Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?

Abstract

The current study incorporates a radical feminist framework to analyze the portrayal of women in relation to both sex and alcohol in country music. Two coders analyzed the top 50 Billboard country songs for each year from 1990 to 1994, 2000-2004, and 2010-2014 (n = 750) for references to women in association with sex and alcohol. Seventeen percent of the songs referred to sex in relation to women, 20% referred to alcohol in relation to women, and 6% referred to both sex and alcohol in relation to women. Songs in the 2010s were more likely to refer to women in conjunction with sex and alcohol than songs in the 2000s and 1990s. References to women in association with sex and alcohol were more likely to be sung by men, not women, suggesting a pattern driven by patriarchy.