“This is what I like,this is why I need to be here”: Young women’s pleasure in the urban night time economy

Abstract

Pleasure is at the heart of ‘nights out’, yet research on the UK’s night-time economy has consistently focussed instead on the risks and harms experienced by particular groups. Where this body of work has met research on young women, the emphasis on the problems of the night-time economy has been especially evident. This paper extends understandings of this subject by making an analysis of young women’s pleasure central. It uses qualitative data to argue that young women’s pleasure in the night-time economy is related to a deep sense of mutuality and, going further, introduces the term ‘opened-out subjectivity’ to characterise this sense of connection. Finally, it shows how this subjectivity helps constitute the appeal of nights out, a new direction in night-time economy research.

Introduction and literature review

Pleasure is at the heart of ‘nights out’, yet research on the UK’s night-time economy (NTE) has consistently focussed on the risks and harms particular groups experience there; crime, regulation and governance have been central themes (Hadfield, 2015). Simultaneously, the alco-centric NTE has been characterised as a space of neoliberal excess, in terms of both its governance (notably the consequences of the broadly deregulating Licencing Act 2003) as well as the subjectivities it produces (Shaw, 2010). Where this body of work has met research on young people, the emphasis on the problems of the NTE has been especially evident. Young people are portrayed as being (unfairly) responsibilised by neoliberal policy enactment (Hackley et al., 2008) and ‘seduced’ by consumer markets (Tutenges and Bøhling, 2019), and their substance use is perceived as conformist, enabling them to ‘survive’ consumer capitalism (Ayres, 2019). Though some research acknowledges positive aspects of young people’s drinking cultures, for example their role in building and supporting friendships (Dresler and Anderson, 2018), young people’s alcohol use in the NTE is overwhelmingly framed as problematic either in terms of their behaviour, or in terms of them being failed by government (in)action.

Other research has emphasised the divided nature of the NTE – segregated along the lines of sex, sexuality, race and class – and these divisions are argued to map onto (and help constitute) the harms marginalised groups experience. As this relates to gender, a large and growing body of research focusses on women’s safety and/or their ‘negotiation’ of femininity. Both areas of research – young people’s drinking cultures and women’s participation in the NTE – offer a necessary, critical lens to the study of this social context. However, given that the pursuit of pleasure (as affective positivity – enjoyment, joy, delight) is a driver and very real outcome of young people’s experience in the NTE, the relative dearth of research on pleasure at the intersection of these fields is limiting, something this paper addresses.

This paper extends work on a well-studied NTE, Newcastle upon Tyne, by making an analysis of young women’s pleasure central, and so creating more holistic, and richer, understandings of nightlife. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is used to present the ‘lifeworld’ ¹ of the participants and thus, priority is given to their perspective; I show that young women’s pleasure in the NTE is related to experiences of mutuality, that is, an intimacy born of shared feeling. Going further I introduce the term ‘opened-out subjectivity’ to characterise the deep sense of connection experienced in the NTE and show how this subjectivity helps constitute the NTE’s appeal.

Young people in the NTE

Research on young people’s use of the NTE is closely related to studies of alcohol use and policy. In the UK context, the backdrop of this alcohol focussed work was research reporting the normalisation of recreational drug use and excessive alcohol use in the late 1990s (Brain et al., 2000; Parker et al., 1998). During this period and in the decade that followed, young people’s ‘binge drinking’ was in the spotlight for researchers as well as the popular press. The association of disorder (and violence) with this style of drinking helped characterise the public discourse around the NTE at this time, and the government’s high profile alcohol strategy Safe, Sensible, Social explicitly identified young people as part of the minority who caused ‘the most harm to themselves, their communities and their families’ (Department of Health, Home Office, Department for Education and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2007: 4).

While researchers tend to agree on the need to reject the moral panic which surrounded the changing role of alcohol and drunkenness in young people’s lives, there was, and continues to be, a tension evident in this research regarding how to interpret young people’s hedonic excess on their ‘big nights out’ (Roberts, 2015). That is, while some research has framed drunkenness as a calculated, agentic component of young people’s engagements with the NTE (Hackley et al., 2015; Haydock, 2014; Parker and Williams, 2003; Szmigin et al., 2008), a greater body of scholarship has centred consumerism and neoliberalism as key contexts in their analyses. In this framing, young people’s pursuit of drunkenness is essentially a forced adaptation to consumer capitalism (Ayres, 2019; Hayward and Hobbs, 2007; Smith, 2013), offering temporary escape from the drudgery of unfulfilling work, zero hours contracts, and increasingly atomised social relations (Winlow and Hall, 2009).

For example, writing in 2005 Measham and Brain argued that young people’s determined pursuit of altered states related to the culture of consumerism and the minimisation of state regulations, stating that under such conditions the market is ‘free to seduce consumers’ while being exonerated of any role in the ‘consequences of deregulated consumer excess’ (Measham and Brain, 2005: 278). The idea that young people are ‘seduced’ has proven an enduring one with recent studies such as those by Ayres (2019) and Tutenges and Bøhling (2019) arriving at much the same conclusion (though through very different methodologies).

The literature reviewed above concerns the mainstream, alco-centric youth cultures in the NTE which are the focus of this paper. An adjacent literature, adopting a cultural studies lens, has also contributed to understanding of young people’s nightlives centring subcultures and/or ‘neo-tribes’ (Bennett, 2005). Reaching its zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s, much of this literature emphasised the sense of collective identity and belonging members of dance/club scenes experienced (see for example Malbon, 1999). Chatterton and Hollands’ (2003) seminal Urban Nightscapes attempted to reconcile the tension between these often celebratory accounts of young adults’ community building and the continued social and spatial inequalities evident in an increasingly corporate NTE; in doing so they identify a ‘mainstream’ (as opposed to alternative or residual) nightlife as best evidencing the market forces which gentrify, homogenise and exclude.

In the politico-economic perspective which has dominated research on young people’s alcohol use in the UK’s NTE in the past 20 years, the mainstream has maintained this status, with pleasure-seeking typically framed as symptomatic of wider social realities. To complement (and complicate) this approach, the current paper seeks to place the subjective aspects of young people’s pleasure at the heart of an analysis of mainstream UK nightlife.

Gender in the NTE

Running parallel to scholarship on young people, alcohol and the NTE, is research which foregrounds the gendered aspect of both the NTE and the alcohol use which takes place there. Approached primarily from a feminist perspective, research on women, alcohol and the NTE has highlighted the inequalities, and dangers, women face and in the UK context there are two prominent trends in the research literature. The first of these is women’s safety; research has identified sexual harassment as near ubiquitous in parts of the NTE, with assaults of various kinds commonplace (Anitha et al., 2021; Fileborn, 2016; Graham et al., 2017). In important ways this risk shapes women’s experience of the NTE, with many women’s drinking cultures (and the pleasures therein) related to its effective management (Diaz-Fernandez and Evans, 2020; Gunby et al., 2020; Lewis and McBride, 2024).

The second trend centres on the persistent ‘double standard’ which normalises men’s heavy drinking and the possible consequences of this, such as violence, while framing women’s consumption as problematic. This is evident in media representations of women’s drinking (Patterson et al., 2016), as well as in many accounts of those who drink (De Visser and McDonnell, 2012). ‘Navigating’ or ‘negotiating’ this double standard when drinking to maintain a (respectable) femininity has thus been the focus of much research (Bailey et al., 2015; Griffin et al., 2012; Hutton et al., 2016; Nicholls, 2018). While valuable, this research trend problematises women’s drinking and emphasises (perhaps to the point of unrecognition) its difficulties, ergo ‘femininity’, rather than centring their time in the NTE as they experience it. As with research on alcohol use more broadly, there is recognition of the constructive elements of drinking for young women (e.g. Maclean, 2015; Nicholls, 2020) but the NTE typically fades into the background as a ‘drinking context’ rather than a constitutive part of the affective experience.

In adopting a politico-economic perspective, research on young people’s drinking in the UK’s NTE has emphasised the harms and injustices of this leisure context. Likewise, feminist research has (understandably) concentrated on the continued inequality women experience – both in terms of cultural double standards, and the pervasive and persistent risk of sexual harm. However, while such critiques are necessary, accounts of the NTE are impoverished when pleasure is neglected.

Pleasure is the major motivator of alcohol consumption and studies have indicated that young people overwhelmingly speak of their drinking experiences in positive terms (De Visser et al., 2013; Harrison et al., 2011; Jayne et al., 2010). Yet, due to the risk of health and social harm, there has been an attempt to ‘erase pleasure’ from the public discourse on substance use (Moore, 2008), as well as a reluctance in critical writing on the NTE to acknowledge that genuine pleasure can result from a deregulated, neoliberal market. However, a more nuanced understanding of how young people’s pleasure is constituted can allow more holistic mapping of the material and subjective realities of their nightlives, complementing the already significant body of work on the risks and dangers for young people and young women specifically. It will also ensure there are accounts of young people’s alcohol use which foreground their experience and perspectives, and furthermore, can inform more effective social policies if harm minimisation is the priority. Finally, while the context of alcohol use is known to be crucial in shaping experiences of intoxication, the reverse – that is, how intoxicated subjectivities shape the NTE – is currently little acknowledged, something this paper attempts to remedy.

Research context

Newcastle Upon Tyne is the largest city in the northeast of England, with the metropolitan area of Tyneside home to around 800,000 people. Drinking and drinking culture are synonymous with the city and it has been the focus of numerous studies of the NTE. Its large student population (around 60,000 between its two Universities) is an important factor in understanding its nightlife.

This research focusses on licensed venues in and around the city centre and the NTE discussed is alco-centric and youth-oriented. Specifically, as a result of the participants, it reflects a student experience of the city, although many of the nights discussed were not ‘student nights’. Though studies of specific music scenes have contributed much valuable insight into the NTE, including in terms of gender (see for example Hutton (2016) in relation to rave and Riches (2015) in relation to metal), this approach runs the risk of creating a series of siloed analyses offering little to our understanding of the wider cultural context, in this case youth-oriented, commercial nightlife in the UK. As such the study was designed to address the NTE as the participants described it, reflecting the importance of specific scene cultures as noted by participants, while maintaining a commitment to understanding their nights out across such distinctions.

Research design and methods

Design

This paper derives from High Spirits: Young Women’s Pleasure in the NTE, a doctoral thesis completed in 2020, which introduced a serious consideration of pleasure into research on young women’s alcohol use in the UK’s NTE. The research was exploratory given the relative lack of work in this field; in terms of a research question, ‘what’s so good about going out?’ served as a simple yet surprisingly effective orienting post for both researcher and participants. The project was granted ethical approval from the Northumbria University ethics committee in 2016.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis and exploring experience

Given that pleasure’s highly subjective nature has been cited as a reason for its neglect in the study of substance use (Duff, 2008), interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was chosen as an appropriate approach to guide the research and analysis, offering as it does a framework for building understandings of subjective experience (Smith et al., 2009). Participant understandings of the NTE and their experiences in it were captured through hybrid ‘focus group interviews’ (FGIs) (Palmer et al., 2010) ² and their accounts are taken to both reflect and construct their lifeworld in relation to this social context. In discussing the suitability of FGIs for IPA studies, Palmer et al. (2010) suggest that such an environment allows participants to co-constitute narratives and provide multi-perspective accounts, and it was the case that the FGI allowed participants to contextualise, challenge and develop each other’s points.

Participants

Young people’s drinking cultures are multiple and complex, and delineating these in a top-down way, with reference to, for example, class and race, requires an intersectional analysis beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, in line with the overall aims of the project, categorisations such as these were held lightly with a commitment to building accounts of these young women’s social world from the ‘bottom up’. Inclusion criteria were minimal; participants were between 16 and 24 years old and the only other requirement was that they had been on a night out in the city. Initial recruitment involved purposive sampling with requests to take part made at the beginning of lectures across two university faculties. Snowball sampling also contributed; some participants were friends or housemates of those who heard about the FGIs in their lectures. Consequently, 27 women were recruited.

All participants were white university students, and as my analysis demonstrates their student status was a major feature of their experience. While university attendance has historically been taken as a proxy for middle class, the ‘massification and democratisation’ of higher education (HE) (Reay, 2016) means that the traditional student stereotype (white, adolescent and middle- or upper-class) has given way to a much more diverse and heterogenous groupings and, indeed, hybridities (Crozier et al., 2019). Participants in this study represented a mix of student types, including those from the region living at home, those from the region living in student accommodation, and those who had moved to the city. The sample therefore represents a distinct, though perhaps not unique, demographic – young, white, students, living in and experiencing the NTE of a post-industrial northern city. Though the findings should not therefore be read as representative of all young women, they present an element of the UK’s youth-oriented NTE worthy of exploration. In presenting the findings, pseudonyms are used for all participants.

Data collection and analysis

Data collection took place in 2017 and seven FGIs with between three and five participants were conducted. FGIs were formed by self-selecting peer groups, were semi-structured and lasted around an hour (±10 minutes). Interview questions were intentionally broad and open-ended, and the tone was informal and light-hearted, with laughter common in each session. Discussions centred on their knowledge of the city’s nightlife, their understanding of how their experience of the city was gendered, and their perspective on what made for a ‘good night’ out.

Writing on IPA does not provide a prescriptive nor definitive account of how to analyse the dataset but rather denotes an analytic focus, namely how people understand their experience. The researcher is therefore engaged in what is termed a ‘double hermeneutic’– making sense of participants’ sense making. In terms of its procedure, my approach was largely informed by Palmer et al. (2010), who provide a protocol for approaching data which takes account of both the experiential claims of participants and interactional elements of the FGI. Adapting their protocol, my analysis maintained the IPA inspired focus on experiential accounts.

Analysis began with a process of open coding and codes were taken as ‘objects of interest’ with experiential claims highlighted for further attention. This first phase of analysis was characterised by a ‘hermeneutics of empathy’ (Smith et al., 2009: 36), attempting to construct meanings from the text itself, without (explicitly and/or intentionally) importing theoretical perspectives. Open coding of all transcripts led to the generation of over a hundred codes which were drawn together to form themes. Then began a more in-depth analysis, moving towards abstract insights and a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Smith et al., 2009: 36) – questioning and problematising participant claims. Abstraction and subsumption of codes and themes continued until three overarching areas of interest were identified. These were the pleasures of the NTE itself, pleasures of the interactions therein and the pleasures of the self. This paper discusses the first of these, detailing features of the NTE that help constitute and are in part constituted by the pleasurable, opened-out subjectivities women embody in this space. Four themes are introduced: There is something for everyone; You can feel you belong; Anything can happen (and many fun things do); and The collective: being one of many. These themes are understood to represent women’s experiences in, and beliefs about, the NTE, revealing the lifeworld they inhabit.

The analysis presented isolates aspects of the NTE for consideration and should be understood as representing one facet of a multifaceted, and complex, social experience: how interactions (with both ‘friends and foes’) and altered experiences of the self (centring beauty work and intoxication) contribute to pleasure in the NTE are beyond the scope of this paper, although they are detailed elsewhere (McBride, 2020).

Findings: What’s so good about going out?

There is something for everyone

Discussed with great enthusiasm, excitement and laughter, the NTE these young women described is one rich in terms of variety and choice. Alcohol and its effects are important features of this NTE and the low cost of alcohol was a particular selling point, enabling participants to go out and drink a lot and/or go out often; Newcastle was consistently described as a ‘heavy drinking scene’ where there is something happening every night of the week (Amelia, FGI2). Participants were under no illusions as to the potential dangers of drinking too much and the possibility of over-doing it when the drinks were so cheap; Ellie (FGI2) described the city as ‘really cheap, dangerously cheap’. Many had first-hand experience of getting too drunk and for example, losing their possessions or falling over. Still, this risk was hardly a deterrent, and all spoke of their delight overall.

The party-like atmosphere participants pursue is closely related to crowds and as Lauren (FGI4) notes, ‘if you go out every night in Newcastle there is bound to be loads of people’. The kind of people constituting that crowd is equally important and a sense of belonging was clear when participants discussed their own preferences for nights out. Many, though not all, of the nights they attended were ‘student nights’ and when out there was a clear desire to be around other young people, with much discomfort described at seeing older clientele. For example, Lauren (FGI4) shared the following:

I went to Discos and there was loads of men dressed in, I don’t know, stupid outfits but they were like really old. I’m not talking 40s, 50s I’m talking 60s practically 70s. Like still partying. I didn’t know where to put myself, thinking maybe this isn’t for me tonight, I think I’m going to find somewhere else to go this isn’t my scene. It was proper uncomfortable.

Lauren is describing a bar she usually enjoys, playing music she likes. However, there was a different crowd to the one she was expecting, and the presence of older people gave a sense that the environment was not ‘for her’. The discomfort she described was noted by other participants and was tied to the feeling of being scrutinised by people of their parents’ age; feeling free from surveillance was an appealing aspect of nights out and is discussed below. Carey and Tanya (FGI5) suggested that the discomfort is mutual when younger and older clientele mix in the NTE, foregrounding that simply being among people you identify with is central to their understanding of a good night out. This requires that you find your crowd among the city’s scene, which Amelia (FGI2) believes is an achievable end:

That’s the best thing in Newcastle, there’s literally one thing for everybody. There is every single scene.

The scenes described revolved around music, atmosphere and/or clientele and their abundance was discussed at length as a strong selling point for the city. Participation in these scenes was presented as relating to preferences and not to exclusionary social practices nor strict dividing lines; as Marion (FGI2) notes ‘you can pre- [drink] with a load of people and they’re all off out to different places’. Given Amelia’s assertion that there is something for everyone, choosing where to go is a performative act of individual and collective identity and one which allows for significant variation; no FGI described being part of one scene exclusively. Instead, different moods and intentions led to different choices of night out as Gemma noted (FGI6):

It’s like whatever, however, whatever night out you’re wanting, there is somewhere for it. So, you can go dressed up or you can go just jeans and trainers …

Here Gemma links finding the right kind of night to dress codes (formal and informal). This is an important aspect of scenes and is given further attention below. On this topic, as many others, the participants demonstrated a high degree of expertise, and cultural capital regarding this social context which they failed to acknowledge, generalising their experiences and perspectives to the experience of all those in the NTE.

You can feel you belong

Fitting in by looking right

A visible, and often striking, feature of the NTE is people’s appearance, an important aspect of scenes and a means of fitting in. While dress codes can be set by venue management and enforced by door staff, for most participants ‘the dress code is like what other people kind of expect you to wear’ (Amy FGI1). As Gemma’s comment above makes clear, this is not about different people, so much as about the same person on different nights, in different moods.

Decisions on attire were made at the group level; friends decide the kind of night they want and dress appropriately. The agreement between friends ensures they will fit in where they go, a central concern for many; several participants had experienced being inadvertently out of sync with the appearance of others, with examples of being both under- and over-dressed. This is an unpleasant experience, as Amelia (FGI2) describes:

That’s the thing you can go like that but like you feel a bit odd one out … not just the same.

Feeling ‘the same’ by aligning yourself with the expectations of looking good (however that is conceived) is an important part of going out, and this is true across the board in terms of the scenes described.

In contrast to research which suggests beauty work and appearances are a source of stress and tension for women in the NTE (Bailey et al., 2015; Nicholls, 2018), in this sample getting dressed to go out was described in positive terms, with descriptions of intimate time with friends and the creativity of make-up application highlighted as sources of pleasure. ‘Dressing up’ was presented as one option among many, rather than a pressure to conform. For example, while Amelia (FG2) preferred, in general, casual nights out she added ‘sometimes me and the girls are like “oh I feel like getting dressed up”’. In terms of its social function, appearances are a means to signal to other revellers that you share the desire for a certain kind of night. Sensitised to the expectations of a given scene, you help constitute it through your presence, and in doing so enjoy a sense of belonging there.

For those venues who do operate dress codes, Tanya (FGI5) imagines there is a type of feedback loop between venues and their clientele:

[Getting dressed up] probably started as a social context then it probably … then the people who run the club said ‘well everyone looks better in this’, so for photos of the club …‘we’ll get everyone to dress up like that and everyone will have this vision of the club’.

Dress codes can be part of the management’s ‘vision’ and Tanya points to the importance of the reputation of venues to provide a certain type of experience; hosting an attractive clientele raises the profile of the venue in question. This reputation is mediated to some extent by the marketing practices of the venue but significantly, these practices incorporate material provided by customers – photographs taken in the clubs are often tagged on social media, essentially generating free publicity for the venue. In becoming part of the venue’s marketing, customers are further embedded as members of a scene and in doing so help constitute the scene itself.

Matching moods and atmospheres

In other descriptions of scenes, there was a clear link to atmosphere. Again, choice was emphasised by participants with Andrea (FGI1) noting that ‘whatever your mood there’s somewhere you could go to’. While most spoke of their enjoyment of the various types of ‘buzz’, as with dress codes, there was the chance of finding yourself at odds with the crowd. Lindsey (FGI2) reported the following:

I went out … for Halloween and I was with people from work. And it was mint because obviously I love my friends at work but we went into somewhere and they were playing hip-hop and stuff like that and I was like ‘what is this’, and my friends are going ‘do you not know any of these songs’, and I’m like ‘no’. And I was just not enjoying it and the different types of people that were in there … they just weren’t my people either. You could see lads trying to pull lasses and I was like ‘I divvint like it in here, please get me out’, and then we went to the Crown which is your rock and indie music, and I was at home.

Lindsey’s dislike of this space is bound up in several considerations some of which are clearly the result of NTE design, for example she did not know, or like, the music playing. However, she did not relate to the people there either and of particular concern was the sexualised atmosphere in which men’s efforts ‘to pull’ were visible to her. This may be related to design, but is also the result of customer participation (or not in Lindsey’s case). Her friends’ choice to go there in the first place indicates the multiplicities of desired night, even within a friendship group. The solution to clashing desires is in this instance to find a space in which you do feel aligned; and given the popularity of this NTE, this was possible. Lindsey’s successful petition to her friends to ‘get [her] out’ resonates with the many studies showing that women’s safety work in the NTE is performed within and between groups of women (Fileborn, 2016), here fostering a sense of belonging with a friendship group in the first instance while a wider sense of belonging within a scene was sought.

Clearly, the NTE is not a space in which everyone’s desires are consistently met, far from it – it is possible to experience deep discomfort as exampled by participant accounts of encountering older clientele, being over/under dressed and feeling unsafe in particular atmospheres. Still, these stresses and tensions of the NTE must be read against of backdrop of successful pleasure seeking – finding your crowd, looking good and feeling good are, for these participants, very achievable goals, including for Lindsay who was quickly able to find somewhere she felt ‘at home’, which points to a deeper sense of belonging than simply liking the music.

Feeling like you ‘fit in’ in is central to enjoyment of the NTE and in its scenes and pleasure is linked to the mutuality of appearances and affects, which extend far beyond the group you have gone out with. Importantly this is driven by the participation of consumers as much as it is the producers of the NTE. As I go on to argue, participation in collective affects is what imbues nights out with their clear appeal and this feeling of mutuality informs what I term an opened-out subjectivity.

Anything can happen (and many fun things do)

In other discussions of atmosphere, the ‘transgressive ambience’ (Hobbs et al., 2005: 93) which can characterise nightlife was highlighted, and participants described a context in which unusual and unpredictable behaviour is to be expected. Talking to strangers and forming ‘fast friendships’ is one important aspect of this. Singing and dancing with abandon were also commonly noted, with dancing on tables standard in one city centre bar. Even public vomiting can be seen in the joyful light of NTE participation as Lauren (FGI4) describes:

And then every night that we’ve been out in Newcastle and we’ve left Temple she’d spewed in the middle of the road, so that just makes my night. I just think it is so funny like she has walked across the road while spewing, it’s just hilarious. Because she’s not like ill, she’s alright she’s just being sick and it’s just proper funny.

[Laughter]

In describing what made her nights out enjoyable Lauren (FGI4) went on to note:

[Having a good time with your friends is] just being freaks isn’t it? That’s what you do. [Laughter] But you do, you just fanny on with each other, grabbing hold of each other.

These atmospheres of social inversions are, for the most part, experienced as liberating and fun, as in Lauren’s comments where the physical intimacy of grabbing each other and the shared transgression of social norms (‘being freaks’) is central to the pleasure experienced.

Beyond friendship groups, participants described a buzz in Newcastle after dark with parts of the city, quite literally, taken over by those out for a night of drinking, as Lisa and Val (FGI3) explain:

Lisa:

Like compared to other cities pretty much every night there’s something on … it is a bit manic and there’s people everywhere, and it’s not just like people in the club then on the streets it’s quiet. Everyone is out, it’s so busy

Interviewer:

So is that a good feeling or a bad feeling for the street to be full?

Lisa:

I like it.

Val:

I love it.

Lisa:

I mean obviously you’ve got to watch some people because if it is so busy then like … and you just see people walking across the road and you’re like ‘there’s a car there you know’.

Part of the NTE’s appeal is the highly charged atmosphere Lisa describes as ‘manic’, an energy not confined to bars and clubs but spilling over into the streets and in her example, onto the road. This buzz is linked to crowds of people, who are ‘everywhere’.

An important part of this atmosphere is the excitement generated through the relaxing of social codes and the permissive attitude to public behaviour the NTE offers. As Lisa’s final comment notes this transgressive ambience is not free from risk but rather entangled with it – both for those who need to ‘watch some people’ and for those who risk their own safety with carefree/careless behaviour (e.g. walking in front of cars).

Young women’s accounts of atmosphere and of social inversions signal the extent to which an openness to what you encounter in the NTE is required to pleasurably engage in it. In providing a social context in which distinct codes of acceptable behaviour (and appearances) are operative, and the unexpected is to be expected, the NTE becomes a space in which people experience themselves and their relationships to others differently; that is, they inhabit a subjectivity characterised by opening-out towards the very many possibilities of the context and the collective.

The collective: Being one among many

Crowds and their potentials are central to the pleasures experienced in the NTE, as Georgia (FGI5) commented ‘I don’t mind how big or small [the club is], as long as it’s busy, as long as it’s full of people’. Three facets of these pleasures are here outlined: Being in sync; Everyone is in the same boat; Collective intention for fun.

Being in sync

Though friendship groups and fellow students were described as central to the social pleasures of the NTE, the wider network of consumers was frequently invoked to explain the appeal of nights out:

Eleanor:

And loads more people being in the same position. Like everybody … instead of just five of you sitting in the living room getting drunk, the fact there’s hundreds of youse in this one club or whatever, all just going off

Lauren:

And when that song comes on that every person in that club loves, and everybody’s jumping to it – that is amazing. Like when everyone’s got their arms up or something because they’re jumping to it. I love that.

Alli:

Everyone is doing the same thing.

Eleanor:

It’s brilliant.

Lauren’s comments reveal the multifaceted ways in which feelings of connection to the crowd emerge. There is the shared love of the song but also a shared physical and demonstrative response to that – arms in the air, jumping – bringing the crowd, quite literally, in sync with one another. Of course, many people (including the staff) may not share this experience, yet from Lauren’s perspective her joy is tied to its shared nature. The ‘going off’ Eleanor mentions is a reference to the sense of release the NTE can provide, a release from the routines and modes of daily life, and a release into a joyful, collective experience of being subsumed into the crowd.

The nature of this collective affect is a key feature of a good night in the NTE and as noted throughout FGIs it is one related to connection, excitement and joy:

Eleanor:

Here everyone is so happy and bubbly like I’ve never seen anyone raging here, anyone that’s going to be like, I feel like ‘oh my god I don’t want to go near them’. Everyone is so like buzzing and in a good mood that I’m like ‘yeah’.

Lauren:

This is what I like, this is why I need to be here.

Eleanor’s description (‘happy’, ‘bubbly’) conjures an atmosphere that is dynamic and energetic and echoing comments in other FGIs which signal the entangling of pleasure and risk, she notes the possibility of this excitement tipping over into other high intensity emotions such as aggression. Yet, when in the collective good mood she describes, Lauren feels affirmed in her sense of belonging and that she is where she should be.

Everyone is in the same boat

Feeling on the same wavelength as others was central to pleasure and across descriptions of scene. One feature of this was the carefree feeling enabled by a mutuality of pleasure-seeking, as FGI4 makes clear:

Eleanor:

I feel like if you make a fool of yourself, it doesn’t matter

Lauren:

It doesn’t matter if you are shit at dancing, you can dance the night away and no one cares. Like no one is looking at you, thinking she’s looking bad.

Eleanor:

Everyone’s in the same boat, everyone is doing horrific dance moves. But because you’re all drunk, it’s brilliant, nobody cares.

The freedom to act without judgement from others –‘no one is looking’, ‘no one cares’ and ultimately ‘it doesn’t matter’– is fundamentally connected to the fact that ‘everyone is in the same boat’ and in allowing others to act freely and without judgement, participants experience this freedom themselves. The disinhibiting effects of alcohol are clearly part of feeling free to act in a carefree manner, but the relational nature of this experience is crucial to note; the pleasures of this disinhibition require some ‘buy in’ from those on nights out and in embracing this they help constitute the atmosphere they so enjoy.

Collective intention for fun

A sense of connection to the crowd, specifically the feeling of a shared mindset, were also central to the pleasures described. Discussing a student union-organised bar crawl, FGI5 explained how their enjoyment was linked to this:

Interviewer:

… So what was so good about that night?

Carey:

I don’t know, I think it’s because like everyone …

Tanya:

Everyone was in the same mood, was doing the same thing

Carey:

Yeah because like it was like everyone’s … It was on the Sunday at the start of Fresher’s week so everyone was in a good mood. Everyone was just like ‘this is one of my first nights so I’m going to have a mint night’.

In explaining their good time, they do not invoke the venues, music, drinks or any aspects of NTE design; instead, it is about being in the same state of mind as those you are out with, which Carey describes as a ‘good mood’ and one linked to an intention to have a ‘mint night’.

Moods and atmospheres are here understood to be generated in part by the collective mind-set of those on nights out. Zinberg’s (1986) seminal work on substance use identifies ‘mind-set’, drug and setting as mutually informing experiences of intoxication. Though this has typically been applied to individuals, in doing so we flatten accounts and lose sight of the fact our own mind-set exists in relation to those around us. In linking these collective good feelings to their own enjoyment, young women’s pleasure is shown to be grounded in orientating themselves towards, and contributing to, these shared mind-sets. That is, their pleasure is grounded in an opened-out subjectivity, oriented towards the collective.

Limitations and future work

Throughout the analysis my focus has been on young women and their experiences in a youth oriented and alco-centric corner of the North East’s NTE, to articulate a rich and real set of situated knowledges, as shared by the participants. Given the large body of research showing that experiences of the NTE are gendered, racialised, classed and otherwise patterned along structural lines, these findings cannot be read across demographic groups. However, subsequent enquiry can explore how the pleasures of other groups are constituted. Of particular importance, given research on women’s experiences of sexual harassment by men in the NTE, would be understanding how men make sense of their good times. Beyond this, different age brackets and/or those who occupy ‘alternative’ nightlife spaces (such as LBGTQ+ people) also present opportunities for further work.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that pleasure is a central feature of nights out, though it is largely absent in the scholarly debates on young women’s use of the NTE. The analysis has shown how experiencing an abundance of choice, attention to appearances and contributing to desired atmospheres, create ‘scenes’ which are constituted through people’s participation. The importance of feeling part of this (chosen) collective has been shown to be central to the pleasures of nights out and the emergence of an opened-out subjectivity, a deeply relational and context specific sense of self, has been offered as a means to conceptualise the foundation of this pleasure.

The heavy drinking which was the focus of many seminal pieces of research on the UK’s youth oriented NTE is evident in these young women’s accounts. However, rather than framing their consumption as a reaction to the (neoliberal) conditions of their lives, as a calculated hedonism (Szmigin et al., 2008) or licensed transgression (Griffin et al., 2018), this research emphasises a productive understanding of their collective experience; the joyful feeling of connection and mutuality and the freedom they experience which is a result of their shared disinhibition. If this is a ‘licenced transgression’ (Griffin et al., 2018), it is crucial to note that the ‘licence’ to transgress is bestowed as much by those constituting the crowd in the NTE as it is by those understood to officially regulate the spaces and who have been the target of NTE critique (Hadfield and Measham, 2015). This insight helps blur the distinction between producers and consumers in the NTE, showing consumer’s active participation is what helps produce the atmospheres and thereby the appeal of such space. Recognising this can foster new conceptualisations of the mainstream NTE as a space of creative social engagement, deserving of scholarly attention. In taking seriously the desires, drives and possibilities of young women in the urban night, we might consider how their pleasures may be otherwise achieved, beyond the deregulated and excessively commercial context the mainstream NTE is said to represent.

While previous research has emphasised what young adults are escaping through their engagement with the NTE and particularly through alcohol consumption, my analysis emphasises what they are getting into: a sense of connection with those united in time, space and the intention to have a good time. In this sense, the findings echo 1990s research on ‘subcultural’/alternative nightlife, which emphasised the collective good feeling of young people in such scenes. Crucially the findings of the current study shows that such pleasure is being achieved in the mainstream and thus can be placed more readily in conversation with the politico-economic critiques of this context.

While in the current NTE context the desire to connect to the collective affect can be read against a backdrop of the pervasive neoliberal sense-making in which the individual is paramount, it can also be understood as a drive that predates this context; it is one that will find expression and satisfaction in culture, be it in churches, protests or football matches. In anthropology, concepts such as communitas (Turner, 2012) and collective effervescence (Durkheim, 2008) have been employed to capture the sense of collective high spirits. The descriptions of a good night provided by these participants resonate with Bunton and Coveney’s (2011) notion of ecstatic pleasure, which links once ceremonial (and thereby collective) pleasures to contemporary cultures of intoxication. These connections have been particularly well studied in regard to ecstasy and rave culture in the 1990s (see St John (2004) for an overview of this literature), but have until now, been largely absent in considerations of the mainstream, alco-centric NTE.

In anchoring my analysis in the embodied, affective and pleasurable dimension of young women’s NTE use, the paper necessarily foregrounds their experiences and perspectives. Setting their understandings of the NTE against the experiences of other users, particularly in terms of exclusionary practices (Hadfield, 2015), is beyond the scope of this paper but presents fruitful opportunity for future work as noted above. In articulating the pleasures they take (and contribute) to the NTE the paper stands to enrich the large, and growing, body of research on young women’s use of this space. Crucially, and in contrast to the majority of scholarship in this area, the findings signal new trajectories for research which acknowledge the pleasures and possibilities of the mainstream NTE.