Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  You Are What You Drink

  Another ‘human universal’ is important here: in all cultures where more than one type of alcoholic drink is available, drinks are classified in terms of their social meaning, and these classifications help to define the social world. No alcoholic drink is ever ‘socially neutral’. In England, as elsewhere, ‘What’s yours?’ is a socially loaded question, and we judge and classify people on their answer. Choice of beverage is rarely just a matter of personal taste.

  Among other symbolic functions, drinks can be used as indicators of social status, and as gender differentiators. These are the two most important symbolic functions of alcoholic beverages among the English: your choice of drink (in public at least) is determined mainly by your sex and social class, with some age-related variations. The rules are as follows:

  •Working-class and lower-middle-class females have the widest choice of drinks. Almost anything is socially acceptable – cocktails, sweet or creamy liqueurs, all soft drinks, beers, spirits and alcopops (pre-mixed alcoholic drinks in bottles, usually vodka- or rum-based, such as WKD, Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezer, which are very popular with young drinkers). There is really only one restriction: the size of glass from which some lower-class women may drink beer. Drinking ‘pints’, in some working-class and lower-middle circles, is regarded as unfeminine and unladylike, so some women in these social groups, if they drink beer at all, will drink ‘halves’ (half-pints) of beer. Drinking pint glasses of beer would classify you as a ‘ladette’ – a female ‘lad’, a woman who imitates the loutish, raucous behaviour of hard-drinking males. Some women are happy with this image, but they are still a minority.

  •Next on the freedom-of-choice scale are middle-middle to upper-class females. Their choice is more restricted: the more sickly-sweet alcopops, cream-based liqueurs and cocktails are regarded as a bit vulgar – ordering a Bailey’s would certainly cause a few raised eyebrows and sideways looks – but they can drink more or less any wines, spirits, sherries, soft drinks, ciders or beers. Female pint-drinking is also more acceptable in this social category, at least among the younger women, particularly students. Among upper-middle-class female students, I found that some felt they had to give an explanation if they ordered a ‘girly’ half rather than a pint of beer.

  •The choices of middle- and upper-class males are far more restricted than those of their female counterparts. They may drink only beer, spirits (mixers are acceptable), wine (must be dry, not sweet) and soft drinks. Alcopops are permitted for the young, but anything too sweet or creamy is regarded as suspiciously ‘feminine’, and cocktails are only acceptable at cocktail parties or in a cocktail bar – you would never order them in an ordinary pub.

  •Working-class males have virtually no choice at all. They can drink only beer or spirits – everything else is effeminate. At least, this is the unwritten rule among older working-class males, for whom even some mixers may be forbidden: gin-and-tonic may be just about acceptable in some circles, but more obscure combinations are frowned upon. Younger working-class males have quite a bit more freedom: spirits with mixers are acceptable, for example, as are alcopops, providing they have a high enough alcohol content and a suitably macho name and image.

  RULES OF DRUNKENNESS – ANTI-SOCIAL PASTIMES

  Another ‘universal’: the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. In some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia – about one-fifth of all cultures worldwide), drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of all cultures) drinking is not associated with these undesireable behaviours. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption or genetic differences, but is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations regarding the effects of alcohol and different social norms regarding drunken comportment.

  This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but also in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments – double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. The English believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when they are given what they think are alcoholic drinks – but are in fact non-alcoholic ‘placebos’ – they shed their inhibitions: they become more flirtatious, and some (young males in particular) may become aggressive.

  Which brings me to the third method the English use to deal with their chronic, incurable social dis-ease: the ‘become loud and aggressive and obnoxious’ method. I am certainly not the first to have noticed this dark and unpleasant side to the English character. Both English observers and foreign visitors have been commenting on it for centuries, and our habit of national self-flagellation ensures that not a week goes by without some mention of it in our own newspapers. Binge drinkers, football hooligans, rowdy ladettes, neighbours-from-hell, drunken brawling, delinquency, disorder and downright impudence. These infelicities are invariably attributed either to a vague, idiopathic ‘decline in moral standards’ or to the effects of alcohol, or both. Neither of these explanations will do. Even the most cursory scan of English social history confirms that our current bouts of obnoxious drunken disorder are nothing new.102 And even leaving aside the placebo experiments, it is clear that many other nations manage to consume much larger quantities of alcohol than us without becoming rude, violent and generally disgusting.

  Our beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol are certainly at least partly to blame, as they act as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you firmly believe and expect that alcohol will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. But this still leaves the question of why we should hold such strange beliefs. The notion that alcohol is a dangerous disinhibitor is not peculiar to the English: it is shared by a number of other cultures, known to the anthropologists and other social scientists who take an interest in such matters as ‘ambivalent’, ‘dry’, ‘Nordic’ or ‘temperance’ cultures – cultures with an ambivalent, morally charged, love/hate, forbidden-fruit relationship with alcohol, usually associated with a history of temperance movements. These are contrasted with ‘integrated’, ‘wet’, ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘non-temperance’ cultures – those for whom alcohol is simply a normal, integral, taken-for-granted, morally neutral part of everyday life; generally cultures that have been fortunate enough to escape the attentions of temperance campaigners. ‘Integrated’ drinking-cultures, despite usually having much higher levels of per-capita alcohol consumption, experience few of the ‘alcohol-related’ social problems that afflict ‘ambivalent’ cultures.

  These basic facts are, among my fellow cross-cultural researchers and other dispassionate ‘alcohologists’, so obvious and commonplace as to be tedious. We are certainly all very weary of repeating them, endlessly, to English audiences who either cannot or will not accept their validity. Much of my professional life has been spent on alcohol-related research of one sort or another, and my colleagues and I have been trotting out the same irrefutable cross-cultural and experimental evidence for over twenty years, every time our expertise is called upon by government departments, police conferences, worried brewers and other concerned agencies.

  Everyone is always highly surprised – ‘Really? You mean there are cultures where people don’t believe that alcohol causes violence? How extraordinary!’ – and politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It’s like trying to explain the causes of rain to some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch-doctors and rain-makers. Yes, yes, they say, but of course the real reason it hasn
’t rained is because the ancestors are angry that the shaman did not perform the rain-dance or goat-sacrifice at the correct time and someone allowed uncircumcised boys or menstruating women to touch the sacred skulls. Everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that drinking alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and start bashing each other’s heads in.

  Or, rather, according to the concerned believers at the conferences on ‘Alcohol and Public Disorder’, alcohol makes other people do this. They themselves are somehow immune: they can get quite squiffy at the office Christmas party, or over a few bottles of good cabernet sauvignon with their friends, or gin-and-tonic in the pub or whatever, without ever throwing a single punch, or even using bad language. Alcohol, it seems, has the specific power to make working-class people violent and abusive. Which, if you think about it, is truly miraculous – a much more impressive magical feat than rain-making. We hold these strange beliefs about the powers of alcohol because, like other irrational religious tenets, they help us to explain the inexplicable – and, in this case, to avoid the issue. By blaming the booze, we sidestep the uncomfortable question of why the English, so widely admired for our courtesy, reserve and restraint, should also be renowned for our oafishness, crudeness and violence.

  My view is that our courteous reserve and our obnoxious aggression are two sides of the same coin. More precisely, they are both symptoms of the same social dis-ease. We suffer from a chronic sociability-disorder, a set of deeply ingrained inhibitions that make it difficult for us to express emotion and engage in the kind of casual, friendly social interaction that seems to come naturally to most other nations. How we have come to be like this, why we are afflicted with this dis-ease, is a bit of mystery, which I may or may not be able to solve by the end of this book, but it is possible to diagnose an illness or disorder without necessarily knowing its cause. With psychological disorders such as this one, whether at the individual or national level, the cause is often difficult or even impossible to determine, but that does not prevent us pronouncing the patient to be autistic, or agoraphobic, or whatever. Those were supposed to be random examples, but now that I come to think of it, the English social dis-ease has some symptoms in common with both autism and agoraphobia. But let’s be charitable and politically correct and just say that we are ‘socially challenged’.

  Whatever we choose to call it, the symptoms of the English social dis-ease involve opposite extremes: when we feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in social situations (that is, most of the time), we become either over-polite, buttoned-up and awkwardly restrained, or loud, loutish, aggressive, violent and generally insufferable. There seem to be no in-between states, and certainly no happy medium. Both extremes are regularly exhibited by English people of all social classes, with or without the assistance of the demon drink.

  The worst of the ‘loud and obnoxious’ extreme tends, however, to be largely confined to specific, well-defined periods of ‘cultural remission’, such as town centres on Friday and Saturday nights, and holidays at home and abroad, when it is customary for hordes of young people to congregate in pubs, bars and night-clubs and get drunk. Getting drunk is not an accidental by-product of the evening’s entertainment: it is the primary objective – young English revellers and holidaymakers (male and female) set out quite deliberately to achieve this goal, and they are almost invariably successful (we’re English, remember, we can get roaring drunk on non-alcoholic placebos). To prove to their companions that they have attained the socially desirable degree of drunkenness, they generally feel obliged to do something ‘mad’ – to put on some sort of display of outrageously disinhibited behaviour. The repertoire of approved displays is actually quite limited, and not terribly outrageous, ranging from relatively tame shouting and swearing to rather more ambitiously offensive antics such as ‘mooning’ (pulling down one’s trousers to show one’s naked bottom – bottoms being regarded as intrinsically funny among young English males) and, much more rarely, fighting.

  For a very small minority, a Saturday night’s revelry is just not complete without a bit of a punch-up. These are generally rule-governed, predictable, almost choreographed affairs, consisting mainly of a lot of macho posturing and bravado, very occasionally escalating to a drunken, clumsy exchange of blows. Such incidents are often sparked off by nothing more than a fraction of a second too much eye contact. It can be remarkably easy to start a fight with the average young, inebriated English male: all you have to do is make eye contact, hold it a little too long (anything over about a second will do – the English are not keen on eye contact), then say, ‘What you lookin’ at?’ The response may well be a repetition of the question, ‘What you lookin’ at?’ – very like the traditional English ‘How do you do?’ exchange: our obnoxiousnesses are about as awkward, irrational and inelegant as our politenesses. But just as the polite ‘How do you do?’ ritual very rarely leads to more intimate conversation, the belligerent ‘What you lookin’ at?’ exchange is merely a ritual display of manliness, only occasionally resulting in an actual physical fight.

  This aggressive behaviour is much less evident, it must be said, among those young people who use illegal ‘recreational drugs’ such as cannabis and ecstasy as their social facilitators, rather than alcohol. We believe that cannabis makes you mellow and pleasantly relaxed (‘chilled out’, ‘chilled’ or ‘chillaxed’, in current parlance) and that ecstasy makes you lively, euphoric, full of goodwill towards fellow revellers, and a brilliant dancer. Apart from the quality of the dancing, these beliefs are largely self-fulfilling prophecies, and a good time is had by all.

  PLAY RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

  The rules of play have provided further confirmation of all the main ‘quintessences of Englishness’ identified so far – all the usual suspects: humour, hypocrisy, class-anxiety, fair play, modesty and so on. Empiricism now also seems to be emerging as a strong candidate for inclusion in the English cultural genome. But most of the rules in this chapter have been about one particular defining characteristic of Englishness – the one I have taken to calling our ‘social dis-ease’, our inhibited insularity, our chronic social awkwardness, bordering on a sort of sub-clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia. Almost all of our leisure activities are, one way or another, a response to this unfortunate condition. And almost all of our responses are forms of denial and self-delusion. In fact, our phenomenal capacity for collective self-deception is beginning to look like a defining characteristic in its own right.

  The collective self-deception involved in the English use of sports, games and clubs as social facilitators is particularly interesting – the fact that we have to trick ourselves into social interaction and bonding by pretending that we are doing something else. Our belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol is part of the same delusional syndrome. We have a desperate need for social contact and emotional bonding, but we cannot simply acknowledge this need, and get on with the pursuit of human warmth and intimacy in a natural, straightforward fashion. We have to create elaborate structures and myths and rituals to disguise our craving for social contact as a burning desire to throw balls at each other, or to perfect our flower-arranging or motorcycle-maintenance skills, or to save the whales, or the world, or something – and then go to the pub, where we can pretend that we are only there for the beer, and attribute any embarrassing evidence of normal human emotion to its miraculous properties.

  Really, I don’t see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery and malaria in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep.

  87. But perhaps I am being too harsh. Jeremy Paxman thinks that the millions who visit historic houses and gardens are expressing, among other things, a ‘deeply felt’ sense of history. I’m not convinced; we are chronically nostalgic, yes, but that is not the same thing. Still, it is somewhat disturbing to find myself sounding more cynic
al than Paxman.

  88. I do realise that there is a distinction between empiricism and realism as philosophical doctrines (holding that all knowledge is derived from sense experience, and that matter exists independently of our perception of it) and the broader, more colloquial senses that are implied here, but I would maintain that there is a strong connection between our formal philosophical traditions and our informal, everyday attitudes and mindsets, including those governing our taste in soap operas.

  89. I am indebted to Simon Nye, who wrote Men Behaving Badly, and Paul Dornan, who was involved in its translation for the American market, for this information, and other helpful insights into the nature of English comedy.

  90. I mean home-grown sit-coms here, so I’m not counting US adaptations of gritty British comedies such as Shameless. Having said that, the US version of Shameless is somewhat less sanitised and prettied-up than other attempts.

  91. Other nations may watch and enjoy (and remake) some of our sit-coms, and we certainly watch and enjoy many of theirs, but I am interested in what English television comedy, the comedy we produce, tells us about Englishness.

  92. I will have more to say on English beliefs about alcohol and the etiquette of drunken comportment later in this chapter.

  93. I could find no responses to Professor Wilson’s comments from the production company responsible for Big Brother, although the broadcaster, Channel 4, did issue a statement saying that the programme-makers were confident in the ‘rigorous vetting procedures, full-time monitoring and security and on-site psychological support’ provided. Wilson’s concerns and criticisms have been echoed by other psychologists, the mental health charity SANE and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.