Brit Chick Puzzled Over Drunk College Girls

This article -- a product of the Times, no less -- answers the very question it pretends to ponder, without apparently noticing.

The question:

It was once the preserve of the rugby team, but now female students down more units than boys. Why is the fairer sex drinking so much?

The author seems to find the drinking an irony, rather than an inevitable result, of some facts she's gathered:

Unfortunately for the fairer sex, science is against us when it comes to coping with alcohol.... The combination of our size, enzymes and extra fatty tissue seemingly adds up to a less efficient system for breaking down the booze.

The answer is right in her article:

A survey conducted by the Portman Group in 2005 found that over a third of women surveyed had been sexually assaulted whilst drunk. Almost the same number of women asked had also had unprotected sex after drinking. The latest medical research shows that this number has now almost doubled and unwanted pregnancies and STI’s are a more frequent consequence.

Just to spell it out: Free frathouse booze + naïve fools who think the guys at a university can't be as bad as Dad warned them ==> herds of does, getting slower and more defenseless three times faster than the frat boys operating the keg handles.

Predators don't need to outrun the fastest prey to make a kill -- just the slowest. That's the enormous benefit of being a predator: you can fail again and again and still hunt. Staking out the watering hole doesn't hurt their odds.

The fact that something like 97% (of a series of 148 slightly-trained women who fought male attackers) succeeded suggests that men who assault women aren't looking to enter and win a fight, they're looking for a good victim. The lesson should be relatively straightforward: don't bend over backward becoming a conspicuously more helpless victim.