United Kingdom
Celia Walden
The key to preventing young women from getting plastered, said Celia Walden in London’s Daily Telegraph, is to figure out why they are doing it in the first place. Faced with new reports outlining binge drinking among youth, the government is calling for “drastic action,” such as raising the legal drinking age or outlawing alcohol advertising. But there’s a much easier solution. Just get the girls to understand that drinking alcohol is a normal behavior. Girls today drink too much in order to feel wicked, as if they are breaking a taboo. “It’s the most basic, anti-puritan reflex: We used to be all buttoned up, now we’re all unbuttoned.” Brits watch Sex and the City and want to act as naughty as those carefree Manhattanites. The truth is that “Manhattan women are far too concerned about their waistlines to drink” nearly as much as London women do. And they are far too sophisticated to consider their drinking illicit. Rather, it’s an adult’s right. So remember, girls, you aren’t “inviting damnation by having a drink. To most of the world it is, in fact, a rather innocent pleasure.”
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