Page 99 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Beer

Male (%) Female (%)

Smaller 46 73

Medium 45 26

Larger 9 1

Wine

Male (%) Female (%)

Smaller 79 89

Medium 17 11

Larger 4 0

Spirits

Male (%) Female (%)

Smaller 40 60

Medium 31 33

Larger 29 7

At these consumption levels, very few people are drinking enough to reach blackout.
Today, two things about that chart have changed. First, the heavy drinkers of today drink far
more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four
drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, ‘Pft, that’s just getting started,’” reports alcohol researcher
Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge-drinking category now routinely includes people who have
had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently
surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had
suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year,
and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks. 5
Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation ago, has
narrowed considerably—particularly among white women. (The same trends aren’t nearly as
marked among Asians, Hispanics, or African Americans.)
“I think it’s an empowerment issue,” Fromme argues:
I do a lot of consulting work in the military, and it’s easier for me to see it there because in the
military the women are really put to the same standards as men in terms of their physical boot
camps and training and all of that. They have worked very hard to try to say, “We’re like the men
and therefore we can drink like the men.”
For physiological reasons, this trend has put women at greatly increased risk for blackouts. If an