This morning I woke up with a hangover softly pulsing in my left temple. 
 
 I took a quick inventory: Last night I went from happy-hour drinks with a former colleague (two glasses of rosé— or was it three?), then to dinner with a friend (another glass of rosé), then to a nightcap with another friend (a beer). 
 
 I don’t make a habit of bar-crawling on weekday nights the way I did when I was in my 20s and working in D.C. Now I live in Los Angeles, where I’m a freelancer whose meetings mostly take place over coffee and whose friends are more likely to suggest we go for a hike than a cocktail. And so when I do end up having more than a single glass of wine with dinner, I don’t beat myself up about it. 
 
 But this morning was different. When I felt the twinge of a hangover, I immediately thought of an essay that I — and, judging by Facebook and Twitter, almost every woman I know — read recently. In it, writer Kristi Coulter makes a deft and passionate argument that modern women drink to excess to escape the realities of living in a still-too-sexist world. “I see that booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise,” writes Coulter, who is now sober. 
 
 Coulter describes blowing off steam after serving on a sexist panel at work by drinking Manhattans and eating some expensive tapas with her female friends. She calls out women she knows for inserting alcohol into every social scenario, from a morning walk through the farmers market to a trip to the waxing salon. “Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become,” she writes. 
 
 Her essay is getting a lot of attention because it’s incredibly well-written and because it does what all compelling trend stories do: It helps us notice something that is ubiquitous in our lives and draws some firm conclusions about the deeper significance. Naturally, Coulter’s firm conclusion — that women drink to cope with the pressures of living in a sexist society — has attracted some critics. In Slate, Nora Caplan-Bricker counters that “many men also spend their free time floating away from their problems on a river of booze. They don’t strike me as participants in an unrelated phenomenon.” We are all depleted by the demands of our lives, she writes. In other words, blame capitalism, perhaps, but not the patriarchy. 
 
 I don’t think Coulter is entirely wrong. But it’s also impossible to prove that she’s right. Like most women who call themselves feminists, I know that living in a sexist world shapes my life and choices. It’s probably why I feel “cleaner” with shaved legs and like to wear bright lipstick. In one specific instance, I’m pretty sure it’s why I was denied a promotion. In most cases, though, when it comes to decisions I make, it’s difficult to separate what is and isn’t related to the patriarchy. Do I feel more powerful with short hair because of the patriarchy? Do I pick my cuticles when I get nervous because of the patriarchy? Do I have a distant relationship with my mom because of the patriarchy? Did I get drunk last night because of the patriarchy? Who knows. 
 
 Women are also shaped by the culture we consume, which muddies the waters even more. Think Olivia Pope, the “Scandal” protagonist who self-medicates with red wine. (And always while wearing a white sweater, sitting on a white couch, never spilling a drop. It’s a perfect visual metaphor for Olivia’s need to be perfect in order to counter the twin demons of sexism and racism.) And Coulter mentions the women of “Sex and the City,” whose “f— it, let’s get cosmos” attitude is ancient pop culture history by this point. Women have a lot of models for booze as both a coping mechanism and a bonding tool. Are these shows merely reflecting real women’s propensity to drink to cope with patriarchy? Or, in drinking so much, are real women reflecting what we’ve seen so often in movies and on TV? I don’t know. 
 
 What I do know is that I don’t share Coulter’s experience of having my female friends insist that all social interactions be lubricated with alcohol — again, I live in Los Angeles, where there are always at least a few drivers in the group who aren’t drinking. But she did make me sit up and take note of the way wine is coded as part of bonding among women of my socioeconomic status. On the podcast I co-host with my friend Aminatou Sow, we are often drinking wine as we record. Some episodes even feature the “glug, glug” noise of us refilling our glasses. In our online store, we sell a portable wine tumbler branded with our podcast logo. We also discuss the patriarchy a lot. I’d never considered that the two things might be related. 
 
 Even if they are, I’m not sure that’s such a terrible thing. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never had a drug or alcohol problem, but for me, drinking with other women isn’t just coping or complacency. It’s often about plotting. Sometimes, a few glasses of wine with friends is what helps me connect my outrage with a plan of action. Under the influence of alcohol, I’ve decided to dump a dude who wasn’t treating me right, committed to revamping my career and, honestly, had a lot of fun. Perhaps some women who drink together are victims of groupthink and ignoring their problems. But I associate it with forming deep bonds. And maybe alcohol keeps some women silent. For others — myself included — it can embolden us to say what we were too afraid to say when we were sober. Drinking together does not always mean screeching and splashing in the shallow end of the hotel pool. 
 
 Maybe patriarchy does drive us to drink, just as patriarchy drives us to shave our legs and wear bright lipstick. Or maybe it doesn’t, and we get drunk for the same reasons that men do. Either way, I’m less concerned about what draws women together over a bottle of wine, and more interested in what we do once we get there. Coulter writes, “Work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that.” 
 
 I have a good idea about where to start. Let’s plot a revolution together. I’ll bring the wine — but don’t worry, you don’t need to drink if that’s not your thing. 
 
 Correction: This piece initially stated that writer Kristi Coulter described drinking half a dozen Manhattans with her friends. In fact, Coulter merely described drinking an unspecified number of “rye Manhattans.” ||||| I’m newly sober and dog-paddling through the booze all around me. It’s summer, and Whole Foods has planted rosé throughout the store. Rosé is great with fish! And strawberries! And vegan protein powder! (Okay, I made that last one up.) At the office, every desk near mine has a bottle of wine or liquor on it in case people are too lazy to walk the 50 feet to one of the well-stocked communal bars we’ve built on our floor. Driving home from work, I pass billboard ads for Fluffed Marshmallow Smirnoff and Iced Cake Smirnoff and not just Cinnamon, but Cinnamon Churros Smirnoff. A local pharmacy, the same one that fucks up my prescription three months in a row, installs self-service beer taps and young men line up with their empty growlers all the way back to Eye & Ear Care. 
 
 Traveling for work, I steel myself for the company-sponsored wine tasting. Skipping it is not an option. My plan is to work the room with my soda and lime, make sure I’m seen by the five people who care about these things, and leave before things get sloppy (which they always do). Six wines and four beers are on display at the catering stand. I ask for club soda and get a blank look. Just water, then? The bartender grimaces apologetically. “I think there’s a water fountain in the lobby?” she says. 
 
 There is. But it’s broken. I mingle empty-handed for 15 minutes, fending off well-meaning offers to get me something from the bar. After the fifth, I realize I’m going to cry if one more person offers me alcohol. I leave and cry anyway. Later I order vanilla ice cream from room service to cheer myself up. 
 
 “People love this with a shot of bourbon poured over it,” the person taking my order says. “Any interest in treating yourself?” 
 
 *** 
 
 That’s the summer I realize that everyone around me is tanked. But it also dawns on me that the women are super double tanked — that to be a modern, urbane woman means to be a serious drinker. This isn’t a new idea — just ask the Sex and the City girls (or the flappers). A woman with a single malt scotch is bold and discerning and might fire you from her life if you fuck with her. A woman with a PBR is a Cool Girl who will not be shamed for belching. A woman drinking MommyJuice wine is saying she’s more than the unpaid labor she gave birth to. The things women drink are signifiers for free time and self-care and conversation — you know, luxuries we can’t afford. How did you not see this before? I ask myself. You were too hammered, I answer back. That summer I see, though. I see that booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise. 
 
 *** 
 
 One day that summer I’m wearing unwise (but cute, so cute) shoes and trip at the farmer’s market, cracking my phone, blood-staining the knees of my favorite jeans, and scraping both my palms. Naturally, I post about it on Facebook as soon as I’ve dusted myself off. Three women who don’t know I’m sober comment quickly: 
 
 “Wine. Immediately.” 
 
 “Do they sell wine there?” 
 
 “Definitely wine. And maybe new shoes.” 
 
 Have I mentioned that it’s morning when this happens? On a weekday? This isn’t one of those nightclub farmer’s markets. And the women aren’t the kind of beleaguered, downtrodden creatures you imagine drinking to get through the day. They’re pretty cool chicks, the kind people ridicule for having First World Problems. Why do they need to drink? 
 
 Well, maybe because even cool chicks are still women. And there’s no easy way to be a woman, because, as you may have noticed, there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe you drink a little. Or a lot. 
 
 *** 
 
 The year before I get sober, I’m asked to be The Woman on a panel at the company where I work. (That was literally the pitch: “We need one woman.”) Three guys and me, talking to summer interns about company culture. There are two female interns in the audience, and when it’s time for questions, one says: 
 
 “I’ve heard this can be a tough place for women to succeed. Can you talk about what it’s been like for you?” 
 
 As The Woman, I assume for some reason that the question is directed at me. “If you’re tough and persistent and thick-skinned, you’ll find your way,” I say. “I have.” 
 
 I don’t say she’ll have to work around interruptions and invisibility and micro-aggressions and a scarcity of role models and a lifetime of her own conditioning. My job on this panel is to make this place sound good, so I leave some stuff out. Particularly the fact that I’m drinking at least one bottle of wine a night to dissolve the day off of me. 
 
 But she’s a woman. She probably learned to read between the lines before she could read the lines themselves. She thanks me and sits down. 
 
 “I disagree,” says the guy sitting next to me. “I think this is a great company for women.” 
 
 My jaw gently opens on its own. 
 
 The guy next to him nods. “Absolutely,” he said. “I have two women on my team and they get along great with everyone.” 
 
 Of course they do, I think but don’t say. It’s called camouflage. 
 
 Guy #1 continues. “There’s a woman on my team who had a baby last year. She went on maternity leave and came back, and she’s doing fine. We’re very supportive of moms.” 
 
 Guy #3 jumps in just to make sure we have 100% male coverage on the topic. “The thing about this place,” he says, “is it’s a meritocracy. And merit is gender-blind.” He smiles at me and I stare back. Silent balefulness is all I have to offer, but his smile wavers so I know I’ve pierced some level of smug. 
 
 The panel organizer and I fume afterward. “Those fucking fucks,” she says. “Ratfucks.” 
 
 What’s a girl to do when a bunch of dudes have just told her, in front of an audience, that she’s wrong about what it’s like to be herself? 
 
 What’s a girl to do when a bunch of dudes have just told her, in front of an audience, that she’s wrong about what it’s like to be herself? I could talk to them, one by one, and tell them how it felt. I could tell the panel organizers this is why you never have just one of us up there. I could buy myself a superhero costume and devote the rest of my life to vengeance on mansplainers everywhere. 
 
 Instead, I round up some girlfriends and we spend hundreds of dollars in a hipster bar, drinking rye Manhattans and eating tapas and talking about the latest crappy, non-gender-blind things that have happened to us in meetings and on business trips and at performance review time. They toast me for taking one for the team. And when we are good and numb we Uber home, thinking Look at all we’ve earned! That bar with the twinkly lights. That miniature food. This chauffeured black car. We are tough enough to put up with being ignored and interrupted and underestimated every day and laugh it off together. We’ve made it. This is the good life. Nothing needs to change. 
 
 *** 
 
 Do you remember the Enjoli perfume commercial from the 1970s? The chick who could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man? 
 
 I blame that bitch for a lot. For spreading the notion that women should have a career, keep house, and fuck their husbands, when the only sane thing to do is pick two and outsource the third. For making it seem glamorous. For suggesting it was going to be fun. And for the tagline she dragged around: “The 8-Hour Perfume for the 24-Hour Woman.” Just in case you thought you could get one fucking hour off the clock. 
 
 More tales of my first sober summer: I go to an afternoon showing of Magic Mike at one of those fancy theaters that serves cocktails to blunt the terrible stress of watching a movie in air-conditioned comfort. A few rows ahead of me, a group of women are drinking champagne through straws. They whoop and holler at the screen as though at an actual Chippendale’s. In the parking lot afterward, one of them says to the others: “Girl time! We have to claim our girl time.” “We’ve earned this,” another replies. And then they drive off in separate directions. 
 
 There’s always one person who can’t deal if someone isn’t drinking. 
 
 A baby shower is in progress at the nail parlor. Except for the guest of honor, everyone is drinking wine, lots of it. I wonder if the mom-to-be minds, if it feels like they’re rubbing it in. “Thank God there are places like this where we can have lady time,” a woman in a yellow dress says. She tells the mom-to-be she’s far enough along to have some wine. It seems important to her that the mom-to-be drink with them. I catch myself nodding. You, I think. Yeah, I know you. There’s always one person who can’t deal if someone isn’t drinking. 
 
 “I’m going to feel hungover by dinner,” a different woman says. “But it’s so worth it. How often do you get a chance to get away from your kids for an afternoon?” 
 
 I personally think this is an insensitive thing to say at a baby shower. 
 
 Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body? 
 
 I mean, what’s the big deal? Why would anyone want to soften the edges of this glorious reality? 
 
 *** 
 
 I run a women’s half-marathon on a day in August when temperatures are fifteen degrees above normal. It’s a — what do you call it — a horror show. But I finish and someone puts a finisher’s medal on me. I’m soaked, chafed, limping, and still triumphant. Until they say: “The margarita tent is right over there!” 
 
 A yoga studio where I sometimes practice starts a monthly “Vinyasa & Vino” event: an hour of fast-paced yoga in a hundred-degree room, followed by a glass of an addictive, dehydrating substance (made locally!). Oh, but it’s about mindful savoring, I’m told. Well, then. Apologies for thinking it was about mindful reciprocal advertising to an overwhelmingly female audience, and om shanti. 
 
 A local kitchen shop offers a combination knife-skills and wine-tasting class — yes, wine for people who have already self-identified as being so clumsy with sharp objects that they need professional instruction. 
 
 At the waxing salon, a cut-glass decanter of tequila is at the ready for first-time Brazilian customers, which — okay, you know what, that tequila was actually pretty helpful back in the day, and far be it from me to deprive other first-timers. 
 
 Is there nothing so inherently absorbing or high-stakes or pleasurable that we won’t try to alter our natural response to it? 
 
 But knives and booze, yoga and booze, 13 mile runs and booze? What’s next to be liquored up: CPR training? Puppy ballet class? (Not really a thing, but someone should get on it.) Is there nothing so inherently absorbing or high-stakes or pleasurable that we won’t try to alter our natural response to it? Maybe women are so busy faking it — to be more like a man at work, more like a porn star in bed, more like 30 at 50 — that we don’t trust our natural responses anymore. Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become. 
 
 Toward the end of summer I take a trip to Sedona and post a photo to Facebook that captures the red rocks, a stack of books, a giant cocoa smoothie, and my glossy azure toenails in one frame. It is scientifically the most vacation-y photo ever taken. 
 
 “Uh, where’s the wine?” someone wants to know. 
 
 “Yeah, this vacation seems to be missing wine,” someone else chimes in. 
 
 I go to a stationery store to buy a card for a girlfriend. I couldn’t keep it together enough to track greeting card occasions when I was drinking, so it’s been a while since I’ve visited a card shop. There are three themes in female-to-female cards: 1) being old as fuck, 2) men are from Mars, and 3) wine. 
 
 “Wine is to women as duct tape is to men…it fixes everything!” 
 
 “I make wine disappear. What’s your superpower?” 
 
 “Lord, give me coffee to change the things I can…and wine to accept the things I cannot.” 
 
 Newly sober women have a lot of wonderful qualities, but lack of judginess not one of them. I don’t just stand there mentally tsk-tsking at the cards. I actually physically shake my head at them like Mrs. Grundy. Are you sure you can’t change those things? I think. And have you stopped to think that if you need ethanol — yes, at this point in my sobriety I called wine ethanol, don’t you wish you could have hung out with me then? — to accept them, maybe it’s because they’re unacceptable? 
 
 *** 
 
 The longer I am sober, the less patience I have with being a 24-hour woman. The stranger who tells me to smile. The janitor who stares at my legs. The men on TV who want to annex my uterus. Even the other TV men, who say that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” What the fuck business is it of yours whether it’s rare or not? I think. 
 
 The magazines telling me strong is the new sexy and smart is the new beautiful, as though strong and smart are just paths to hot. The Facebook memes: muscles are beautiful. No, wait: fat is beautiful. No, wait: thin is beautiful, too, as long as you don’t work for it. No, wait: All women are beautiful! As though we are toddlers who must be given exactly equal shares of princess dust, or we’ll lose our shit. 
 
 And then I start to get angry at women, too. Not for being born wrong, or for failing to dismantle a thousand years of patriarchy on my personal timetable. But for being so easily mollified by a bottle. For thinking that the right to get as trashed as a man means anything but the right to be as useless. 
 
 “What,” says a woman I enjoy arguing with, “so they can get fucked up and we have to look after them?” 
 
 No, I tell her. We have to look after ourselves. 
 
 “That still doesn’t seem fair,” she says, not unreasonably. 
 
 We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating. 
 
 But who said anything about fairness? This isn’t about what’s fair. It’s about what we can afford. And we can’t afford this. We can’t afford to pretend it’s fine that everything we do or think or wear or say yes or no to is somehow wrong. We can’t afford to act like it’s okay that “Girls can do anything!” got translated somewhere along the line into “Women must do everything.” We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating. 
 
 We can’t afford to be 24-hour women. 
 
 I couldn’t afford to be a 24-hour woman. But it didn’t stop me from trying till it shattered me. 
 
 I am very angry with women that summer and then I’m very, very angry with myself. And I stay that way for months, trudging through my first sober Christmas and job change and flu and birthday and using that anger at every turn as a reminder to pay attention and go slow and choose things I actually want to happen. By the time summer comes back around I realize I no longer smell like eight-hour perfume. 
 
 *** 
 
 That second summer, I meet my friend Mindy outside San Diego, where her adopted son is days from being born. Mindy’s dark alleys were different from mine, but she walked them all the same and walked herself out of them, too. Sometimes, talking about the recent past, we blink at each other like people struggling to readjust to sunlight after a long, bad movie. More and more it’s the new that gets our attention: my new job, her newish and happy marriage, the book I’m writing and the classes she’s taking. The things we are making happen, step by step. 
 
 We spend the weekend moving slowly and sleeping late and — hypocritically — wishing the lazy baby would hurry up already. On Sunday morning we’re reading by the deep end of the hotel pool when the shallow end starts to fill with women, a bridal party to judge by what we overhear. And we overhear a lot, because they arrive already tipsy and the pomegranate mimosas — pomegranate is a superfood! one woman keeps telling the others — just keep coming until that side of the pool seems like a Greek chorus of women who have major grievances with their bodies, faces, children, homes, jobs, and husbands but aren’t going to do anything about any of it but get loaded and sunburned in the desert heat. 
 
 I give Mindy the look that women use to say do you believe this shit? with only a slight tightening of the eyeballs. The woman on the other side of her catches the look and gives it back to me over her laptop, and then woman next to her joins in too. We engage in a silent four-way exchange of dismay, irritation, and bitchiness, and it is wonderful. 
 
 Then Mindy slides her Tom Ford sunglasses back over her eyes and says, “All I can say is it’s really nice on this side of the pool.” I laugh and my heart swells against my swimsuit and I pull my shades down too, to keep my suddenly watery eyes to myself. Because it is. It is so nice on this side of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I can’t believe I get to be here. 
 
 This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers. ||||| Photo by Luca Francesco Giovanni Bertolli/iStock/Thinkstock 
 
 In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped. As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril. 
 
 Emily Yoffe Emily Yoffe is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. 
 
 A 2009 study of campus sexual assault found that by the time they are seniors, almost 20 percent of college women will become victims, overwhelmingly of a fellow classmate. Very few will ever report it to authorities. The same study states that more than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol. Frequently both the man and the woman have been drinking. The men tend to use the drinking to justify their behavior, as this survey of research on alcohol-related campus sexual assault by Antonia Abbey, professor of psychology at Wayne State University, illustrates, while for many of the women, having been drunk becomes a source of guilt and shame. Sometimes the woman is the only one drunk and runs into a particular type of shrewd—and sober—sexual predator who lurks where women drink like a lion at a watering hole. For these kinds of men, the rise of female binge drinking has made campuses a prey-rich environment. I’ve spoken to three recent college graduates who were the victims of such assailants, and their stories are chilling. 
 
 Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims. 
 
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 Experts I spoke to who wanted young women to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has become to give warnings to women about their behavior. “I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.” 
 
 The “Campus Sexual Assault Study” of 2007, undertaken for the Department of Justice, found that the popular belief that many young rape victims have been slipped “date rape” drugs is false. “Most sexual assaults occur after voluntary consumption of alcohol by the victim and assailant,” the report states. But the researchers noted that this crucial point is not being articulated to young and naïve women: “Despite the link between substance abuse and sexual assault it appears that few sexual assault and/or risk reduction programs address the relationship between substance use and sexual assault.” The report added, somewhat plaintively, “Students may also be unaware of the image of vulnerability projected by a visibly intoxicated individual.” 
 
 “I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. “But when your judgment is compromised, your risk is elevated of having sexual violence perpetrated against you.” 
 
 The culture of binge drinking—whose pinnacle is the college campus—does not just harm women. Surveys find that more than 40 percent of college students binge drink, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as consuming five or more drinks for a man and four or more for a woman in about two hours. Of those drinkers, many end their sessions on gurneys: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that about 600,000 students a year are injured due to their drinking, and about 700,000 are assaulted by a classmate in a drunken encounter. Some end up on slabs: About 1,800 students a year die as a consequence of alcohol intake. 
 
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 The site Compelled to Act, started by the grief-stricken father of a college-student daughter who died because of a drunken snowmobile accident, keeps a tally of alcohol-related death, including reports of students who perish due to alcohol overdoses, falls, and drownings. The typical opening weeks of school (except perhaps at Brigham Young University) result in stories like this one at the University of Maryland: In the first three weeks of the semester, 24 students were taken to the hospital for alcohol-related causes. Then police were called to an off-campus bar known for serving freshmen to investigate a stabbing involving underage students. 
 
 I don’t believe any of these statistics will move in the right direction until binge drinking joins smoking, drunk driving, and domestic abuse as behaviors that were once typical and are now unacceptable. Reducing binge drinking is going to require education, enforcement, and a change in campus social culture. These days the weekend stretches over half the week and front-loading and boot and rally are major extracurricular activities. Puking in your hair, peeing in your pants, and engaging in dangerous behaviors have to stop being considered hilarious escapades or proud war stories and become a source of disgust and embarrassment. 
 
 As a parent with a daughter heading off to college next year, I’ve noted with dismay that in some college guidebooks almost as much space is devoted to alcohol as academics. School spirit is one thing, but according to The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, when the University of Florida plays Florida State University, “Die-hard gator fans start drinking at 8 am. No joke.” I guess I’m supposed to be reassured to read that at the University of Idaho, “Not everyone is an alcoholic.” 
 
 “High-risk alcohol use is the one thing connected to all, and I mean all, the negative impacts in higher education,” says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law and author of The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University. He cites the problems of early student attrition and perpetually disappointing graduation rates. 
 
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 I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men. 
 
 If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate. Surely this University of Richmond student, acquitted in one of the extremely rare cases in which a campus rape accusation led to a criminal trial, would confirm that. 
 
 The federal government has taken steps to acknowledge the campus sexual assault problem by using the pressure of Title IX, which prevents sex discrimination in education, to require schools to improve programs to protect students from sexual assault and to deal more effectively with it. (Occidental College students filed a Title IX complaint against the school after administrators allowed a serial rapist to continue his studies.) Educating students about rape, teaching them that by definition a very drunk woman can’t consent to sex, is crucial. Also important are bystander programs that instruct students in how to intervene to prevent sexual assault on drunk classmates and about the need to get dangerously intoxicated ones medical treatment. 
 
 But nothing is going to be as effective at preventing alcohol-facilitated assaults as a reduction in alcohol consumption. The 2009 campus sexual assault study, co-authored by Krebs, found campus alcohol education programs “seldom emphasize the important link” between women’s voluntary alcohol and drug use “and becoming a victim of sexual assault.” It goes on to say students must get the explicit message that limiting alcohol intake and avoiding drugs “are important sexual assault sex protection strategies.” I think it would be beneficial for younger students to hear accounts of alcohol-facilitated sexual assault from female juniors and seniors who’ve lived through it. 
 
 Collective intoxication is intoxicating, one of the reasons that it’s been so difficult to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campuses. 
 
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 Of course, perpetrators should be caught and punished. But when you are dealing with intoxication and sex, there are the built-in complications of incomplete memories and differing interpretations of intent and consent. To establish if a driver is too drunk to be behind the wheel, all it takes is a quick test to see if his or her blood alcohol exceeds the legal limit. There isn’t such clarity when it comes to alcohol and sex. According to “Prosecuting Alcohol-Facilitated Sexual Assault,” a study by the National District Attorneys Association: “Generally, there is not a bright-line test for showing that the victim was too intoxicated to consent, thereby distinguishing sexual assault from drunken sex.” Bringing these cases is, the study notes, “an extreme challenge.” And college student victims rarely turn to law enforcement. Instead, often days later, they bring a complaint to campus authorities to adjudicate. 
 
 Some think changing the campus drinking culture requires lowering the drinking age from 21 years. The Amethyst Initiative, started by chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges, and the group Choose Responsibility both make the case that since most college drinking is illegal, that gives it the allure of the forbidden, encourages excess, and increases danger because students are reluctant to turn to the authorities when drinking gets out of hand. But changing the drinking age is a policy that’s gotten little traction. 
 
 Lake says that administrators often take an overly simplistic approach to curbing alcohol consumption. In the 1990s that meant crackdowns, which he says sent a lot of drinking off campus, probably elevating the risks. He says binge drinking is so entrenched it requires a multifaceted approach that includes coercion, enforcement, and social engineering. For example, he says weekends often begin on Thursday because many colleges have few, if any, Friday classes. “In the alcohol wars, you can see where battlefields are and where booze has beaten the academy,” he says. “The academic program has receded, and they’ve given up on Friday.” He says a full day of classes should be scheduled on Friday, and it should be a standard day for tests and exams. He says since millennials (like young people forever) keep vampire hours, unless there are evening alternatives on campus, those purveying alcohol will win. 
 
 And who is it purveying alcohol? In some cases it’s a type of serial predator who encourages his victim to keep pouring the means of her incapacitation down her own throat. Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes. Lake observes that these offenders can be campus leaders, charming and well liked—something that comes in handy if they are accused of anything. “They work our mythology against us,” says Lake. “We would like to see our daughters hang out with nice boys in navy blue blazers.” 
 
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 The three young women I spoke to who were victims of such men attended different colleges, but their stories are so distressingly similar that it sounds as if they were attacked by the same young man. In each case the woman lost track of how much she’d had to drink. Then a male classmate she knew took her by the hand and offered her an escort. Then she was raped by this “friend.” Only one, Laura Dunn, reported to authorities what happened, more than a year after the fact. In her case she was set upon by two classmates, and the university declined to take action against either one. 
 
 One of the rape victims was a senior who had been to a school-sponsored celebration where the wine flowed, then everyone went to a bar to continue the festivities. Her memories are fragmentary after that, but a male classmate came by. She remembers running down the street with him, then being in bed, then waking up the next day with her clothes inside out. She was sickened at herself for what she thought was cheating on her longtime boyfriend and confessed her infidelity to him. Ultimately that led to their breakup. 
 
 As she dealt with her shame and guilt, she talked to friends about that night, and the real story emerged. She was so intoxicated that her friends were worried about her when she stumbled out of the bar disoriented and without her shoes. They said they saw her being led away by the male classmate who was not drunk. She came to understand that she had been raped. “Since I realized it wasn’t my fault, I crawled out of a deep, dark hole,” she says. She also knew he’d done it before. “He had this reputation if you were going to be drunk around him, he was probably going to have sex with you.” 
 
 The young woman laments the whole campus landscape of alcohol-soaked hookup sex. “Women are encouraged to do it, which ignores all the risks for us,” she says. “You get embarrassed and ashamed, so you try to make light of it. Then women get violated and degraded, and they accept it. Who does this culture benefit? Alcohol predators. It doesn’t liberate anybody.” 
 
 I get what all the beer bongs, flip cup, power hours, even butt chugging is about. (OK, maybe not butt chugging.) It’s fun. In Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard, Ohio University sociologist Thomas Vander Ven got an inside look at what he calls “the shit show.” He writes, “To some university students, the decision to drink at college is a redundancy. To them, college means drinking.” Vander Ven documents the pleasure that group intoxication brings: the suppression of inhibitions and self-consciousness, the collective hilarity, the thrill of engaging in potentially perilous adventures, and the sense of camaraderie. Even nursing hangovers and regrets becomes a group endeavor, a mutual post-battle support group. Collective intoxication is intoxicating, one of the reasons that it’s been so difficult to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campuses. 
 
 I know many people will reflect on their own bacchanalian college experiences with nostalgia and say the excesses didn’t hurt them—at least what they’re able to remember. So I will present myself as an example that it’s possible to have fun without being drunk. I enjoy moderate drinking and have only been hung over three times in my life. I have never been so drunk that I browned out, blacked out, passed out, or puked from alcohol ingestion. Still, as a young person, I did my share of fun, crazy, silly, stupid, and ill-advised things. But at least I always knew that I was responsible for my behavior, not the alcohol.
– A recent essay on Quartz by Kristi Coulter has been making waves on social media, with a (now-sober) Coulter saying she thinks 21st-century women guzzle too much hooch to forget about the sexist world we live in. Ann Friedman offers her own take, writing for the Washington Post that even though she takes some of Coulter's "well-written" points to heart, she's not completely on board with Coulter's conclusion, noting it's "difficult to separate what is and isn't related to the patriarchy." "Did I get drunk last night because of the patriarchy? Who knows," she says, listing other woman-related issues (e.g., a penchant for short hair, picking at one's cuticles) that could theoretically be linked to a male-dominated society. Friedman lays out why she's reluctant to fully toast Coulter's thesis, noting many men also drink to deal with the day-to-day, and that pop culture—especially via boozy women protagonists on TV and in the movies—has much to do with it, too, presenting alcohol "as both a coping mechanism and a bonding tool." And she cites her own personal imbibing, relaying how her boozing sessions tend to serve a more active "plotting" purpose to direct her "outrage," with her drinking buddies serving as sounding boards. "Maybe patriarchy does drive us to drink, just as patriarchy drives us to shave our legs and wear bright lipstick," she concludes. "Or maybe it doesn’t, and we get drunk for the same reasons that men do. Either way, I'm less concerned about what draws women together over a bottle of wine, and more interested in what we do once we get there." (Her entire essay here.)