Drinking dangerously cool among young women
There is no way to pretty up the relationship today between young women and alcohol. Frankly it’s a toxic mess.
As a mother who brought up her now 20-something daughter through the binge drinking culture — in both high school and university — I cannot tell you how it filled me with dread, from the “pre-drinking” in which young women would gather to drink copious amounts of wine before they even left the house for the party or bar, to its blurry aftermath. Who fell down the stairs? Is she all right?
I used to look around wistfully and see nothing but potential. These girls were a feminist dream — lovely, smart, privileged young women, told they could be anything or do anything, most of whom would thankfully go on to university degrees, good jobs and satisfying relationships. But I would worry, why oh why do they have to get drunk so often?
Therein lies a modern tale. It involves a three-way collision between a culture of female empowerment, paradoxically a frustratingly intractable problem of young women lacking self-confidence and thinking booze will be their “magic carpet ride” as one author puts it, and relaxed social mores that have convinced our girls it’s not only OK to drink like a man, it’s cool.
Except it’s not. Health agencies armed with statistics — binge drinking among women in the U.S. has increased at seven times the rate of men, nine out of 10 sexual assaults on campuses involve alcohol, women who drink heavily are especially at risk for breast cancer and other lethal diseases — are pushing back relentlessly with grim warnings.
The latest warning was a real bummer: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week issued an advisory to the 3.3 million U.S. women between 15 and 45 who consume alcohol that all sexually active women in their fertile years, should either abstain from alcohol or use birth control to avoid the risk of giving birth to babies with “fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.”
“The risk is real. Why take the chance?” asked the centre’s deputy director, pointing to a report that said three in four women do not quit drinking alcohol when they stop using birth control, and half of all pregnancies are unplanned. (Surprisingly, many researchers insist it’s the well-educated 30-somethings who don’t stop drinking while trying to get pregnant.)
With that advisory, the CDC seemingly sentenced an entire cohort of women to a decade or so without shots, mojitos and Pinot Grigio.
The outrage about the CDC warning was swift. It was called “puritanical” and “patronizing.” Women on every platform vigorously objected to being treated as nothing but baby incubators and being made solely responsible — as men aren’t — for the safety of their mythical unborn children.
It’s hard to reconcile that outrage with fetal alcohol researchers who maintain that even one glass of wine may harm your baby.
The baby may not end up with full blown fetal alcohol syndrome, but some of your child’s potential may be dimmed.
One young woman told me: “It’s not a rule or a law and I do not believe that if I have a glass of wine before I know I am pregnant there is a terrible risk.”
She said she was more bothered, working in the health sector, that health agencies aren’t making the connection clearer between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. (Many women don’t even know alcohol is a carcinogen.)
It’s going to take more than an avalanche of statistics to penetrate the denial around the specific health dangers to women of alcohol.
On Feb. 25, on the series Firsthand, CBC TV will premiere the documentary Girls’ Night Out, from White Pine Pictures, a hard-hitting look at young women and binge drinking, with university-age women speaking bravely about the way they drink — “We’re sooo wasted!!!” — one girl texts another.
Director Phyllis Ellis puts it bluntly: “Our girls are in crisis and they need our help.” There will be a live online town hall panel after the film, and, as part of an initiative called ReThinkTheDrink, the producers will then take the documentary to university campuses.
The movie was inspired by the book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, by author Ann Dowsett Johnston, who began warning in 2010 of risky drinking among women.
“I wanted to jump-start a public conversation about how we glamourize and overuse our favourite drug,” says Dowsett Johnston.
What strikes me is there is a straight line from the binge-drinking students in Girls’ Night Out (skid row meets perfect orthodontistry) to the CDC warning and the denial with which it was received. (To be clear, binge drinking will not harm your fetus if you don’t get pregnant while drinking. The alcohol has to be present in your system to do the damage.)
It’s not that women shouldn’t drink. But if binge drinking somehow became completely uncool, there would be a vastly different attitude toward responsible drinking in each phase of a woman’s life, up to and including pregnancy.
The most disturbing moment in Girls’ Night Out for me was not the sight of young women in tank tops funnelling booze. It was a quote from a student who said the lure of alcohol was so great that on a sunny day she would say, “Oh it’s nice outside. I want a drink.”
Now that’s scary. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.