The new face of underage drinking: teenage girls
Kelsey Bennett had her first drink when she was 13. She doesn't think she was pressured by her peers. She doesn't think she was swayed by advertising. She just had a few friends over one night and opened some bottles in her parents' liquor cabinet.
"The older kids are drinking and having a good time, so why not, you know?" says Kelsey, now a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "When you start drinking, it's kind of this mystery, something you can't do."
It's something that young people have long been forbidden to do, and done anyway. But the reality has been changing, with evidence that it is now girls such as Kelsey, not boys, who constitute the majority of youths using alcohol.
The gradual shift, which has only emerged over the past few years and has not been widely reported, raises questions about whether society understands enough about the different forces motivating boys and girls as they move from grade school to college.
Some factors affecting both sexes are obvious: Start with alcohol's huge presence in American culture, add more absent parents and rising rates of stress and depression among youths, and you have a cocktail of reasons explaining underage alcohol use.
Beyond that, many girls "want to be one of the boys," says Joseph Califano, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York. Also, in the center's studies of 12- to 17-year-olds, girls report far higher stress levels than do boys. That, along with more spending money, correlates with a greater propensity to drink.
Moreover, alcohol's disinhibiting effects can be alluring as a shortcut to girls who "feel enormous pressure to have sex." The push to be sexy often goes hand in hand with the pressure to drink. Experts say that's a factor that advertisers exploit, often to the detriment of girls more than boys. "Bad girls make good company," reads one ad for Cuervo rum. In a Martell Cognac ad, a sultry woman is on display with a plea to "Be at least capable of bad."
To be sexy, goes the logic, is to drink, says Jean Kilbourne, a visiting research scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women. And more subtly, alcohol goes beyond being a tool of seduction, promising empowerment, liberation.
The role that ads may play is highlighted in a study released this week by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University in Washington. The group looked at the advertising content and readership ages of popular magazines such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, and Sport Illustrated. The study found that underage youths saw more alcohol advertising than did adults in 2002 - and that teen girls were far more likely to be exposed to that advertising than teen boys.
For example, while underage boys saw 29 percent more beer advertising in 2002 than legal-age men, underage girls saw 68 percent more such advertising than legal women. The disparity is just as striking in the "malternative" market (malt-based drinks), where boys saw 37 percent more such ads than legal-age men, while girls saw 95 percent more advertising than legal-age women.
Ashleigh, a teenager who recently graduated from a New Jersey boarding school, says marketing definitely plays a role in her friends' decisions to drink. "I don't think it's considered unladylike to drink a lot," she says. "Look at college girls. They are always depicted in the media as getting trashed and they look cool."
The numbers don't surprise Susan Foster of Columbia's center on addiction. "Targeting women is nothing new," she says. "The alcohol industry, just like the tobacco industry, knows that if you want a lifetime heavy drinker, the best way is to start them early."
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