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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSo what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n
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? \u00a0Has this shift resulted in a small absolute but significant relative increase in women with alcohol dependency? \u00a0Is \u201c4 drinks in 2 hours\u201d a reasonable definition of binge-drinking or is this a reasonable rate of consumption for, say, a girls\u2019 night out?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s something that strikes me: \u00a0it seems that not a day goes by that some Facebook friend or another doesn\u2019t 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. \u00a0Does 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? \u00a0And, if so, is this good or bad?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
image: \u00a0https:\/\/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<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late last week, the Washington Post reported that \u201cDrinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.\u201d \u00a0Specifically, for white women aged 35-54, the death rate increased from about 8 per 100,000 (it\u2019s a graph, so that\u2019s just an approximation from a dot) in 1997 to 18 per 100,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":5798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[516,517,518],"class_list":["post-5780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alcohol","tag-drinking","tag-wine"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n