Women’s changing responsibilities and pleasures as consumers: An analysis of alcohol-related advertisements in Finnish,Italian,and Swedish women’s magazines from the 1960s to the 2000s

Abstract

Since the 1960s, feminist movements have emphasized that men and women should be seen as equal in their roles as parents, breadwinners, and citizens. This conception is not confirmed by the images produced in advertising. This article presents an analysis of alcohol-related advertisements published in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish women’s magazines from the 1960s to the 2000s. The advertisements are approached as performative texts in which gender is made visible “here and now” by placing women in particular consumer positions relative to private or public spheres and by associating specific kinds of gender expectations and norms that reflect women’s shifting responsibilities and pleasures. The article asks what kind of drinking-related identities have been portrayed as desirable in women’s magazine advertisements over the past few decades and how they have changed as we move closer to the present day. The analysis reveals both continuity and variability in alcohol-related consumer identities in advertisements in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish women’s magazines. It shows that as Finland, Italy, and Sweden have developed from modern societies to late-modern societies, women’s responsibilities and pleasures have expanded from the traditional domain of the private sphere into multiple new areas. The expansion of women’s identities has occurred differently in each geographical area. This does not, however, mean that the traditional gender norms have disintegrated and been replaced by equal gender norms. Rather, it seems that traditional gender norms continue to be reproduced with varying nuances in alcohol-related advertising.

Keywords

Advertising gender consumer identities alcohol comparative study performative

Introduction

This article analyzes alcohol-related advertisements published in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish women’s magazines during the period 1967 to 2008. These countries were transformed during the period from modern societies into late-modern societies. At the same time, women’s part-time and full-time employment (Julkunen, 2010), as well as their alcohol consumption, increased in Sweden and Finland (Johansson, 2008; Mäkelä et al., 2012), while in Italy women’s employment rate remained below the European average (Istat, 2012) and their alcohol consumption decreased (Allamani et al., 2010). Overall, in the period of the study, women’s traditional identities as mothers and wives expanded to include new kinds of childcare, employee, and citizenship identities (Lovell, 2004: 38).

In the article, our starting point is that the changes in women’s societal position and in their alcohol-related lifestyles have raised women to the foreground of social and cultural transformations in general: the way women’s lifestyles have changed expressively reflects the development of gender differences, gendered responsibilities, and gendered pleasures in private and public spheres (c.f. McRobbie, 2004). By analyzing alcohol-related advertisements published in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish women’s magazines in the period from 1967 to 2008, we trace how female responsibilities and pleasures have been renegotiated in the contexts of alcohol and consumption, and with what kinds of subject positions (Törrönen, 2001), activities, and settings the responsibilities and pleasures have become associated. As Wilsnack and Wilsnack (1997) argue, gender differences in alcohol use is a strong and specific indicator of how a given society and era, generally speaking, distinguishes between male and female identities, and how these identities may change or oppose change. In contrast to news media that often represent drinking as above all a problematic activity for women (Jackson and Tinkler, 2007), alcohol-related advertising allows us to trace how women’s drinking has been positively associated in different cultures and periods with gendered responsibilities and pleasures (Törrönen, 2014).

Advertising is one of the main areas where gendered consumers are constructed and made visibly and tangibly present for readers. In this article, we approach these gendered constructions and representations as “performatives” (Butler, 1990). We consider advertisements as acts that produce gender through stylized repetition of bodily gestures and actions. With the concept of performative, we emphasize that gender identities, as well as gendered responsibilities and pleasures, are not fixed. As Butler (1990) points out, understanding gender as performative suggests that the gendered body “has no ontological status apart form various acts which constitute its reality” (p. 173). Rather, through the repetition of discursive corporeal signs and actions they, as fabrications, take contextually changing “surfaces” by being associated with specific kinds of ideals, norms and regulative ideas of masculinity and femininity. For example, in advertising, women can be repeatedly performed as characters who consume the domestic products of cooking, cleaning, and decoration by implying that they inhabit a subject position in which their responsibility is to take care of the household chores and the needs of other members of the family, or they can be performed as characters who consume free-time products by suggesting that they occupy a subject position in which they concentrate on their own personal pleasures, or they can be performed in many other subject positions.

In the article, we will look at how alcohol-related advertisements place women in domestic or public spheres and how they construct specific kinds of subject positions for women that express particular feminine responsibilities and pleasures. Furthermore, we are interested in what kinds of subject positions appear to have been acceptable and desirable in women’s magazine adverts over the past few decades and how they have changed as we move closer to the present day. A comparison of Scandinavian and Mediterranean images of drinking women and the contextualization of these images in each society’s drinking cultures and gender practices helps us to recognize some intriguing similarities and differences in women’s subject positions and to identify which of the changes in feminine responsibilities and pleasures have been culturally shared or have remained culturally specific.

In what follows, we first provide insight into the cultural values, norms, and shifts in gender ideals and practices, as well as gendered drinking cultures in the countries under study. Next, we specify our theoretical approach, describe the way the data were collected, and explain the principles of our analysis. After this we, first, introduce the typical female consumer positions, responsibilities, and pleasures that are repeatedly produced by Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising. Then we analyze what kinds of continuities and changes they have undergone over the years. Finally, we discuss and contextualize the findings.

Comparing “similar” societies and “contrasting” societies

In our research setting, Finland and Sweden represent the Nordic intoxication-oriented drinking cultures (Hauge and Irgens-Jensen, 1987; Mäkelä et al., 2012), whereas Italy, in turn, represents the Mediterranean meal-drinking cultures (Allamani et al., 2010). While in Finland and Sweden alcohol has traditionally been used to transgress everyday-life norms and routines during seasonal feasts and weekend celebrations, in Italy alcohol has for centuries been an organic part of daily nutrition, with informal norms that limit intoxication. Moreover, these societies differ by their welfare state arrangements. Finland and Sweden constitute Nordic welfare states (Esping-Andersen, 1990), while Italy epitomizes the Continental European welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The urbanization, modernization, and late-modernization processes of recent decades have affected the welfare state formation, gender roles, alcohol cultures, and drinking habits in these countries differently.

Welfare state, gender, and alcohol consumption in Sweden and Finland from the 1960s to the 2000s

In the 1960s, traditional gender roles were challenged in Sweden by feminist social movements, such as the Women’s League and Group 8. In this process, the “housewife contract,” that is, the arrangement where men work outside the home and women have responsibility for the household and childcare (Julkunen, 2010), was to be replaced by the “equality contract,” whereby men and women were considered to have equal responsibilities and freedoms as parents, breadwinners, and citizens (Hirdman, 2002). Finland in turn followed the example of Sweden. The 1970s and the 1980s saw the institutionalization of the equality contract as part of the modern welfare state, both in Sweden and in Finland (Julkunen, 2010: 92). Daycare and other extended public services were introduced to allow mothers to move into paid employment (Julkunen, 2010). In Sweden, the state was more active and a stronger actor in equality issues than in Finland. In 1980, 76% of married women were employed. The corresponding figure in Finland was 70%.

In the 1990s, Sweden and Finland were hit by economic recession, which spilled over into a crisis of the gender contract. The recession led to deep cuts in welfare state services, to countermoves in gender equality and to accelerated neo-liberal and neo-conservative reforms in the public sector (Julkunen, 2010: 117–118). At the same time, gender differences were given increasing prominence in visual culture. The hypersexual woman entered into media representations and advertising. She was “not an object but an autonomic, active, purposeful, assertive and desiring woman subject” (Julkunen, 2010: 188). The construction of the hypersexual woman was mainly a media and marketing product. Some teenagers and young women also embraced it in different ways as part of their self-representations (Julkunen, 2010: 190).

In the 2000s, the project to build a neo-liberal state continued apace in Sweden and Finland. Gender equality was still on the political agenda, but the drive had now lost some of its momentum. The performance of genders moved to a post-patriarchal state: a single gender contract transformed into many gender contracts and as the norms of following uniform gender ideals fractured, there was more space for individual choice and self-variation (Julkunen, 2010: 243). Women started to express individuality and self-variation particularly in their free time and private life by making a tighter distinction between public life and personal matters. Women continued to defend equality in public speeches and public spheres but were flexible toward expectations of equality in their private choices, responsibilities, and pleasures. In particular, younger generations seemed to consider intimate relationships, sexuality, family, home, and their own style as personal matters that allowed them to take distance from the public projects of equality (Julkunen, 2010: 281–282).

Between the 1960s and the 2000s, alcohol consumption tripled in Finland and doubled in Sweden. At the same time, women’s share of total consumption increased. In the 1960s, Swedish men drank approximately 5 times and Finnish men about 10 times more than women (Johansson, 2008: 372; Mäkelä et al., 2012). Nowadays, women consume about 30% of the total consumption in Sweden (Kühlhorn and Björ, 1998) and about 25% in Finland (Mäkelä et al., 2012). Furthermore, in the early 2000s, the level of alcohol consumption in Finland and Sweden converged with that of Italy.

In Finland and Sweden, during the whole study period, alcohol consumption was regulated by state-owned monopolies with an assumption that by restricting the availability of alcohol through state-governed retail sale stores and high prices the total consumption of alcohol could be kept under control or reduced. In the wake of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, the policy climate surrounding alcohol became more liberal. The number of pubs and bars started to increase (e.g. Johansson, 2008: 440) and a new kind of urban drinking culture began to develop in cities, influenced by continental drinking habits as well as new party cultures (Demant & Törrönen, 2011). When Sweden and Finland joined the European Union in 1994, they disbanded all of their alcohol monopolies except in the area of retail sales. In the 2000s, alcohol policies in Finland and Sweden remained areas of controversy and ambivalence, with alternating waves of liberal and restrictive alcohol policy (Törrönen, 2003).

Welfare state, gender, and alcohol consumption in Italy from the 1960s to the 2000s

Italy has been characterized as being one of the Continental European welfare state regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990) or as a Southern European “Latin Rim” welfare state, together with Greece, Spain, and Portugal (Sundström, 1999). In the 1960s and the 1970s, the Italian welfare state was built around the male breadwinner ideal, with the aim of guaranteeing a “family-wage” through the secure lifelong career of the husband (Solera, 2009: 636). The building of the welfare state was guided by the assumptions of a stable labor market, a stable family, and a well-defined gender order. The welfare state insurance schemes were developed in accordance with the “housewife contract” (Hirdman, 2002) by assuming that family life is based on a sharp division of labor among genders so that men are expected to provide economic resources for the family and women are expected to take responsibility for the household and unpaid care.

Even though the welfare state insurances were developed in line with the “housewife contract,” feminism began to spread in Italy and became a social movement by the 1970s (Bertilotti and Scattigno, 2005). Legalization of divorce in 1970, the law of 1971 that protected working mothers, and the family law of 1975 that recognized the equality of spouses in marriage, are concrete examples of the changes the feminist movement contributed to bringing forth. However, taking care of children and the household chores remained female responsibilities. Policies helping to bridge motherhood and work careers have been relatively weak in Italy, which is reflected in female labor market participation. Compared to the Nordic countries, it was low throughout the entire study period (Sundström, 1999: 194). The increasing level of education among women during the 1980s, combined with the growth of the third sector and new laws against gender discrimination in employment resulted in a new and meaningful presence of women in working life and strengthened women’s autonomy (Ginsborg, 1996). Women’s labor market participation continued to increase in the 1990s but was still below 40% by the 2000s (Toffanin, 2011: 382), compared with figures of 78% in Sweden and 73% in Finland in 2005 (Julkunen, 2010: 128).

Italy experienced dramatic changes in alcohol consumption during the study period. In the 1960s, total consumption of alcohol was still increasing, reaching about 16 L of pure alcohol per capita in 1970 (Voller, 2007: 207). Thereafter, alcohol consumption went down year on year, until in 2002 total consumption of alcohol was 7.4 L of pure alcohol per capita (Tusini, 2007: 254; Voller, 2007), falling below the consumption of Finns and being about the same as in Sweden. Thus, modernization and urbanization processes affected alcohol consumption in Italy in the opposite direction to that seen in Sweden and Finland. In contrast to Sweden and Finland, where the countryside was “dry,” in Italy alcohol was part of the diet and hard work of men in the fields. In the urbanization process, Swedes and Finns moved to a wetter environment that greatly increased their possibilities to drink. In Italy, migration from the countryside to the cities and to factory work signified a movement to drier conditions (Allamani et al., 2010; Tusini, 2007). Furthermore, the massive urbanization process did not transform alcohol’s cultural position as a nutrient in Italy: during the turbulent years, drinking maintained a strong connection with meals and was not transformed into a weekend drug of intoxication.

As a nutrient, alcohol consumption in Italy followed global food trends more than was seen in Sweden and Finland, where alcohol occupied a position of intoxicant. By the 1980s and the 1990s, the period of mass production and intense migration had greatly diminished, while the downward trend in alcohol consumption was strengthened by the middle-class expectations of a healthy lifestyle and by middle-class aspirations to express one’s identity by consuming food products – like expensive wines – that have distinctive symbolic value (Allamani et al., 2010; Tusini, 2007). In the reduction of alcohol consumption, women played an important role. As women were key figures in the food choices and meal practices of the family and constituted the main target audience for advertising messages in Italy, they acted as “cultural intermediaries” (c.f. Bourdieu, 1984) for new trends in drinking. Moreover, as higher-level education and participation in paid work also increased year by year among women, this also strengthened their position to act as cultural intermediaries for healthy and status-oriented lifestyles in Italy (see Tusini, 2007).

Advertising as performativity

Advertising is an arena where we see the continuities and changes in cultural norms widely and expressively illustrated. Alcohol consumption and alcohol-related advertisements, in turn, constitute an interesting platform from which to approach the continuities and changes in the performance of gender. As described above, during the last 40 years in Finland and Sweden, the share of women’s drinking has risen continuously. Furthermore, from a shorter perspective covering the last decade, women in Sweden and Finland stand out as a population group in which the frequency of binge drinking has grown considerably (Kühlhorn and Björ, 1998; Mäkelä et al., 2012). In Italy, in turn, alcohol consumption by women constitutes about a half of that of men (Allamani et al., 2010), and since the 1980s, the number of female drinkers has decreased (Voller, 2007). At the same time, women’s traditional identities as mothers and wives have expanded during the study period to include new kinds of childcare, employee, and citizenship identities. In what follows, we will analyze how alcohol-related advertising has retold, modified, or contradicted these changes.

Advertising does not simply mirror the norms and ideas around masculinity and femininity circulating in each society and period, but dynamically contributes to influencing and distributing them (cf. Paasonen, 2010). Through the growth of digital technologies based on mediated meanings and of media commercialization, advertising has attained a significant and widely visible cultural position in the making and reproducing of images of gender. Studies show that gender has been an obsession for advertising (e.g. Jhally, 1990). Advertising typically repeats and reiterates dichotomized gender differences by representing heterosexual gender norms as natural, ahistorical, and self-evidently desirable (Rossi, 2003: 32). Furthermore, advertising has a tendency to portray women in connection with the natural environment, family, and fashion, while men are shown in connection with technology, work, and sports (Döring and Pöschl, 2006: 173).

Women’s magazines provide an important institution and context for performing ideal types of femininities and masculinities (Inness, 2004). As explained above, our examination here of the representations of gender in drinking is based on an idea that an advertisement can be seen as an act, a performative text, that makes gender visible “here and now” (c.f. Butler, 1990: 25). Each advertisement does gender over and over again by using, citing, and imitating features, qualities, and styles of masculinity and femininity that are expected to be normative among the target groups. From this perspective, gender is not seen as a cause for behavior, but rather as an effect of the act. Since gender is not fixed, it is an attribute that can assume many different cultural forms and whose continuity requires constant representation, imitation, and repetition (Törrönen, 2014).

More specifically, these constant repetitions of gender are here elaborated on by applying the concept of subject position (Törrönen, 2001). We focus on what kinds of subject positions women are repeatedly located in within the advertisements, whether they are located in private or public domains, and what kinds of patterns of responsibilities and pleasures, female attributes, and activities are associated with these subject positions.

Collection and analysis of alcohol-related advertisements

We collected advertisements both from old established women’s magazines as well as from new popular women’s magazines aimed at younger audiences. In the first group, we included Året Runt (All Year Round), Femina, and Damernas Värld (Women’s World) from Sweden, Gioia, Grazia, and Marie Claire from Italy, and Kodin Kuvalehti (Home Magazine), Kotiliesi (Home Stove), Me Naiset (We Women), and Kauneus & Terveys (Beauty and Health) from Finland. In the second group, we included Elle, Amelie, and Cosmopolitan from Sweden, Elle, Amica, and Vogue from Italy, and Cosmopolitan, Gloria (Glory), and Trendi (Trend) from Finland. The data were collected between 2009 and 2013, using 1968, 1976, 1984, 1992, 2000, and 2008 as the primary sampling years. If there were insufficient alcohol-related advertisements in the primary sampling years, additional material was collected from adjacent years. This procedure ensured sufficient material to reveal continuities and changes in alcohol-related subject positions.

In Sweden and Finland, alcohol advertising was at one point regulated by legislation and so we have also included indirect alcohol advertising in our data. In Sweden, alcohol advertising was prohibited between 1979 and 2003. The prohibition did not involve light beer with alcohol content under 2.25%. From July 2003, matter-of-fact, moderate, and informative advertising of beverages with less than 15% alcohol content was allowed. In the beginning of 2005, the law was further specified by emphasizing that alcohol advertising should be neutral, show only the product, and include a warning text about the harms of alcohol. Furthermore, alcohol advertising was not allowed to address young people aged under 25 years.

In Finland, matter-of-fact, moderate, and informative advertising of alcohol was permitted up to March 1977. Alcohol advertising was prohibited between 1977 and 1995. At the beginning of 1995, appropriate alcohol advertising of mild beverages was permitted. The law prohibited the association of alcohol with youth cultures and positive effects. In Italy, alcohol advertising was allowed up to the 2000s. In 2001, an Alcohol Act came into force that introduced some limitations to advertising, such as prohibiting the use of images depicting teenagers’ drinking, in order to protect children and young people (Beccaria, 2007).

Using digital photography, the advertisements were copied from the magazine archives and gathering into a data set. The material comprises 1060 alcohol-related advertisements from Sweden, 2943 advertisements from Italy, and 586 advertisements from Finland (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Data.

	1967–1969	1975–1977	1983–1985	1991–1993	1999–2001	2005–2008	N
Finland	25	40	30	46	121	324	586
Italy	391	595	393	688	548	328	2943
Sweden	154	118	143	154	203	288	1060
N	570	753	566	888	872	940	4589

From Table 1, we can see how the number of alcohol-related advertisements fluctuates over time. In Finland and Sweden, the change in the number of advertisements in each period reflects the opinion climate of alcohol policy: in restrictive times, fewer advertisements are published. In Sweden, in the 1960s and in the last two decades, and in Finland from the 1990s onward, the opinion climate toward alcohol consumption has been quite positive. In Italy, where alcohol is considered an ordinary product and where alcohol-related advertising is less controlled by the state and more visible, the change in the number of alcohol-related advertisements probably reflects the fashion trends of consumer products and the position of alcohol in them.

In our analysis of the subject positions and the respective responsibilities and pleasures produced by alcohol-related advertising, we will consider three aspects. We will first identify the protagonists appearing in the advertisements. These are not necessarily persons, but may be such items as a bottle or other object, a place, scenery, interior element, and so forth (Rose, 2001). When no persons appear in the picture, the desirable subject position may be represented indirectly through a distinctively decorated kitchen, a romantic table setting, or a sun-drenched beach. When persons are represented in images, we consider their gender, age, skin color, appearance, body, facial expression, eye contact, and body movement, as well as their settings (private, public) and situations (Törrönen, 2014). Second, we pay attention to what kinds of activities, objects, responsibilities, and pleasures are associated with the main character. Third, we consider the means employed by the advertisements to draw the audience into identifying with the main protagonists and activities through the use of camera-angles, framings, and text (Kress and Leeuwen, 1996; Rose, 2001).

By looking at these three aspects in the analysis, we developed a typology of typical subject positions in our data. The typology was developed by identifying what is the most highlighted subject position in an advertisement. Even though an advertisement may evoke many subject positions for female consumers, we noticed that it usually gives prominence to one of them in relation to the activity and setting represented in the image. Therefore, it is not uncommon that an advertisement that gives prominence to the responsible consumer, for example, may use hedonistic, status-oriented, or sexual features. This strategy of evoking multiple subject positions makes the advertisement more influential in terms of consumer identification (c.f. Odih, 2007).

Our analysis of the data set begins with mapping the subject positions given to female consumers within the advertisements and to the specific kinds of responsibilities and pleasures attached to them. We then analyze what kinds of society-based continuities and changes exist in these subject positions. Our analysis produces knowledge about what kinds of female consumers have been considered as permitted, socially desirable, or dominant in women’s magazine advertisements during the study period. However, our analysis does not allow us to deduce how actual readers have internalized, modified, or opposed these consumer positions, or to speculate on what kinds of effects they have had in their lives.

The responsible consumer

One typical female consumer position that is repeatedly produced by Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising is connected to women’s traditional roles in the domestic sphere. Alcohol-related advertisements call upon women readers as female consumers to identify with the private domain and to attend to the needs of others by associating women’s responsibilities and pleasures with their duties at home, with intimate relationships, and related to the family (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013).

We can group the alcohol-related advertisements that address female readers as domestic consumers into four subtypes. In the first subtype, female consumers are addressed as cleaners and launderers in relation to products such as domestic machines and detergents, as in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1.

Grazia 1968/11.

Figure 2.

Året Runt 1968/6.

In Figure 1 from Italy (1960s), a washing machine, a champagne bottle, and two glasses act as primary protagonists. Together they suggest a theme where a particular washing machine makes the laundry work of a female consumer so easy and such a festive ceremony that she is freed up to drink champagne with her partner and focus on their joint intimate enjoyments.

In Figure 2 from Sweden (1960s), a detergent is advertised with a similar kind of promise. In the advertisement, we see the primary protagonist flying from the kitchen to drink wine with her husband or her guest(s). She is represented at two different locations in regard to social distance. The text promises the female consumer that if she uses the advertised product, the “dishes will be finished so quickly that you will practically fly off to socialize with your guests.”

In the second subtype, female consumers are addressed as cookers and hostesses with regard to products such as kitchens, fridges, napkins, freezers, snacks, starters, meals, deserts, and different kinds of beverages, with the implication that preparing and serving food for a partner or the family is a female responsibility and pleasure. Figures 3 and 4 below concretize these kinds of female subject positions.

Figure 3.

Kotiliesi 1967/3.

Figure 4.

Grazia 1984/11.

Figure 3 from Finland (1960s) shows a woman and a man who are about to enjoy a meal together; the reader is induced to identify with the woman as she is looking directly into the reader’s eye from an intimate distance, showing off her two bottles of beer and saying, “Lahden Sininen is what we drink with our meals.” In Figure 4 from Italy (1980s), we see an extended family having a meal in the grandmother’s garden. She is serving pasta for her children and grandchildren. The adults are drinking wine.

In the third subtype, female consumers are addressed as interior decorators through the promotion of products such as pieces of furniture, glassware, and furnishings, with the assumption that women have a responsibility to make the home beautiful and presentable. Figures 5 and 6 exemplify this kind of subject position of the female consumer.

Figure 5.

Femina 1976/44.

Figure 6.

Gioia 1992/5.

Figure 5 from Sweden (1970s) shows a decanter and wine glasses, with the text “Do You Love Wine?” The advert promises that Kosta and Boda’s beautiful wine glasses “make the wine bloom.” Figure 6 from Italy (1990s) shows as the primary protagonists a service trolley with a bottle of Campari and champagne, a bowl of punch surrounded by glasses, and a woman dancing with a man. The trolley is advertised as an elegant design that is indispensable in all home situations.

In the fourth subtype, female consumers are addressed as caretakers of an intimate relationship through products such as holiday trips, beverages, kitchens, furniture, and ceramics. Figures 7 and 8 below are representative of these kinds of subject positions.

Figure 7.

Trendi 2008/4.

Figure 8.

Grazia 1976/3.

In Figure 7 from Finland (2000s), a travel agency is advertising beach and city holidays for couples. The heading of the advertisement states “Time for a couple,” which, as an utterance, may refer to a couple’s own time or time for a couple of drinks in the holiday resort. In Figure 8 from Italy (1970s), we see a brandy bottle in the upper part of the picture and three father figures on the lower part of the picture. The advert invites wives to buy brandy for their husbands as a Father’s Day present.

The hedonistic consumer

Another typical female consumer position that is repeatedly produced by Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising is connected to women’s own time and pleasures, which are independent of the desires of the man and family. The following Figures 9 –11 are examples of how advertising can position female readers as hedonistic consumers (Törrönen, 2014).

Figure 9.

Damernas Värld 2000/11.

Figure 10.

Me Naiset 2006/48.

Figure 11.

Gioia 1984/9.

In the cruise advertisement in Figure 9 from Sweden (2000s), the main protagonists are three women in a whirlpool bathtub. The composition of the image brings one of the women’s hand to the foreground. The text on the hand reads, “Away on an important work trip. Back Wednesday.” The situation, the text, and the logo of the well-known cruise company in the bottom left-hand corner of the advert indicate that these women are enjoying their own party-time beyond the bounds of their everyday responsibilities and duties. The advert is persuading career women to take a break, to get away from it all for a few days with their best friends, and indulge in hedonistic bodily pleasures.

The advertisement in Figure 10 from Finland (2000s) represents lifestyle advertising that promotes hedonistic values by advertising different product categories at one and the same time, in this case Santa Helena wine and the TV series Perfect Women. In the foreground of the image, we see a wine bottle and in the background the program logo for Perfect Women. At the bottom, the text says that the program is broadcast on a commercial channel every Monday evening at 9 p.m. The wine bottle is tilting toward the program logo, implying that Santa Helena is best enjoyed while watching the program (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013).

In the advertisement in Figure 11 from Italy (1980s), we see the main protagonist enjoying her free time on a sunny beach while drinking the advertised product, Brancamenta.

The status-oriented consumer

The third typical female consumer position that is repeatedly produced by Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising is connected to status-oriented middle and upper class taste distinctions and to women’s individualization as career-oriented agents in the public space. The following Figures 12 –14 are examples of this.

Figure 12.

Femina 1984/5.

Figure 13.

Marie Claire 1984/9.

Figure 14.

Gloria 1999/3.

In the advertisement of Figure 12 from Sweden (1980s), the main protagonists are a young couple and silverware. The text says that every one of us can learn how to set a beautiful table. Almost all Swedish homes, it continues, have fine glasses and porcelain tableware, but “How many of us own some silverware?” The text refutes the woman reader’s false belief that silverware is only appropriate on special occasions; backed up by the image, the text makes the point that silverware is in fact well suited even for more everyday situations. It explains that silverware dates back to 18th-century England: it is timeless and as such “not only keeps its value, but becomes more and more beautiful as the years go by.” In this way, the advert is persuading the woman-reader to participate in the class struggle and distinguish herself from the rank-and-file by following the taste of the upper class (Törrönen, 2014).

In the fashion advertisement of Figure 13 from Italy (1980s), we see a woman dressed in a masculine suit. She is reading a newspaper in a bar with a masculine decor. The masculine markers of the image do not mean that women have lost their femininity and been transformed into men in the 1980s. Rather, the woman’s posture, her dress style, and the reading of a broadsheet newspaper in a space traditionally regarded as a male domain each refer to the women’s strength, to the fact that women can just as easily be as career-oriented as men, take an interest in world politics, and act in positions of status and power (Gripsrud, 2002: 228).

The fashion advertisement of Figure 14 from Finland (1990s) is another example of a female consumer who uses alcohol in a distinctive way: this woman is advertising expensive and sophisticated evening dresses and enjoying champagne in the saloons of the Moët & Chandon castle where Napoleon I, Austria’s Francis II, Russia’s Alexander I, the Duke of Wellington, and the King of Prussia are said to have enjoyed champagne. The woman is surrounded by luxurious and exclusive furniture and furnishings (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013).

The hypersexual consumer

The fourth typical female consumer position that is repeatedly produced by Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising relates to the hypersexual consumer. She is an eroticized woman who pleases herself, and is free and self-sufficient, in accordance with a neo-liberal message about autonomy, expressed appropriately through consumer choices (Harris, 2005: 40). She is not caring or nurturing or oriented toward mothering. Rather, having a “sexy body” is a key source of her identity (Gill and Herdieckerhoff, 2006: 498). The hypersexual consumer often gets hedonistic features, but it differs from the hedonistic consumer by overemphasizing signs of sexuality in its main characters. The following Figures 15 –17 are examples of this kind of female subject position.

Figure 15.

Elle 1992/6.

Figure 16.

Trendi 2000/2.

Figure 17.

Elle 2008/4.

In the fashion advertisement shown in Figure 15 from Sweden (1990s), the main protagonist is a woman enjoying a holiday abroad. She is pictured as a self-sufficient woman who pursues her desires with pride. Her postures and dress are erotic and sexually seductive (Törrönen, 2014).

The cider advertisement in Figure 16 from Finland (2000s) shows a woman in a flirty and erotic maid’s outfit that emphasizes the woman’s breasts, hips, and legs. Instead of watering the flowers in the background, the maid is pouring water onto a table with two bottles of cider standing on it. The text informs the reader that the cider is a “refreshingly dry novelty cider.” The watering of the table is ambiguous and can be interpreted in many ways, for instance as drawing attention to wetness as opposed to the dryness of the cider or hinting at the woman’s subversive erotic playfulness (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013).

In the fashion advertisement in Figure 17 from Italy (2000s), the main protagonists are four women who emphasize their sexuality through erotic and sexually seductive postures and dresses and who form a bodily community by touching each other.

The partying consumer

The fifth typical female consumer position that is repeatedly produced by Finnish and Swedish alcohol-related advertising relates to partying consumers. The partying consumer may have hedonistic or hypersexual features. However, it distinguishes from hedonistic and hypersexual consumers by highlighting signs that refer to collective rituals of celebration in the image. In Finland and Sweden, the partying consumers act as “party princesses” (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013), “ladettes” (Jackson and Tinkler, 2007), or “phallic girls” (McRobbie, 2007: 732). They drink as transgressively as men do, and imitate masculine features of boldness, confidence, and aggression, as concretized by the watch advertisement from Sweden (2000s) in Figure 18. In Italy, the partying consumer refers rather to civilized family celebrations where many generations are present than to the transgressive drinking of young people.

Figure 18.

Cosmopolitan 2007/1.

Figure 18 can be understood in relation to young urban women’s partying culture, which in recent decades has become an important social ritual in Sweden and Finland (Demant and Törrönen, 2011). In it, two young women and a young man appear as the main protagonists. They are represented as spending “jet set” time. The woman in the middle is looking at the woman-reader defiantly in the eye, tilting her head slightly backwards. The women and the man are dressed erotically. They are sitting closely side by side, drinking champagne and eating grapes. The rug on the floor is crumpled. On it lies an empty bottle of champagne, next to which is a glass that is almost full. The scene is one of a Roman, orgiastic, and decadent party. The transgressiveness of the situation is further underlined by the caption, which says that “for some people the sun never goes down”; they will continue to party regardless of the rhythm of daily life (Törrönen, 2014).

The cider advertisement of Figure 19 from Finland (2000s) is another kind of articulation of the partying consumer. The advert is strongly metonymic and metaphoric. As a metaphor, it represents cider consumers’ transition from everyday life to the reality of partying. It describes this transition by representing a bottle of cider, from a sociable distance, as a firework just about to be launched into the sky. As a metonym, the advertisement associates drinking with heavy, drunken celebrations. The context for partying is set by the text, “the evening is always young” on the lower right side of the image. The firework itself refers to celebration in the darkness of night (Törrönen and Juslin, 2013).

Figure 19.

Me Naiset 2000/3.

Continuities and changes in consumer positions

Table 2 shows what kinds of continuities and changes there are in our data from Finland, Italy, and Sweden in terms of the above-described subject positions. It shows that in the 1960s in Finland, alcohol-related advertising places women solely in the subject position of the responsible consumer in the private sphere. Over half of the adverts address female consumers as cookers and hostesses, 28% as caretakers of their husbands and 16% as interior decorators. In Sweden, the spectrum of subject positions is wider: 74% of the adverts locate women in the domestic field as a responsible consumer (including also the position of cleaner and launderer), but there are also adverts that promote hedonistic and status-oriented subject positions. The hedonistic position relates to an unmarried young woman. In beer advertising in particular, the young single woman is represented as a romantic nature–oriented hippy-girl (Törrönen, 2014) who concentrates on her own pleasures outside the home, sitting on the beach or in the forest, or taking a walk in a meadow either alone, in the company of girlfriends, or in a mixed group. The range of subject positions is widest in Italy: 70% of the adverts address women as responsible consumers, 12% as hedonistic consumers, 16% as status-oriented consumers, and 2% as partying consumers. In comparison to Finland and Sweden, the adverts that promote responsible consumer positions include a larger repertoire of drinks and alcoholic beverages, define more precisely the beverages in terms of their use value (aperitifs, meal drinks, or digestives), represent couples more often in leisure time settings outside the home, and show children, who are not present in Finnish and Swedish advertisements, as part of meal-drinking situations. In contrast to the status-oriented advertising in Sweden, the status-oriented consumer position in Italy is articulated in relation to fashionable clothes, in addition to luxury products. Furthermore, in Italy alcohol is advertised in relation to family celebration (the partying consumer), where alcohol marks the situations as festive.

Table 2.

Continuities and changes in the subject positions of female consumers across Finland (F), Sweden (S) and Italy (I), percentages.

	1967–1969			1975–1977			1983–1985			1991–1993			1999–2001			2005–2008
	F	S	I	F	S	I	F	S	I	F	S	I	F	S	I	F	S	I
The responsible consumer (RC)
1. Cleaner and launder		8	1		5	3		3	1		4	1	3	3			2
2. Cooker and hostess	56	36	34	50	32	37	67	22	32	48	21	32	14	23	15	6	14	14
3. Decorator	16	17	16	35	24	7	16	24	5	13	22	6	3	15	4	5	13	2
4. Caretaker of the intimate relationship	28	13	19	15	14	15	17	8	17	4	6	9	10	8	7	17	6	7
RC together	100	74	70	100	75	62	100	57	55	65	53	48	30	49	26	28	35	23
The hedonistic consumer		13	12		10	15		22	13	6	19	17	14	21	21	31	31	25
The status- oriented consumer		13	16		15	19		21	27	22	19	27	24	14	36	27	25	34
The hypersexual consumer						1			3	7	8	7	10	6	16	4	3	16
The partying consumer			2			3			2		1	1	22	10	1	10	6	2
	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100

In the 1970s in Finland, alcohol-related advertising continues to place women solely in the domestic position of the responsible consumer, through a stronger emphasis on her role as a decorator of the home. Alcohol begins to appear in advertisements for mirrors, different types of textiles, beds, pieces of furniture, and glassware. In Sweden, the responsible consumer and the status-oriented consumer maintain as strong positions as in the 1960s by maintaining the use of similar kinds of imagery. However, the identity of the hedonistic consumer has changed: the hippy-girl disappears from the beer advertising and is replaced by landscape images that show sailing ships on an open sea, thus emphasizing the feeling of freedom. This reflects a tightening of the alcohol policy opinion climate in Sweden, which no longer allows representations of young women in connection with alcohol. In Italy, advertising follows the same imagery as in the 1960s: the hedonistic, status-oriented, and partying consumers receive slightly more visibility. They also become more individualized, to the detriment of the responsible consumer. This reflects the massive urbanization process in Italy from the countryside to the cities. Moreover, a new consumer position, the hypersexual consumer, enters the advertising scene through the advertising of clothes and cosmetics.

The Finnish alcohol-related advertising of the 1980s resembles that of the 1970s: it still continues to locate women solely in the domestic consumer position, with an emphasis more on a woman’s role as a cooker and hostess than in earlier decades. In Sweden, the status-oriented and hedonistic consumer positions have strengthened and the responsible consumer position has weakened. The status-oriented and hedonistic consumer positions assume more distinctive and individualistic features in comparison to earlier decades. At the same time, wine emerges as a more prominent marker of class distinctions, which is visualized in Figure 12 above. Female drinking is also connected to career-orientation in a similar way to that seen in Italian advertising (see Figure 13 above). In Italy, as in Sweden, the responsible consumer representations have weakened but still hold dominance. In Italy, the status-oriented consumer especially has been given more prominence in advertising: she more often drinks alone in a private or public setting or with a dress that communicates refined taste. Moreover, a strengthened career-orientation, hedonism, and hypersexuality in the images highlight the individualization of women’s alcohol use in Italian alcohol-related advertising (see Figures 11 and 13 above).

In the 1990s, Finnish alcohol-related advertising representations began to diversify. The responsible consumer retains its hegemony, but women also move away from the household arena and toward the public sphere. Their images are no longer determined solely by their obligations toward an intimate relationship and the family. Female drinking becomes associated strongly with status-orientation (see Figure 14 above) and somewhat with hedonism (as in Figures 10 and 11 above) and hypersexuality (as in Figures 15 and 16 above). In Sweden, erotic values related to women’s leisure time, freedom, appearance, and sexuality gain increasing prominence in alcohol-related advertising (see Figure 15 above). As in Finland and Italy, this exemplifies the consolidation of post-feminist sensibilities regarding the female body in advertising. Otherwise, advertising continues to repeat, with an almost similar weight to that of the 1980s, the positions of the responsible, hedonistic, and status-oriented consumers. In Italy, the same trends of individualism, hedonism, status-orientation, and hypersexuality of the 1980s continue, with the difference that hedonism and hypersexuality become more visible (see Beccaria, 1999). The percentage of responsible consumer representations falls below 50% (see Table 2).

In all countries during the 2000s, the responsible consumer loses its hegemonic position in alcohol-related advertising. At the same time, advertising becomes more playful (see Figures 16 –19 above). Besides continuing to promote individuality, advertising also starts to enact different kinds of female and mixed group “communitas” (Turner, 1969), which are shown to experience liminal or intensive time together (see Figures 9, 17 and 18 above) in opposition to routinized everyday-life drinking situations. In Finland and Sweden, the representations of “communitas” are more hedonism- or partying-oriented (see Figures 9 and 18 above) in contrast to Italy where they are more status-oriented and eccentric (see Figure 17 above). In Finland, the hedonistic and status-oriented consumer positions achieve as strong a presence as the responsible consumer. Furthermore, a new position of partying consumer (exemplified by Figure 18) receives prominence especially at the turn of the century. In Sweden, the picture is similar: the hedonistic, status-oriented, and responsible consumers are prominent positions. However, the partying consumer does not receive the same visibility as it does in Finland. In Italy, in turn, the status-oriented consumer position has the most dominant place. Italian advertising highlights more eccentric individuals and peculiar forms of “communitas” (e.g. Figure 17 above) than that of Finnish and Swedish advertisements and also repeats more frequently the position of the hypersexual consumer.

Conclusion

Our analysis reveals fascinating continuities, changes, and tensions in the subject positions of alcohol-related advertising in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish women’s magazines from the 1960s to the present day. It is interesting that the identity of women as the responsible consumer continues to have a prominent presence up to the present day. By associating women’s responsibilities and pleasures with their duties at home, intimate relationships, and the family, the alcohol-related advertisements call upon women to identify again and again with the private domain and to attend to the needs of others. Up to the 1990s, the responsible consumer occupied a hegemonic position in all of the countries studied, even though in Italy and Sweden the hedonistic consumer and the status-oriented consumer were also given noteworthy visibility.

In Italy, where alcohol has long been part of the everyday life of both genders, the spectrum of possible female subject positions is wider initially than in Finland and Sweden. In Finland, where women consumed the least alcohol in relation to men in the beginning of the period of study in comparison to Sweden and Italy, there is the least variation also in the subject positions of alcohol-related advertising. Up to the 1990s, Finnish advertising had positioned women solely inside the private sphere: connected with domestic responsibilities and pleasures. This reflects the strength of the peasant culture, the persistence of the “housewife contract,” and the dominance of masculine drinking norms in Finland. From the start of the study period, Sweden was a much more modern and urbanized society in contrast to Finland, where over half of the Finnish population still lived in the countryside in the 1960s. A critical debate on gender roles started in Sweden in the 1950s, while it did not start until the mid-1960s in Finland, and even then on a smaller scale (Rossi, 2010: 26). Although Finland subsequently followed the Swedish example regarding gender issues, Sweden was more definite in promoting gender equality through various welfare state measures, and equality stayed more firmly on the political agenda (Julkunen, 2010: 89–93). All these factors probably clarify why drinking women were represented between the 1960s and the 1980s as more independent, hedonistic, distinctive, and career-oriented in alcohol-related advertising in Sweden than in Finland. In Italy, in turn, drinking has for a long time been part of normal female culture and self-expression. It was no surprise then that the widest repertoire of possible female drinking positions was found in Italy at the start of the study period. On the other hand, since in Italy drinking has not been surrounded by such an extensive and politically influential feminist discourse, it probably does not connote so strongly with equality issues as it does in Sweden and Finland. The stronger presence of a status-oriented consumer as well as hypersexual imagery in Italian alcohol-related advertising also lends credibility to this interpretation.

The breakdown of the hegemony of the responsible consumer during the 1990s and the 2000s and the strengthening of other consumer positions alongside it are indicative of the development, establishment, and recognition of parallel, mutually competitive femininities as culturally acceptable modes of being a woman. This does not mean, however, that the genders have become more equal year after year, or that the home and private domain have become gender neutral. Rather, there seem to exist many contradictory normative conceptions of the responsibilities and pleasures of women today (Griffin et al., 2013). Furthermore, even in their new subject positions, women are still associated with stereotypical gender attributes, as actors who build their identities on the stages of their private life and leisure time. These are fashion-conscious, successful, flexible, slim, middle-class women who want new consumer goods and who are increasingly relaxed about being the focus of the male gaze (Julkunen, 2010: 242). This kind of intensification of male gaze is problematic. By giving emphasis to the comparison between oneself and certain kinds of sexy slim bodies, it does not empower women as multi-dimensional whole subjects. Indeed, as Finland, Italy, and Sweden have turned into modern and late-modern societies, and advertising as a performative act has also started to repeat “progressive” gender representations, this has not done away with traditional gender norms and expectations. Rather, it seems that the traditional gender order, norms, and hierarchies are reproduced over and over again in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising with the stubbornness of a hydra with many heads: “When you cut one head off, it grows another” (Julkunen, 2010: 225).

The recent emergence of subject positions that emphasize specific consumer responsibilities and pleasures has been interwoven with middle-class aspirations and reflects the spread of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism in Europe since the late 1980s. In Italy, the status-oriented consumer and hypersexual consumer positions receive more attention than in Finland and Sweden and drinking is associated more consistently with meal situations. In Finland and Sweden, the partying consumer was given more visibility than in Italy. This opposition between party drinking and meal drinking continues to reproduce the old traditional difference between moderate and intoxication-oriented drinking cultures. Finland in particular appears in the imagery of advertising to be the most intoxication-oriented region. In Sweden, the partying consumer is in a less prominent position, which perhaps mirrors the fact that wine drinking has become a much more widespread practice in Sweden than in Finland (Johansson, 2008; Mäkelä et al., 2012). The recent dominance of the status-oriented consumer in alcohol-related advertising in Italy implies that there it is more acceptable to show superiority to others than in Scandinavia. Even though the neo-liberal and neo-conservative discourses of the 1990s and the 2000s have made the status-oriented consumer more seductive also in Finland and Sweden, its looks as if the long and visible presence of the equality discourse has tempered it so that it has not been able to attain such a dominating position as in Italy.

Our analysis shows that in the context of alcohol and gender, advertising appears as a conservative institution that keeps on performing women in the subject positions of consumer, which powerfully repeats and reproduces traditional gender order and hierarchies, and in which female responsibilities and pleasures contradict publicly held beliefs and policies surrounding gender equality. Our finding suggests that the public policies and services that have successfully enhanced gender equality in terms of allowing women to move into paid employment have not been successful in terms of making gender representations, responsibilities, and pleasures less hierarchic. The persistence of gendered stereotypes is not only evident in advertising, they also have a strong foothold in working life and private life. For example, occupations are still strongly segregated such that female work is handling the cleaning, cooking, and caring and male work as handling machinery, money, and management (cf. Perrons, 2005), while in dual-earner households, women still take more responsibility than men for planning and carrying out domestic labor and parenting (Lyonette and Crompton, 2015).

The spectrum of gender representations we have identified in our analysis may be regarded as quite narrow socially, culturally, and sexually. Many important female subject positions that are lived through in other contexts and practices of society do not appear in Finnish, Italian, and Swedish alcohol-related advertising at all, or they receive only very little attention. It is significant that even though women’s employment has increased in all the study countries, it is rare that women appear in the subject position of breadwinner in the alcohol-related advertisements published in women’s magazines; the position of a politically enlightened citizen is almost completely unseen. In addition, men are rarely positioned as performing traditional female duties at home, either as parents or nurturers. Female representations are dominated by young and slim women, and advertisements usually address women as hetero-oriented consumers. Overall, our analysis shows how advertising as a powerful performative still continues to cite and repeat corporeal images, signs, and gestures that disseminate the fiction of a heterosexual binary and coherence (Butler, 1990).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is part of the projects ‘Drinking, Gender Differences and Social Change. The Gendered Dynamics of Finnish Drinking Culture from a Comparative Perspective’ (project no. 137685, funded by the Academy of Finland), and ‘Drinking, Gender Differences and Social Change. The Gendered Dynamics of Swedish Drinking Situations from a Comparative Perspective’ (project no. 2014-0167, funded by FORTE, Sweden).

Author Biographies

Jukka Törrönen, with a PhD in sociology, has a chair as professor at SoRAD on social alcohol and drug research. He has had a long-term interest in alcohol and drug research, in theoretical sociology and in qualitative methods.

Sara Rolando, PhD in sociology, has been worked with Eclectica (Torino) since 2007 as a researcher in national and international research projects with focus on drinking and other addictive behaviours. She has got her doctorate at the University of Helsinki, Finland, with a thesis comparing youth drinking cultures in Italy and Finland.

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