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Issue date: 1/10/05 Section: Women's Issues

At a recent frat party, a stereotypical bleached-blonde wearing a pink shirt and dark jeans took a brief break from the night's partying to lean up against a wall with her friends. Without using her "inside" voice, she launched into a slurred recap of the night, "Did you SEE me? I was going shot for shot with [him] until he GAVE UP. THEN I went and drank three more!", before stumbling over to dance. Less than an hour later she was hugging porcelain in the bathroom, spewing her hard-won victory down the pipes.

Alcohol is nothing new on college campuses, for as long as students have been studying and working hard on the weekdays they've been drinking hard on the weekends. Over the past several years the number of students reporting binge drinking has remained roughly the same but the average amount of drinks imbibed at one sitting has increased over that time. Each year, roughly 1,400 college students die of alcohol-related causes, often car crashes, but also in incidents due to alcohol poisoning.

The issue gained national prominence earlier this school year after a series of high profile alcohol-related deaths across the nation's campuses. Among the most publicized cases was that of Samantha Spady, a Colorado State sophomore who went on an eleven hour drinking binge before passing out and dying in the back room of a fraternity house. Across the country, males are still more likely to binge drink than females (48% to 39%), but women are catching up.

While binge drinking as a whole did not increase significantly over the course of the nineties, with 43% of college students reporting it in 1993 and 44% reporting in 1999, in roughly that same time period students that reported frequent binge drinking at all-women's colleges increased an astounding 125%. The Journal of American College Health found that from 1993 to 2001, the amount of college-aged women reporting being drunk on ten or more occasions during the previous month increased threefold. In the early 1990s alcohol use among twelve to seventeen year olds was equal for the first time that such studies had taken place. Girls are managing to close the gender gap, but their recent successes would hardly make teetotaler Susan B. Anthony proud.

After working hard to catch up to men financially in the seventies and eighties, women are apparently working hard at breaking other, less glamorous gender gaps in the social structure. Traditionally, men have committed the majority of crimes, crimes that tend to be more serious and more professional than their female counterparts. However, women are increasingly breaking out of their traditional gender roles and catching up. Over the course of the 90s, the number of men arrested for assault decreased almost ten percent, but during that same time period the number of women arrested for the same crime increased 46%. These shifts hold true for drugs, auto accidents - the chance that a sixteen-year-old girl will get into a car crash increased 10% in the past decade - fighting and smoking, an odd push for equality. In sense, though, it is a feminist movement, or at least many girls that drink to excess see it as such.

Continued...

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