Among teenagers, boys who abuse alcohol become rowdy and randy, but studies show girls are more likely to become depressed. They also become susceptible to sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases. Perhaps most troubling, evidence is mounting that girls who begin drinking in their early teens have a greater chance than boys do of eventually becoming alcoholics. "Girls have a whole constellation of medical problems surrounding alcohol," says Dr. Duncan Clark of the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center. "We would anticipate that rates of alcohol abuse will ultimately equalize between men and women. That's a perverse kind of equality."

But while some health educators are already whispering of an epidemic, other researchers, armed with different data, contend that young women aren't closing the gap at all. Indeed, in Wechsler's study, while frequent binge drinking rose slightly more for women than men on all campuses, an increasing number of women reported abstaining from alcohol altogether. Critics claim that although it may seem that women are suffering more alcohol-related problems, the number of reports may be rising because researchers, who for years did not ask about unplanned pregnancies or sexual assault, are finally posing relevant questions. And then there's the theory that today's young women simply feel more comfortable raising their hands and admitting they drink.

Drinking has always had an uneasy relationship to women's freedoms. In Colonial America, women owned taverns but were frowned on for frequenting them. By the late 19th century, women, sick of tending to inebriated men in their midst, banded together to form the temperance movement. It was one of the first times women had a strong political platform, and many were soon using it to lobby for other freedoms, including suffrage. Yet drinking retained a special stigma. Not only did women do most of their drinking privately in homes or apartments, but they were also loath to publicly admit drinking too much. (When Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the late 1930s, only one of its 100 members was a woman.) The sexual revolution of the '60s went a long way toward ushering women's drinking — along with so much else — into the open. So did liquor companies, which began targeting women with ads in the mid-'70s.

Today, of course, you can't pick up a fashion magazine without seeing splashy liquor ads picturing women sipping themselves into various states of rapture. "Get in touch with your masculine side," instructs a recent Jim Beam ad, which depicts a woman puffing on a cigar. Flip on an episode of Sex and the City, and you are likely to catch Carrie Bradshaw and her friends blithely tossing back candy-colored cocktails at a downtown bar. But it's not only thirtysomethings on TV who persistently overindulge. On a recent episode of the Fox sitcom Undeclared, several college coeds go out to a bar, where one woman gets so drunk, she flashes her breasts. And Britney Spears recently starred in the film Crossroads, in which a trio of teens indulge in a spirited drinking session after raiding a motel mini-bar.

It's no wonder that girls today are four times as likely as their mothers to begin drinking by age 16. Molly, 23, of Little Rock, Ark., was just an adolescent when she began entertaining fantasies of how "it would be glamorous to be sitting on the beach in Miami with a long cigarette, drinking martinis." She first got drunk at 13, when a girlfriend urged her to drink wine coolers. Indeed, research has shown that girls often begin drinking not to impress boys but to endear themselves to other girls. In a study published last year of more than 1,000 Maryland sixth-graders, girls were twice as likely as boys to succumb to peer pressure to drink. The reason? While boys at that age bob among social groups, girls have already cleaved into powerful cliques. "Girls see a group of girls and are looking to try on their behaviors," says the study's author, Bruce Simons-Morton, a researcher with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

But it doesn't take long for the keeping-up-with-the-boys impulse to kick in. Elizabeth D'Amico of the University of California at San Diego coordinates a voluntary alcohol-intervention program in five San Diego high schools that have seen drinking rise among girls in recent years. The lunchtime discussion sessions are popular with girls — many boys prefer to air their views anonymously over the Web. "One of the main things they talk about is being at a party where their boyfriend hands them a beer, and feeling like, if he is drinking, then they have to drink it," says D'Amico. Lee Saltz, a consultant to the prevention and intervention program in the Los Angeles public schools, hears the same thing from the growing number of girls she counsels. "Equality is part of it," she explains. "We've been working very hard to get [girls] to that point: Yes, you can do math. Yes, you can play football. And yes, you can drink."

Women carry those chirpy mantras with them to college. "They are no longer confined by the stereotypical notions of femininity," says Devon Jersild, a journalist who talked with college-age women for her book Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman's Life. "They associate drinking with power, and they think that if they drink like a guy, they will be like a guy." At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where frequent binge drinking among women rose 67% between 1993 and 2000, women routinely brag of matching men in alcohol consumption. Sarah, 21, describes a "keg stand" — two friends suspend you by your ankles over a keg, and you guzzle as much cheap beer as quickly as you can — and beams: "There are girls who can go longer than guys!" It's not just other girls who are keeping track either. "Here, if a girl gets drunk, it's, 'You're awesome,'" says Don Groves, who graduated from the university in December. "Girls don't have to sit home and wait for their boyfriends, because they drink more than their boyfriends."

Often women drink to meet those boyfriends in the first place. According to Sharon Wilsnack, a professor in the neuroscience department at the University of North Dakota who has tracked the drinking habits of 1,800 women over the past 20 years, 60% of all drinkers said they felt less inhibited about sex. That was certainly true on a recent night at a bar near Syracuse University. The scene was at first reminiscent of a junior high school dance, as men and women self-consciously drank and chatted in separate huddles. As the night wore on, the groups slowly mingled and paired off. "That's pretty much the way it goes," observes a male bartender. "The girls that came in a group have left with guys."