Confession time: I am an addict.
My addiction is constantly on my mind – when I wake up, when I’m in class, and
when I’m trying to sleep. As a matter of fact, as I write this I am
concurrently satiating my cravings. My RA’s even know about my addiction, yet
there is nothing they can say or do to stop me. What is my addiction? Reddit -
a magical website where one can find just about anything he or she desires.
There are thousands of subreddits – essentially online forums dedicated to a
specific topic – dedicated to just about everything. Curious about deep
scientific or philosophical inquiries? There are subreddits for those. Looking
for mindless distractions? You will spend days in those subreddits. One of
those subreddits – a personal favorite of mine – is a subreddit called
“holdmybeer.” Essentially, this subreddit consists of people engaging in
remarkably stupid activities, presumably because they’re drunk (hence the name
“hold my beer”). The first thing one will notice upon entry is that the vast
majority of this subreddit consists of dudes; this conforms to the stereotype
that men are generally more reckless than women. However, this did make me
wonder about gender differences in consuming alcohol, so I read Nolen-Hoeksema
and Hilt’s literature review on the various studies dedicated to the topic.
The
first thing I discovered was the bevy of research devoted to men and alcohol
consumption compared to the marginal research devoted to women and alcohol
consumption; this is due to the fact that men drink more and have more
alcohol-related problems than women. There are many possible reasons for this:
it could be that women are genetically less likely than men, or the fact that
alcohol negatively affects women more quickly or more harshly, or even the
difference in social norms between men and women.
Genetically
speaking, there are studies that seemingly illustrate both higher cases of
alcoholic heritability in men as well as cases of equal heritability. To me,
the lack of consistency in these findings suggests that genetics does not
necessarily play a large role in these gender differences. I am much more
interested in the physiological and social differences.
Physiologically,
alcohol tends to cause negative symptoms more rapidly in women than in men; in
other words, women become drunk faster than men. Not only that, but there are
several other ways in which women suffer more drastic or severe consequences
than men, including a faster onset of cardiac disease, a faster progression of
brain damage, an increase in sexual dysfunction, and fetal alcohol syndrome
(only applicable to pregnant females, for obvious reasons). In addition, social
norms seem to dictate that women drink less than men – even women judge their
fellow woman more severely for alcohol consumption than they judge men. These
norms seem to be determined by gender roles – women are discouraged from
alcohol consumption, and some symptoms of consumption (such as aggressiveness)
are generally seen as “masculine” and thus undesirable for females. This
combination seems to lead to the phenomenon of “telescoping”: because alcohol
consumption in women progresses so rapidly, they are able to see a problem and
thus self-report much sooner and at a much higher rate than men.
It
is clear that there is a significant difference between the consumption of
alcohol in men compared to women. This seems to be a combination of both
physiological effects that cannot be changed and social effects that can be
changed. Discovering how to change these social norms could be the key to
reducing alcohol consumption.
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