Binge drinking women are Britain's litmus test

Article here. Excerpt:

'Put the phrase "binge drinking Britain" into Google and you will find one over-riding image in use. Young women in tiny skirts and towering heels are shown in the final stages of drunkenness, stumbling down a high street or collapsed on the ground. Nor is the search engine alone in depicting UK's alcohol culture this way. Women, young and old, are invariably used as illustrations of the problems of binge drinking today.

Last year North Yorkshire’s newly elected police commissioner Julia Mulligan said women's binge drinking was a real problem in the area, which leaves them “vulnerable to exploitation” while last month the Daily Mail asked: “Why do some of our brightest young girls want to drink themselves into oblivion?”

But what about our brightest young boys? Are they so brilliant at controlling their alcohol intake? The answer is certainly no but somehow no one seems to care if they get legless or incapable.
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Gin Lane (1751) [link added], William Hogarth's painted depiction of London’s descent into the gin craze, when cheap alcohol flooded the market, is typical. At the centre of this image of decay a woman lets her child fall from her arms – presumably to its death - as she sits insensible and uncaring. Although Hogarth also shows men descending into debauchery and violence, it is this lost woman that forms his central motif. In the 18th century, gin became known as mother's ruin - not father’s. Segue to the modern times, and the exhibition uses a 2008 photograph - of three girls stumbling down a street, drinks in hand - that has appeared in just about every UK newspaper. Two hundred years later, attitudes have changed not a jot. But why?

One answer is provided by David Geiringer, an associate history tutor at Sussex University, who argues that societies have traditionally gauged their own morality by the behaviour of their women. And despite the various waves of feminism since the 20th century, the concept that female morality needs to be protected has been hard to shake. Women are the litmus test: men may over-do things, but the moment that women do so, it becomes clear society has degenerated. This has been seen time and time again: during the gin craze, laudanum drinking during the Victorian era, when cocktail-drinking flapper girls ignited vicious pearl-clutching during the twenties, and now binge drinking must be a serious problem in Britain because girls are doing it.

It is easy, sloppy thinking. Certainly, shaming girls on a boozy night out will not fix Britain’s troubles with excess indulgence of alcohol. Education, eradication of poverty, and the minimum unit alcohol pricing are the proper routes. Attacking women for drinking is just as wrong as it for right wing newspapers to pick on women for wanting careers or for not staying at home to raise children. It’s simple, brutal propaganda.'

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