Women and alcohol – and facebook?

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that “Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.”  Specifically, for white women aged 35-54, the death rate increased from about 8 per 100,000 (it’s a graph, so that’s just an approximation from a dot) in 1997 to 18 per 100,000 in 2015.

Now, to be sure, that’s not a large number in absolute terms, but it is a dramatic jump, and the post pairs this with other graphics showing that

• White women are more likely to respond that they are “drinkers,” that is, having twelve or more drinks per year, vs. women of other races — 71% vs 47% of blacks, the next largest group.
• White women are more likely to drink more than once per week.
• Educated white women (college grads) are more likely than uneducated white women (no college) to be drinking multiple days per week — 14% vs. 6% drink twice a week, 6% vs. 3% drink three days per week, 7% vs. 2% drink 4 – 6 days per week, and 4% vs. 3% drink every day.
• 33% of white women “binge drink” (4 drinks in 2 hours), vs. 27% for Hispanics, the next-highest group, and that rate has increased 40% from 1997 to 2013 (during this time period the survey definition was 5 drinks in 2 hours; idiotically, they then changed the definition to completely eliminate comparability of numbers, so you can’t view changes since 2013).
• Women ages 35-54 are much more likely than at other ages to be admitted to the ER for alcohol intoxication; specifically, for ages 45 to 54, the rate jumped from 7 per 1,000 to 11 per 1,000 from 2006 to 2013.

So what’s going on?

Is there simply a cultural shift to women being more likely to enjoy drinking alcohol as they relax with family or friends in the evening?  Has this shift resulted in a small absolute but significant relative increase in women with alcohol dependency?  Is “4 drinks in 2 hours” a reasonable definition of binge-drinking or is this a reasonable rate of consumption for, say, a girls’ night out?

This is just one article, without enough data to understand whether there is a real increase in the number of women drinking to excess, but here’s something that strikes me:  it seems that not a day goes by that some Facebook friend or another doesn’t post a meme to the effect that all the stresses of motherhood can be solved with a bottle of wine at the end of the day.  Does Facebook, and other forms of social media, reinforce a growing cultural acceptability of women drinking, whether with friends, or by themselves (or with husbands) at the end of the day while relaxing in front of the TV?  And, if so, is this good or bad?

image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARed_wine_closeup_in_glass.jpg; By Quinn Dombrowski (originally posted to Flickr as Wine) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons