Wilsnack says she has heard again and again from college women that they drink to "get in a party mood." This bears up even at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women school in South Hadley, Mass., a town so tiny it has but one bar. No matter. Before dances, women simply tend bar in their dorm rooms. "We are really shy when we go out. We are not confident," says freshman Chandrika Christie. "But if we drink, we put ourselves out there." Her friend Jenn Richardson says the objective is "to get drunk as quickly as possible." Richardson has built up quite a tolerance, so she says this usually takes her about five shots of hard alcohol, two ciders and a cocktail. The unshocking result: "I am more talkative, I meet new people, and yes, I remember them."

To public health officials, the most worrisome outgrowth of young women's shifting drinking patterns is a perceived shift in their sexual activities. Reliable statistics on sex are always hard to pin down, especially when the question is, "Did you get drunk and have a one-night stand?" But health educators at high schools are concerned by the stories they are hearing from students like Devon, a ninth-grader from Richmond, Va. Girls drink, she says, so they can "do stupid slutty things and hook up with as many guys as they want."

Then there is the obvious danger of disease. A study of high school alcohol-dependent students published this month by the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center found that 1 in 5 girls was infected with the herpes virus. Drunken women also suffer disproportionately from rape and sexual assault. "[Women] walking back to campus intoxicated wear a neon sign on their back: Mug me. Victimize me," says Georgetown's Kilcarr. Packaged like that, the antidrinking message has some bite. But for much of the past decade, many colleges have aimed their prevention campaigns exclusively at men. One favorite strategy has been to hang antidrinking posters over urinals. Indeed, one of the most convincing explanations for the spike in women's reckless drinking is that many women have simply shrugged off the negative effects of drinking as a guy's problem.

Schools are beginning to see it as an equal-opportunity issue. The University of Colorado at Boulder now dispatches female cops to advise women how to have a safe night on the town. "When you're drunk, you'll have sex with someone you wouldn't have lunch with," went one pitch, "so bring condoms." To underscore the message, the university recently stationed the blown-out wreckage of a red Honda Prelude at the center of campus. It was once driven by Alisa Harden, killed at 16 when she drank and drove into a mail truck.

Syracuse University has opted for a more touchy-feely approach. The school sends young female health educators to brief sororities on the dangers of excessive drinking. Associate dean Bergen-Cico presided over a recent session for 40 members of Alpha Chi Omega. Among other things, she told them what many already knew from personal experience: weight-conscious women tend to skip meals before drinking, to conserve calories, making them more easily affected by alcohol. One simple solution: make sure they eat a hearty meal before they hit the bars. Patrick Kilcarr of Georgetown finds that nutrition information can be an effective tool. He asks the women he sees to tell him what they drink on a given night; then he pulls out a small chalkboard and crunches the numbers for them. "They are often flabbergasted to see they're drinking 3,000 calories in an evening," he says. "These are women who eat salads and starve themselves all week. Once they see it visually, they begin to shift the choices they're making."

Even some bars that cater to young women are rethinking their priorities. This month one company will begin distributing "safe drink strips" to bars; the white cardboard rectangles turn a deep purple when dipped in a drink laced with the prevalent date-rape drug ghb. The strips, which cost just pennies to make, are certainly a promising step. But colleges are also lobbying bars to banish gender-based drink promotions ("Ladies Drink Free!"), which have proliferated in recent years. A consortium of city, community and Florida State University officials in Tallahassee has crafted a series of print and television ads that will begin running next month. "Gender-based drink specials. In this day and age?" intones one ad. "At the very least they're demeaning — at the worst they're dangerous."

Of course this assumes that women feel demeaned by deals that help them save hundreds of dollars each semester. After a fight, the University of Colorado at Boulder dissuaded bars immediately adjacent to campus from offering special promos to women. But now women just flock several blocks away to a joint called the Walrus, where they drink at a deep discount on Thursdays. An ad for the bar shows a pair of silken panties with the message, "Lose Something?" The bartender says a popular drink among female patrons is a mixture of Red Bull, Grand Marnier, Stoli Ohranj and orange juice. It is named after a vulgar phrase for vagina.

Some women are repelled by the very notion that it's physiologically impossible for them to drink like men. Dr. Charles Lieber, a professor of medicine and pathology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, has spent years studying the effects of alcohol on women's bodies. At one conference he delivered a paper detailing why women can't hold their liquor as well as men. He looked up and noticed that the women in the room were hardly applauding. "They were a bit offended," he recalls. "There's a tendency to reject anything that shows them as inferior. They don't want to admit the biological difference."

For that to change, today's young women may need to take a lesson from the early feminists who fought so stridently for temperance. Jodie Rosenbloom, a senior at Syracuse University, is striking out along that path. After drinking away many of her freshman-year weekends, she has gradually scaled back to a cocktail at happy hour or wine with dinner and feels much better for it. "I'm referring now to something I learned in a women's studies course I took," she says. "In the wave of feminism we're in right now, women shouldn't be emphasizing sameness with men. I don't think women gain any power in outdrinking a man, because it will always be at a standard set by the man. In drinking and everywhere else, women need to start setting their own standards." Now that would be girl power indeed.

— With reporting by Amanda Bower/ South Hadley, Rita Healy/Boulder, Steve Barnes/ Little Rock, Leslie Berestein/Los Angeles, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Jeanne DeQuine/Miami