More, Now, Again
In many ways, life in college is like one big competition. If you’re not landing the coveted internship with J.P. Morgan, making the Dean’s List, playing college sports, or throwing the best parties—you’re left in the dust. Now the competitions have moved into a whole different arena and college women are starting to play some serious hardball.
The typical Friday night at college has transformed from kicking back and enjoying a few beers with friends, to drinking battles between the sexes. While college men have traditionally been stigmatized as binge drinkers, recent studies show that college women—in some attempt to prove that they can be one-of-the-boys—are becoming more prominent culprits of the binge drinking culture. (While there can be many definitions of binge drinking, the accepted definition is five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more drinks in a row for women). As senior Syracuse University student Lisa Diebold told TIME magazine, “To be able to drink like a guy is kind of a badge of honor.”
TIME’s April 1 headliner article “Women on a Binge” reveals that binge drinking among college women is on the rise, which is making campus administrators a little uneasy. The University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, has seen a 67% increase in binge drinking among women between 1993 and 2000. Last year at Syracuse University twice as many women as men were rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and/or accidents as a result of excessive drinking. However, these statistics are not limited to large co-ed universities known for their wild parties. In fact, since 1993, women’s colleges have experienced a 125% increase in binge drinking, according to research released in late March by the Harvard School of Public Health. So, is female binge drinking a case of girl-pride gone wrong or is it just a new reality on today’s college campus?
Carolyn Hurwitz, the Sexual Assault and Women’s Health Coordinator at Georgetown University, says, “I don’t think that binge drinking is the way that girls claim their feminism.” Hurwitz, who was not at all surprised at the statistics in the TIME article, asserts that, “For a certain group it may be popular to drink as much as guys so not to be a light-weight. For others, it’s not a competition, but a form of socialization like ‘Work hard, Play hard’.”
Perhaps it’s this motto that’s caused Georgetown to see a 35% rise in women sanctioned for alcohol violations over the past three years. Students at Georgetown do not deny the social utility of drinking as sophomore student Pilar O’Brien said, “At the end of the week it’s time to drink because we’ve had a lot of work. … Drinking starts out with a social purpose and then things just get bad.” Yet, another sophomore, Chris Lowe, put it more simply adding, “a lot of girls go out just to get drunk.”
While most Georgetown students agree that women’s primary motivation to binge drink is not to compete with the boys, they do say that there is still a lot of pressure from guys to pound back the drinks. A female student, who was recently hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, said, “Girls get pressured into drinking because of guys. They want to prove that they can [drink a lot].” The boys, however, are not the only problem. Other girls also serve as instigators for binge drinking, as one student said, “Girls who don’t drink will look inferior to those who do.”
And, how do guys feel about girls who binge drink? Well, according to my informal survey, the results are mixed. Some guys think that binge drinking “makes them [girls] looser and more fun,” according to Lowe. Others strongly disagree. Mark Lukach, a junior at Georgetown, finds girls who binge drink very unattractive, but unfortunately it’s something he sees regularly. He recounted that two weekends ago he saw two dangerously drunk girls walking each other home and wanted to offer his help, but decided not to get involved.
Not only do women who abuse alcohol have a higher risk of becoming depressed, but binge drinking also has different physiological consequences for women. According to the TIME article, emerging research shows that liquor corrodes women’s bodies more quickly. Also, “as adults, women tend to develop liver disease 10 to 15 years earlier than men, even if women consume only a fraction of the daily alcohol that men do.” However, when asked, the Georgetown students had no idea that excessive drinking had different long-term health effects for women than men.
While many college women around the country pick up and pound beer after beer, many others have decided to refrain from drinking. In fact, the research conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health also showed that over the past few years an increasing number of women reported abstaining from alcohol altogether. As alcohol is becoming a bigger part of the college party scene, so are sexual assaults. Hurwitz revealed that three-fourths of the time drinking is directly involved in cases of sexual assault and rape. College women who chose not to drink may be safer from these horrible consequences, but their binge-drinking girlfriends may not.