Girls Gone Wild

In the days leading up to Valentine's Day, many major magazines, newspapers, and web sites participated in a publicity blitz to offer helpful hints to hapless men regarding the best gifts to buy the woman in their lives. Chocolates, flowers, and jewelry still dominate most lists, but today's Wall Street Journal offered something else she craves that I would have never considered.

Booze.

Apparently, the United States and Great Britain have experienced a dramatic upsurge in heavy drinking by women--a 33 percent increase among those between the drinking age and age 24 over the last half decade. The paper offers this example of one woman's typical intake after a night out with her girl friends on a Friday night in London:

She says she drank a bottle of red wine, two cocktails, a shot of vodka and a glass of Baileys Irish cream.

It was a typical night out, says the 26-year-old civil servant, who says many of her friends drink as heavily as she does. "That's quite a lot. But normally I'm absolutely fine the next day," she says. "It's just what we do."

Or consider the exploits of a twenty three year old insurance broker, who offered this justification for a typical night involving four or five bottles of Smirnoff Ice coupled with seven or eight drinks at the local pub--"Sometimes we overdo it, but it's what we do to have fun."

The article is filled with those pleasantly daft moments of unintended humor. British police report an exponential leap in disorderly conduct among women, including late night catfights over taxi cabs. British comedy clubs requiring "behavior bonds" because of an influx of rowdy bachelorette parties. A Manhattan editorial assistant insisting that drinking games just level the playing field between men and women competiting for cash prizes ("We can play football or baseball with guys, but we aren't going to be at the same level competitively. Playing a drinking game, it's more skill and not brawn.")

This competitive quest by women to compete with men through binge drinking suggests feminism gone awry (or maybe a rye.) Medical evidence indicates that women playing a drinking game with men are demonstrating stupidity, not skill.

A 2002 TIME magazine article on the rise of female drinking notes that women usually get drunk faster than men, because their bodies tend to have a higher ratio of fat to water, which means the alcohol is less diluted when it enters the blood stream. Most women also possess lower levels of a key enzyme designed to break down alcohol. Worst of all, women tend to develop liver disease more than a decade faster than men, even if they drink much less per day.

The Wall Street Journal lays part of the blame on advertising and other marketing activities by alcohol producers eager to take advantage of this new growing market, such as Anheuser-Busch bribing the editors of top woman's magazines with free manicures and facials just for sampling a new series of fizzy, alcoholic fruit drinks.

However, a stronger urge than advertising may be the root cause of this behavior. A 20 year survey by University of North Dakota professor Sharon Wilsnack determined that 60 percent of female drinkers feel less inhibited about sex. Dr. Wilsnack's conclusion--women drink to get in the party mood. Or as one Mount Holyoke student told TIME, "We are really shy when we go out. We are not confident. But if we drink, we put ourselves out there."

So if you really love that woman of yours, maybe chocolate is the best approach for Valentine's Day, unless it's a chocolate martini.