Alcohol, Binge Sobriety and Exemplary Abstinence

Julie Robert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350167995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Where did Temporary Sobriety Initiatives (TSIs) such as Dry January, FebFast and Ocsober, come from? And what is their role, if any, in prompting people to revisit their relationship with alcohol? These organized campaigns have flourished throughout the English-speaking world in the past decade. Collectively, they involve thousands of participants and raise substantial sums of money for medical research, as well as drug and alcohol related charities. Alcohol, Binge Sobriety and Exemplary Abstinence considers these campaigns as part of a lifestyle movement that transcends single events and even singular national contexts. It uses case studies from Australia, the USA and the UK to examine both the short history of TSIs as a response to problematic localized drinking cultures – including binge drinking – and their relationship to a much longer and transnational history of temperance activism. In taking TSIs as a case study of both embodied philanthropy and participatory health promotion, this book considers how TSIs are structured, promoted and experienced as an embodied event to create imitable, and sometimes contradictory, examples to create a public pedagogy of 'responsible drinking'.

1
Introduction

Sitting in a pub, enjoying a drink with a friend on a wintry Sydney evening in late June 2010, my friend told me that he would be refraining from drinking alcohol for the next month. As a very recent migrant to Australia, I was unaware of any reason for a thirty-one-day abstention in July, and my curiosity was piqued. My unreflexive and potentially impertinent questions of ‘What?’ and ‘Why?’ elicited an answer, ‘Dry July’, pronounced in a self-assured tone that suggested that I was ignorant of a cultural commonplace as elemental to Australian society as the Boxing Day Test (an annual cricket event, as this Canadian later discovered). The look of puzzlement that must have crossed my face prompted a further explanation: ‘It’s when you give up drinking for a month and raise money for cancer.’

My companion’s nonchalant response led me to believe that this must be something that Australians simply ‘do’, even if none of my newcomer’s guidebooks had mentioned the phenomenon. If anything, they and my pre-move online news consumption had warned me of the opposite: this was a society more prone to the excesses of binge drinking than the abstemiousness of binge sobriety. The cultural observer in me (to say nothing of the wine lover) became oddly fascinated by both the individual participant’s motivations and the larger cultural relevance of this phenomenon.

From this initial sample of one, I surmised that there were elements of group cohesion, philanthropy, health and financial motivators at play. Dry July, in this case, was adopted as part of an office challenge where individuals signed up to see who could raise the most money by forgoing their usual tipple. The decision to enlist for this particular challenge, when the workplace routinely offered any number of philanthropic schemes with which to get involved, was linked to the enticing prospect of being able to drop a couple of kilos and save a few dollars by not drinking for a month. This mishmash of motivations, and the seemingly arbitrary flip from one day enjoying (more than) a few drinks to forgoing the experience entirely the next, signalled that the undertaking had little to do with the kind of moralistic attitudes towards alcohol I associated with the temperance movement, especially as reflected in Hollywood portrayals of battles between prohibition officers and rum-runners and speakeasy patrons. Instead, it reflected a much more pragmatic and complicated relationship between the temporary teetotaller and alcohol, their health, bank balance, relationship with fellow participant–colleagues, the socially cohesive role of alcohol in Australian society and the charity being supported.

Dry July is now only one of roughly two dozen events of its kind worldwide. The events, most of which were launched after my initial exposure to the idea in mid-2010, differ in terms of timing, causes supported and focus. They nonetheless share important characteristics of being time-delimited, formally backed and often (but not exclusively) philanthropic campaigns that call on participants to totally abstain from alcohol. Most span only a single calendar month or a similarly short timeframe, such as the forty days of Lent in the Christian calendar. Unlike New Year’s resolutions, which are often qualitatively vague (to eat healthier, exercise more, drink less) and open-ended, they pitch complete abstinence as the goal, even if many make formal allowances (with financial penalty) for a lapse in willpower or a special occasion that warrants a toast. They are most prominent and popular in contexts with a self-acknowledged reputation for slightly indulgent attitudes towards alcohol. Yet, they are also different from ‘sober-curious’ communities and groups even though participants, especially since these month-long campaigns have become more commonplace, may have much in common in terms of motivation.

These short-term initiatives are typically backed by an organization that uses the period as a formalized part of awareness-raising, behaviour change and/or fundraising activities. Like the various ‘thons’ (swim-a-thons, read-a-thons, etc.) or embodied philanthropy challenges ranging from the heroic (climbing a mountain) to the pride-compromising (shaving one’s head or dousing oneself with a bucket of icy water), they are subtly varied but fundamentally related projects that use analogous participatory methods to achieve comparable goals. Campaigns like Dry July might more productively, therefore, be considered iterations of a popular and growing international phenomenon. They have elsewhere been designated ‘dry months’, ‘sober months’ or ‘voluntary/temporary abstinence campaigns’, appellations that speak to underlying assumptions about the rationale for and the nature of the break from alcohol. For my part, I call them Temporary Sobriety Initiatives (or TSIs) in recognition of the overall sobering or tempering effect this period of abstinence is meant to have on both an individual’s and society’s overall relationship with alcohol.

In more than a decade since the first TSIs launched, they have become something of a mainstream practice, especially in Australia and Britain, but increasingly in Canada and Scandinavian countries. Surveys suggest that as many as one in six residents of the UK intended to abstain from alcohol during January 2017 (YouGov 2017). In Australia, thousands of participants have raised millions of dollars for the causes supported by the three campaigns that entreat drinkers to go dry during February (FebFast), July (Dry July) or October (Ocsober). In other locations – Canada, Ireland, Finland, the United States, even France, Hungary, Slovenia, Belgium and the Netherlands (for a full list, see Appendix A) – the timing and popularity vary, but local adaptations are proliferating and becoming more popular every year.

As TSIs gained in local importance, they transitioned from feel-good public interest stories for local media and fodder for cynical commentators to genuine subjects of scholarly inquiry. Clinical researchers curious about the effects of the trend investigated the purported health benefits of abstaining from alcohol for thirty-day intervals (Mehta et al. 2015; Munsterman et al. 2018). In so doing, they lent some credence to the concept of a month-long break from alcohol having an appreciable medical benefit. Researchers who conducted large-scale studies with participants queried whether particular campaigns, such as the UK’s Dry January and Australia’s FebFast, have been effective in actually changing drinking habits in the longer term (de Visser et al. 2016; de Visser et al. 2017; Hillgrove and Thomson 2012). Much to the surprise of sceptics, their findings confirm a genuine effect. Larger independent analyses comparing participants to non-participants have nonetheless begun to cast doubt on these claims (Case et al. 2021). Regardless of the findings, such investigations principally serve an evaluative function to determine if TSIs ‘work’, albeit within relatively narrow parameters of success, defined either by the organizations themselves or by public health bodies. The early results of these investigations have nevertheless buoyed TSI organizers who have been able to draw upon the findings to advertise the reported benefits – better sleep, weight loss, improved productivity and energy, better social relationships, clearer complexions, stronger vital statistics – of the short break from alcohol.

If, however, one considers TSIs not just as sabbaticals from alcohol but as a collection of subtly varied, local expressions of an international trend towards purposive binge sobriety, different questions become relevant. Marketing, communications, legal and public health scholars, as well as professional operators in the third sector, are increasingly looking to dry-month success stories, success defined in a variety of ways, to better understand how temporarily giving up alcohol for charity became a new fundraising scheme at the same time as it became an anti-consumption and healthy living movement with even loftier aspirations to change society’s relationship with alcohol. Here, comparative analysis of the underlying objectives, campaign structures, timing, messaging and public response – all to be considered within the relevant local circumstances – can provide important insight into the TSI logic and the public resonance of campaigns.¹ Like any coordinated initiative, the choices campaign organizers make provide TSIs with a particular inflection and allow researchers to understand the individual campaigns, and via their similarities in the grouping of like initiatives, as social and cultural actors in their own right.

For cultural observers, the questions are related but slightly different. Where did TSIs come from? Why and how did they spread? What overarching cultural premises and/or local circumstances did TSI tap into or capitalize upon? What is their appeal, especially given that they tend to be most successful in contexts that embrace alcohol as a socially cohesive factor? How do they actually work for the organizations that run them and for the individuals who take part?

This book, the extension of my initial curiosity about Dry July, sets out to answer these questions through a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural analysis of TSIs as complex nodes of philanthropic, health, educational, cultural, consumer and civic activity. Taken as a whole, the enquiry seeks to understand why TSIs have emerged as a preferred means for participants and organizers to effect both personal objectives and advance social goals centring on health, philanthropy, cultural change or some combination thereof. It is not intended to be yet another critique of neo-liberalism or a contemporary history of modern abstinence movements, although TSIs cannot be understood without reference to these phenomena, for it is my contention that TSIs function as networked, neo-liberal temperance campaigns. Where TSIs offer something different – especially when thinking beyond the questions of alcohol, drinking or even philanthropy – is in how as a form of social movement predicated on personal choices, they craftily leverage the pedagogical power of individual, embodied examples. In this, TSIs function as a form of alcohol and drinking education, taken in the broad sense Dwight Heath attributes to it, where people engage in a ‘more convincing and more lasting process’ that addresses alcohol’s physiological, emotional and social effects, as well as its role in shaping behaviours when consumed or refused (Heath 2012: 103). By virtue of the extent of participation, these examples both illustrate and enact changes to individual and collective drinking behaviours and the role attributed to alcohol.

Twenty-first-century temperance

Although deliberate periods of abstinence have been practised for centuries and have often been linked to religious customs, the advent of TSIs speaks to logics other than the imitation of a divine example of sacrifice and self-restraint. They similarly differentiate themselves from what linger as the mythologized images of the temperance movement in the American, Northern European and Australasian contexts – staid campaigners railing about the moral perils of alcohol or prohibition officers pouring liquor down the drain – thanks to more permissive views on alcohol consumption from campaign organizers and among the population at large.² It is, after all, no accident that TSIs are virtually unheard of in contexts where rates of alcohol consumption are low and/or rates of personal abstinence are higher thanks to either cultural or regulatory factors. Even in their most stridently reforming versions that emphasize individual action as a means to effect moderation and a significant reduction in alcohol consumption on a societal level, TSIs are more neo-liberal than preachy. They envisage and promote demonstrably moderate and considered approaches to drinking, the epitome of ‘responsible’ drinking, rather than personal teetotalism or legislated prohibition. This approach likely owes to persistent public suspicion of what is perceived as moralism (Berridge 2005) or accusations of regulatory overreach (Valverde 1998), both of which run counter to predominant doctrines of individual responsibility. TSIs nonetheless have a great deal in common with prior temperance logics, if not their outward manifestations.

Like the temperance movement’s call to limit alcohol consumption via personal pledges and regulatory interventions, TSIs came about in a general context (with specific local inflections) of heightened anxiety about alcohol (AIHW 2014) that was out of step with the realities of consumption. As Levine (1993) noted of American temperance, the movement arose even though estimated per capita alcohol consumption had been declining for decades. Similarly, Australia in 2008, when all three national TSIs formed, had experienced falling rates of per capita consumption for years (ABS 2015) but was newly awash in media coverage of binge drinking, especially among young people, girls and those more likely to engage in violent behaviour while under the influence (Robert 2016b). This occasioned high levels of public concern for the social problems deemed to arise from the vague notion of ‘irresponsible drinking’ and the nation’s problematic ‘drinking culture’, a term increasingly unmoored from its anthropological roots (Douglas 1987; Wilson 2005) to instead be used as a euphemism for the most sensational elements and negative behaviours associated with alcohol consumption (Savic et al. 2016). News editors and politicians opportunistically seized upon dramatic scenes of drunken brawls and young women semi-conscious in gutters in their clubbing attire to highlight a handful of severe or tragic cases in their calls to public action. The continual focus on the ‘drinking culture’ provoked increasing levels of self-scrutiny, but not so much among those who were captured in the B-roll for the evening news. Instead, the messages found purchase among those who already self-identified as ‘responsible drinkers’ but who recognized the limits or failings of their personal responsibility.

Those decrying the culture of irresponsible drinking stopped well short of anti-alcohol sentiment, especially for the much-touted and epidemiologically over-represented ‘responsible majority’ of moderate drinkers that Robin Room (2010) argues has become the cultural ideal of self-control in post-temperance, neo-liberal societies. The championing of moderation and responsibility remained unabashed, even though definitions of moderation and responsible drinking have been and remain contested (Yeomans 2013), not least because they are seen as out of keeping with how people interpret them and experience them through daily life (Lindsay 2010). The perceived (and readily perceptible) rather than objective state of alcoholic irresponsibility, not alcohol itself, was therefore cast as the problem to be solved. It was thus the drunken brawler or the staggering clubber rather than those whose overindulgence occurred in the privacy of their lounge rooms or blended into the regular weekly routines of the neighbourhood pub that focused public attention. Demonstrations of responsibility with regard to alcohol, the more overt, the better, thus became central to new temperance thinking and campaigns. As Dorothy Noyes (2016) argues of socially transformative moments, these social circumstances called for gestures, grand or small, that could crystalize responsible conduct, vis-à-vis alcohol, into examples to be followed.

Controlling one’s behaviour to achieve socially valued outcomes has long been at the core of temperance thinking. Joseph Gusfield (1986) maintains that nineteenth- and twentieth-century American temperance, which was strongest among the nascent middle class, had always been a primarily symbolic rather than pragmatic campaign: status and recognition for one’s way of life – not alcohol control – were the chief objectives of the movement. ‘The argument is less over the effect of the proposed measures on concrete actions than it is over the question of whose culture is to be granted legitimacy’ (Gusfield 1986: 148). David Wagner (1997) similarly argues that the broader American turn towards ‘new temperance’, the embrace of lifestyle choices characterized as healthier or less risky, starting in the 1970s, was a strategy of social demarcation whereby behaviour and not relatively stable identity markers, such as race, enabled the increasingly undermined middle class to shore up its social position. Comparable arguments could be made of any number of Western nations, for temperance mentalities became part of larger ‘healthist’ projects (such as trends towards exercise, dieting, organic eating and anti-tobacco) that were characteristic of the new civic morality – that one shall be self-sufficient in all regards and not become a burden on the state – of the neo-liberal age (Crawford 1980, 2006). Temperance reinvented was therefore most likely to be a lifestyle project related to demonstrations of responsibility for the maintenance and development of one’s human capital rather than an overt concern for virtue or respectability, and even less a campaign demonizing alcohol. It is also worth noting that many abstainers (for instance, those who abstain or consume very sparingly owing to factors such as religion or taste) could be accused of missing the point. They perform the right action but for the wrong reason and thus act but do not gesture towards the larger project.

If TSIs are to be considered neo-temperance movements, they must also be seen as paradigmatic neo-liberal projects, but not just for their ‘healthy living’ orientation. As my friend’s example first suggested to me, TSI participants are spurred to abstain (in the short term) to increase their various forms of social capital (Bourdieu 1977), not just to improve their health. They seek to attract the plaudits that come from being part of a socially legitimized initiative, both in terms of society at large and in their own networks. Where societies still regard alcohol as that which facilitates bonding and raises one above the suspicion of either being an outsider (religious minority, suffering from an illness, recovering alcoholic) or judgemental of others who do not belong as a result of their drinking, TSIs purport to champion the ideal of moderation – including the moderation of moderation.

There is an equal, and a more often acknowledged, desire to achieve appreciable and personally advantageous goals related to this capital: to have more energy, avoid hangovers, be fitter, be more productive, save money and improve overall health. Like any accumulation of capital in a late capitalist society, the demonstrability of this capital via achievement is paramount. Such achievement-oriented rationales underpin the Quantified Self movement (the accumulation and analysis of personal data on a range of factors such as sleep, nutrition and activity) and the range of ‘tracking’ technologies it employs (Lupton 2016; Swan 2013). TSIs leverage the power of such drives by providing (prospective) participants with discursive and calculative tools to quantify the financial and caloric savings of a commitment to temporary abstinence. Participants and organizers alike also conceive of episodic sobriety as a way to direct social and human capital to other socially valued projects. The time saved by not frequenting the pub or nursing a hangover can be directed towards fitness or professional goals, while financial savings can be directed to other purchases or to a charitable cause. These normally hidden opportunity costs of drinking are made visible and, when highlighted through actions such as joining a gym or taking a holiday, become part of the incentivizing discourse.

Scholars of neo-liberalism’s influence on healthcare ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Public pedagogy through exemplification
• 3 TSIs as phenomenon
• 4 Reimagining temperance cultures
• 5 Embodiment and affect: TSIs as pedagogues
• 6 Lifestyle heroism: Soberheroes and Dryathletes
• 7 Selfish philanthropists, selfish abstainers
• 8 Unruly examples
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright