Feminism is to be blamed for women drinking because we all know that back in the good old days of the 1950s women didn’t drink?

Duh.

They popped Valium back then. A far more lady-like substance to abuse, natch.

thanks!

It’s kinda like

“Slavery happened: Blame the Civil Rights Movement”

…wtf

Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

Quoting this number, on it’s own, is utterly useless. As one poster has already pointed out this number is meaningless is 55% of college students or more is female. I know that at my undergraduate institution the ratio of men to women was about 2:1, at my graduate institution its closer to 8:1. Without the context of the gender break down of college students these kinds of numbers are at best irrelevant and at worst misleading.

A second problem with citing a statistic like this is that it gives us little information as to the actual prevalence of alcohol abuse on college campuses by members of any gender. If rates are low then a gender breakdown number like that is essentially useless because it is highly susceptible to idiosyncratic factors within the relatively small sample size being examined. This is a particular concern given the fact that most studies of this sort are not broad population studies but studies of smaller sample groups that are assumed to represent the population as a whole. If you have 10,000 students on campus, and 500 of them participate in the study (an extraordinary feat), you have a pretty good sample size. If you’re only considering the people who meet a given clinical criteria within that 500 people, however, you run into a problem. If, say, 10% of the college population fits the criteria for alcohol abuse (a generous estimate) then your real sample is only 50 individuals for a population of 10,000.

Now that we have the stats out of the way, what is this “clinical criteria for alcohol abuse?” The DSM-IV-TR definition is as follows:

* A. A maladaptive pattern of substance use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by one (or more) of the following, occurring within a 12-month period:

1. Recurrent substance use resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations at work, school, or home (e.g., repeated absences or poor work performance related to substance use; substance-related absences, suspensions or expulsions from school; neglect of children or household)
2. Recurrent substance use in situations in which it is physically hazardous (e.g., driving an automobile or operating a machine when impaired by substance use)
3. Recurrent substance-related legal problems (e.g., arrests for substance-related disorderly conduct)
4. Continued substance use despite having persistent or recurrent social or interpersonal problems caused or exacerbated by the effects of the substance (e.g., arguments with spouse about consequences of intoxication, physical fights)

* B. The symptoms have never met the criteria for Substance Dependence for this class of substance.

Thats the actual clinical criteria for alcohol abuse that would go in your chart, but that doesn’t mean its an objective criteria. Depending on the questions, cut-off levels, and definitions you can game the statistic to fit any hypothesis. What working definitions were used, how was data collected, and what effect did patient privacy have on restricting the collection of this data? Who was making the call as to whether or not students fit the criteria? How did gender factor into perceptions about things like “failure to fulfill social obligations” or “social or interpersonal problems?”

Why doesn’t the author just save us all the time in the future and say what he means: drinking is for the menfolk?

Fashionably Evil, the temperance movement in this country was associated with women because it was a moral crusade (and because the women who drank weren’t rich WASPs and no one cared). Men abandoned their families when they drank, they forced their wives and children into poverty when they drank, they raped their wives when they drank (at a time when that was legal in every sense of the word); if eliminating alcohol from society really would stop all those things I might start thinking about it.

This article has inspired me to add a new Feministe category: Blame Feminism.

Now wait a minute here – you’ve had this blog for how many years, and you just now adding a Blame Feminism category?
talk about rose-coloured glasses.

ha!!!

sorry, that made my lunch-time martini spray right out my nose.