Two-thirty a.m. at Hogs and Heifers bar in Manhattan's meatpacking district, and the scene is much as usual: the smell of blood and beef still hangs heavy in the air after a day's business, but by night this is party town.
Tourists from the prairie states shifted gear from beers to hard liquor hours ago. The high-heeled Jersey girls have missed the last train home under the river, are emptying vodka glasses and pairing up with local boys; it's a fair trade - a bed for a screw - whose complaining?
The barmaids, once they've finished their routine dancing on the bar in halter tops, hot pants and cowboy hats, weave through the crowds selling shots in test tubes, mixed drinks like 'buttery nipples' - Butterscotch and Bailey's. But there is a notable difference between this scene and the equivalent a few years ago: most of the drinking is being done by women or - often as not - teenaged girls.
The age ID checks at the door were strict enough until about 1.30 - by now no one cares who the hell you are. It could be the binge-drinking scene from Britney Spears' movie Crossroads, or the recent episode of Fox TV's Undeclared, in which a gang of co-eds get smashed enough for one of them to start flashing her breasts. It could be Sex and the City, only that's not Carrie Bradshaw over there, it's real-life Paula Thornton from Brooklyn devouring another shot of tequila, with no idea how many came before it.
Paula dropped out of college last year; she waitresses three nights a week and makes beadwork for a living, which she sells along trendy Bedford Avenue. She is in the middle of explaining how it works, but simply stops mid-sentence and glazes over. Paula is 18; in three years time she will be allowed to drink legally in Hogs and Heifers.
President George Bush's girls - Gemma and Barbara - have famously brushed with the law for under-aged drinking, and Gemma is one strike away from a mandatory prison sentence under her own father's rules in Texas. But they are mere emblems that sound a national alarm.
Alcohol has now joined drugs, smoking, dangerous driving and violent crime as the latest ingredient in the dark side of sexual equality in America. Today's 15-year-olds are 15 times more likely to use drugs than their mothers. Fatal traffic accidents involving women are up 30 per cent, as compared to 8 per cent involving men. Over the past decade, the number of women arrested for assault has increased by a staggering 46 per cent, while that for men has decreased by 10 per cent.
But the most alarming trend of all concerns alcohol.
The Journal of American College Health published a survey last week reporting that between 1993 and 2001, all-women colleges saw an increase of 125 per cent in 'frequent binge drinking', and that such sessions were accompanied by a 150 per cent in 'unplanned' sexual activity.
The figures came on the heels of another report by Columbia University's National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse, showing that girls as young as 14 were just as likely as boys to be drinking alcohol regularly. The scientific research shows that while being drunk makes boys rowdy and boisterous, it tends to make girls depressed and open to sexual abuse.
In the poor South Side of Chicago, a Baptist church group working with young addicts reports that alcoholism is far outrunning drugs and violence as the ghetto's curse, especially among young women.
Girls are coming for counselling having had their stomachs pumped in hospitals, others with fractured bones after drunken fights, says the Rev. Dan Taylor; some have been sexually assaulted while incapable of resistance.
However, the worst figures come not from the deprived inner cities, but from among students, the suburbs and middle classes. Campuses across America report that the days when 'Frat Brats' pushed the pace of drinking are over. Typically, twice as many girls and women as boys and men are treated for chronic intoxication.
At the elite Georgetown University in Washington DC, there has been a 35 per cent rise in the number of women sanctioned for alcohol violations over the past three years. 'We are very worried about this,' says Patrick Kilcarr, director of the university's Centre for Personal Development. 'Women are not just drinking more, they are drinking ferociously'.
'Women are drinking one for one with men,' says Dessa Bergen Cico, the dean of students at Syracuse University, 'but they are coming in much more damaged. We are seeing a real shift going on here.'
The problems arising from female alcoholism are unwanted, unprotected sex and the disease that comes with it. 'If you're drunk you'll have sex with someone you wouldn't have lunch with,' reads a Colorado campaign poster. A treatment centre in Pittsburgh recently found one in five of its clients had herpes; statistics connecting female alcoholism and Aids have not yet been harvested.
Although girls like Paula Thornton say they drink in order to have fun with their girlfriends it is not long before the aim of keeping up with the boys kicks in. 'They associate drinking with power,' says Devon Jersild, who published a book about women and alcohol. 'They think that if they drink like a guy, they will be like a guy.'
Time recently eavesdropped on a discussion group run by five San Diego high schools. The magazine quotes girls talking about party drinking games like the 'Keg Stand' whereby competitors are held by their ankles over a beer keg and made to gulp as much ale as possible; 21-year-old Sarah boasts that 'there are girls who can go longer than guys!' The guys' verdict: 'Hey, if a girl gets drunk, it's "you're awesome".'
