Madelaine Pries, Contributor
Featured image courtesy of White Wind Pictures
Ladies, we are in the midst of a binge drinking epidemic.
Nights that go from hitting the bottles to staring at the bottom of a toilet bowl have become routine among young college women, with drunken escapades laughed off in the morning as just another wild night out. But the steps from throwing up to blacking out to getting seriously injured or ill are not as far off as they seem. The February 25th premiere of award-winning director Phyllis Ellis’ new documentary, Girls’ Night Out, brings the problem into sharp focus. Broadcasted by CBC Firsthand at the Scotiabank Theater in Toronto, the film’s premiere marked the launch of the #RethinkTheDrink campaign and Talkback Tour, which aims to start the conversation about the escalating problem of normalized binge drinking among young women.
As a series of personal accounts, Girls’ Night Out is a stark look into why young women binge drink and the devastating tolls it can take. The film follows a group of young university women on a typical night out, from pre-drinks to the morning after. Their goals are clear: drink to get drunk, drink to have a good time, and drink to become someone else and forget about their worries. Split between these scenes are the personal stories of women who have overcome binge drinking, most of whom it took hitting rock bottom to realize that they had a problem in the first place. They reveal that with the glamorization of binge drinking culture and its alarming normalization, it takes having a terrible experience for people to realize the devastating effects it can have.
Binge drinking is defined by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as five or more drinks for a man, or four or more for a woman, but has always been thought of as a male issue. However, Ann Dowsett Johnston, the MaClean’s journalist who wrote the book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol about her own struggles with alcohol, was the inspiration for the documentary as she revealed that it is now in fact a women’s problem.
Appearing in the Town Hall panel following the film alongside Ellis and other women featured in the film, Johnston says, “This is the new story. Women are leading the numbers in binge drinking in terms of growth, seven times higher than men.” The feminization of drinking culture, or what she calls the “pinking of the drinking market,” has targeted a previously largely untapped young female market with alcopops and low calorie drinks and by glamorizing binge drinking culture through female-targeted advertising.
Campaigning against an accepted and normalized drug that gives young women relief from pressures, worries, and insecurities is hard to push. However, the Talkback Tour that will be visiting university campuses through spring and fall of this year is hoping to start the conversation about the binge drinking epidemic for young women. In a country where alcohol is the leading cause of death of women aged 18 to 24, it is certainly time to start talking.
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