According to a recent study, girls as young as thirteen are consuming as much alcohol as early as boys. If you’re a reasonable human person over the age of, like, sixteen (+/- 2 years), your response to this tidbit will most likely be, “That seems unhealthy that children as young as thirteen are consuming alcoholic beverages. It’s probably not very good for their brain development.” If, however, you’re like Dr. Ken “Concerned Mansplainer” Flegel, this information will fill you with a desire to sneakily victim-blame.
Dr. Flegel was recently penned an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal titled “Big alcohol catches up with adolescent girls.” In it, he argues that “alcohol, all drinkable forms of it, is not an equal-opportunity substance.” (No mention of all butt-chuggable forms of it). He therefore believes that the government should require a “health warning to accompany alcohol advertising aimed at young women as well as on the products sold,” and he starts off making some salient points:
On average, women have a smaller body mass than men, with proportionately less of it composed of water, which results in a more rapid rise and higher net level of alcohol in the blood for a given quantity consumed. It is well known that excess lifetime consumption of alcohol causes various forms of cancer in the gastrointestinal and genitourinary tracts, cirrhosis, liver cancer, heart disease, addiction and dementia.
Okay, that makes sense (kind of) — alcohol can be really dangerous, and women are littler and less watery than men so maybe more prone to disease. However, Dr. Flegel makes a quick departure from this line of argument:
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