Men’s Drinking and Women’s Autonomy

guest post from Mary Jean Walker, writing with Anne-Marie Laslett, Katherine Karriker-Jaffe and Ingrid Wilson

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking about ethical issues related to alcohol use. I’ve been especially interested in looking at issues related to intoxication, an area relatively neglected in ethics. Alcohol-related harms accrue in ways directed, in part, by gender. I’d like here to argue that feminist bioethicists could usefully engage more in this space.

Unlike some health-related behaviours, alcohol consumption often harms people other than those consuming. Alcohol plays a role in various harms to others, from traffic accidents to violence and crime. We need a gendered lens to understand many of these harms. Globally, men drink more than women. In many cultures men’s drinking is normalised and linked to notions of masculinity, such that their right to drink is sacrosanct, unquestioned even when expected to cause harm. Meanwhile, women’s disadvantage is reinforced by cultural beliefs that make them responsible for managing intoxicated men and/or blame them for harms they experience.

I’ve been privileged to work on some of these issues with the co-authors named above, and a larger research team, whose findings are summarised here.

The team’s review of qualitative literature on harms to women related to men’s drinking found women report alcohol-affected men perpetrating physical violence, emotional abuse, sexual violence and coercion, and economic abuse. Women suffer long-term injury, disability, or mental health impacts. Sexual coercion interferes with their reproductive autonomy, e.g. unwanted pregnancies. The findings align with quantitativestudies linking men’s drinking to more frequent and severe intimate partner violence.

Beyond violence and control and their sequelae, other harms from men’s drinking included diversion of household funds away from food and other necessities, income loss contributing to women’s burden in and beyond the home, and loneliness and isolation.

In short, men’s alcohol use can have the effect of disempowering women and reducing their social and economic opportunities. It intersects with and exacerbates other disadvantages women face.

Further, as the team argued in another review, alcohol policy globally often ignores how alcohol harms are distributed in a population. It focuses on aggregate population health benefit over social justice concerns, and data on various kinds of gendered alcohol-related harm is lacking. This is understandable, but from an ethical standpoint, there is a need for better data on, and policies that address, harms to women and children.

Feminist bioethicists might make meaningful contributions in this space. One reason the impacts of men’s drinking on women’s lives is under-recognised is a perception that focusing on alcohol could provide harm-perpetrating men with an excuse. Many cultures position intoxication as providing a ‘time out’ or ‘moral holiday’. Ethicists are well placed to confront these ideas.

Conceptual resources from feminist bioethics could also complement empirical work, for instance, in ethical analyses of the social justice issues raised, and the impacts of men’s drinking on women’s autonomy and opportunities. We might usefully examine how the hidden nature of these harms relates to the elision of ethics from the private sphere and so from most gendered interactions, or the role of epistemic injustice, where concepts of intimate partner violence may be unavailable due to its normalisation.

As feminist bioethicists, we should be concerned about the types and levels of harm associated with men’s alcohol use that affect women’s health and wellbeing, and that of their children, worldwide. We hope our work will support further efforts in this area.