Women On A Binge

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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.