<p>An impassioned article by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, focusing on recent events at Duke: [The</a> Hazards of Duke - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-hazards-of-duke/8328/]The ”>The Hazards of Duke - The Atlantic )</p>
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Todays typical middle-aged man (the father of a teenage daughter, perhaps) may hear about college drinking and shrug his shoulders: he remembers similar antics from his own days. But the best book about the current state of girls and young women in America, Girls on the Edge , by a physician and psychologist named Leonard Sax, offers astonishing and troubling new insight into the role and consequences of binge drinking in so many girls lives. While the rate at which boys abuse alcohol has remained relatively constant over the past 40 years, for girls the rate has roughly quadrupled. Among college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse, women now outnumber men, and drinking affects the women in a different and more pernicious way than it does men. Sax writes,</p>
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Drink per drink, alcohol is more dangerous to young women than it is to young men, even after adjusting for differences in height and weight. Alcohol abuse appears to damage girls brains differently and more severely than the same degree of alcohol abuse affects same-age boys.
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<p>If youve been on a college campus recentlyor merely followed a college newspaper onlineyou know the toll that this kind of drinking is taking on students, particularly on young women. The institutions have it within their power to change the situation, but only by exerting the long-dead patriarchal approach, with parietals and curfewssomething that no elite institution will touch, because the old system was inherently sexist. Instead, many university presidentsincluding Dukes own president, Richard Brodheadhave signed on to something called the Amethyst Initiative, a perplexing document that essentially absolves them of any responsibility for what is taking place. Apparently, the current legal drinking age of 21 is bad for young people because the need for fake IDs forces students to make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law. How much would you have to hate yourself to sign a document that made that assertion?
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<p>Actually, I read an article a few years back that cited research that found that binge drinking is much less common in colleges in Canada, where the legal drinking age is 18. The article said that this might be because drinking there is illegal and therefore not associated with other illegal activities as much or the party scene that seems to be so huge in the states.</p>
dbwes
January 4, 2011, 9:02pm
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<p>Booklady – There are similar articles out about how the current hook-up culture at schools hurts young women. I think these kind of articles bring up interesting topics to discuss with a daughter. I also think they emphasize a kind of “crisis” thinking that makes headlines. Most girls are still getting through college just fine.</p>