Alcoholic Bitters for Sweet Sex? Masculinity, Femininity, Alcohol, and Sex Consuming Selves in Heterosexual Relationships

This chapter presents a novel analysis of the intersections of sexualised alcohol use, gender, conformity, and transgression in heterosexual relationships. Alcohol companies produce and market several sexualised spirit-based herbal alcoholic bitters as aphrodisiacs and sex enhancers, branding them with sexually explicit names (e.g., Kerewa- copulation; Baby Oku- sexy babe). Men revealed that women demand protracted sex, complain about men who do not last longer than the natural limit or fail to perform optimally during sex, calling them ‘lazy’ or two-minute men, and women corroborated men’s perspectives. Failing to last long and meet one’s partner’s sexual expectations will end the relationship abruptly, and the man will lose the partner to more virile men. Therefore, men strategically resorted to sexualised alcoholic bitters (and sometimes, other substances) to enact heterosexual masculinity, delay ejaculation, impress their girlfriends, and avoid shaming and negative social badges that could ruin their reputations. These sex-enhancing practices prop up heterosexualised norms of sexual conquest. Women’s motivations and beverages for sex differed from men’s. Drinking to boost confidence, lower sexual inhibitions to transgress heterosexual norms, ameliorate perceived pains of devirginisation, and maximise sexual pleasure and enjoyment motivated women’s sexualised alcohol use. Women also used alcohol to celebrate when they succeeded in engaging in sex with men they had long admired or when their partners performed maximally. The findings demonstrate how men are indirectly involved in real or imaginary masculinised contestations to avoid losing sexual partners to other men who possess superior sexual stamina and virility. At the same time, women who were ‘undoing’ gender reconstructed femininities and enacted subversive alternatives that demonstrated their sexual agency, assertiveness, and self-efficacy. The chapter highlights how the alcohol industry drives the alcoholic-bitters-for-sex-turn, facilitating the transgression of sexual norms prohibiting premarital sex. This sexualised drinking, which is discussed in this chapter, further suggests that the youth drinking decline may not be a global phenomenon.