being aware of their shortcomings in this area.
How do we break this chain of genderisation? How do we make alcoholic drinkers neutral ground? Well we call it out when we see it, tell your favourite writers, directors, influencers, tv producers when they fall short. If you yourself are in a position of being able to portray British culture be aware of your own biases and take the time to put through into how you’re representing gender, race and sexuality. You can promote female beer writers, female industry workers and business owners. And you can absolutely stop asking beer servers if they have any ‘girly drinks’.
