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Being a drinking woman in America can leave you feeling pulled between two extremes. On the one hand, you’re a thrill-seeking party girl enjoying the booze-tinged good times that men have enjoyed for centuries with impunity. On the other hand, you’re on a death march toward liver disease, breast cancer, and brain damage.
Let’s look at the first extreme. The stigma that used to hang on "women who drink" — think of the fallen hussies who used to populate the covers of pulp fiction novels — pretty much went out the window when the demure housewife stopped being the feminine ideal. Today, women who fly to Vegas for a weekend of drinking and debauchery are as acceptable and widespread as guys who change their kids’ diapers.
Pop culture has celebrated the female boozer over the past decade, giving us the vodka-guzzling romantic Bridget Jones, the Cosmo-swilling sophisticates in Sex and the City, and the most unrepentant lush to appear in a popular sitcom: Karen Walker, the tart-tongued socialite on Will & Grace. None of these women spent time in rehab, and that’s the way audiences liked it.
Now let’s go to the other, more solemn end of the Female Boozer scale. All the real-life girls gone wild have provided a population sample for the study of alcohol abuse not rivaled since the days of 18th-century London’s "Gin Lane." One morning, when I was hungover, I searched the Web for "women, hangovers." Alongside headache remedies, I dredged up these sobering statistics:
• Women get drunk more easily and stay drunk longer than men because a) they usually have less body mass — particularly less body water — in which to distribute the alcohol, and b) they produce less dehydrogenase (an enzyme that breaks down alcohol).
• A woman’s risk of developing liver cirrhosis is significant at less than two drinks per day, whereas a man’s risk isn’t significant until he consumes at least six drinks per day.
• Women who drink to excess experience more brain damage and sooner than males who drink the same amount.
• Women who consume two to five drinks per day have a 41 percent greater risk for breast cancer than non-drinkers. Also, drinking is associated with fertility problems, even for women who have less than one drink per day.
• Because alcohol is so easily absorbed into women’s bloodstreams, health complications tend to begin earlier in women — after 13 years of alcohol consumption compared to 22 years for men.
Boy, if I didn’t have a headache when I started this task, I sure did when I finished it. The prescription for avoiding all these short- and long-term ailments is, of course, moderation. That sounds reasonable — until you get to the definition of "moderate drinking" for women: one drink per day. One.
Well then, I’m a hopeless lush, it seems. Last night was a typical weekend night. At about five o’clock, after a long walk, I had my first beer of the day, a delicious, 12-oz. glass of the hoppy Belgian tripel Houblon Chouffe (9%). I followed that with a pint of Allagash White ale (5.5%). After that, my boyfriend and I walked to another bar and ordered dinner, over which I drank a whole bottle (about 25 ounces) of Saison DuPont Belgian farmhouse ale (6.5%). Finally, we walked home and watched a movie, during which I nursed a cocktail that contained one-and-a-half ounces of gin.
According to the standard scale that defines one drink as either 12 ounces of beer (at 5%), five ounces of wine, or one-and-a-half ounces of liquor, I figure that what I consumed over the course of the evening equalled about six-and-a-half drinks. The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and any other organization that monitors alcohol’s effects on the U.S. populace would probably classify my average Saturday night as a drunken spree right out of Leaving Las Vegas.
I’ll be the first to admit: this was not moderate drinking. This was weekend drinking — the little bacchanalia I throw for myself after a week of working hard and puzzling over the meaning of life. But in light of the dire health consequences listed above, it’s not only my weekend binges that are way out of line. So are the times I split a bottle of wine with a girlfriend, or taste eight small samples of beer at a festival, or, God forbid, order two martinis on the first night of vacation.
Is there any way a girl can occupy some median point on the scale between "drinks a little Chardonnay on the weekends" and "brings a flask to the office?" Clearly, I’m not the kind of person who’s trying to live forever, given my drinking habits and the handful of cigarettes I smoke each week (I know, I know, I’m going to quit!). But — surprise — I do care about my health. I exercise every day, eat a balanced diet, take vitamins, wear a seatbelt, and coat myself in SPF 15 when I’m out in the sun. And, yes, I monitor my consumption of alcohol — which is a bit like watching one’s weight: it’s universally considered to be a good idea, and yet the effort is often thwarted.
Serving sizes for alcoholic beverages have kept pace with the gargantuan food portions you find in many restaurants. The 12-oz. draught is long gone; most places serve beer in 16-oz. or even larger measures. Trendy bars fill 10-oz. martini glasses with straight, chilled spirits. Even wine glasses are huge these days. People like me, who enjoy wiling away an evening in a bar, hashing out the world’s problems with friends, commenting on the bartender’s iPod playlist, and having three, four, five — even six-and-a-half — pops, don’t need 20-oz. beers and 10-oz. martinis. What we need is a commitment to moderation. Whatever that means.
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