Women On A Binge

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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."

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."