In his column on Wednesday, staff writer Gabe Cralley painted a picture that we all, perhaps, know a little too well: a drunk girl stumbling into a freshman dorm, saying, “How do I get out of here? I can’t find my way out of here.”

Drunk Girl: We’ve seen her in Jeff Richards’ character on “Saturday Night Live.” She turns up frequently on textsfromlastnight.com. And, whether she drinks to the point of forgetting on accident or on purpose, she’s pretty pervasive in our experiences at Washington University.

As a female college student, I cannot help but wish to dispel the stereotypes surrounding Drunk Girl. I cannot help but think it is unfair that women are labeled as sloppy skanks while men can resign themselves to being beer-pounding meatheads without criticism. I want to argue that the final triumph of feminism ought to be that female drinking should be just as acceptable as male drinking.

The problem, though, is that women fall subject more easily to the perils of binge drinking. Our bodies are less capable of processing alcohol, and—even on the safest of college campuses—we are more likely to be victims of rape and sexual assault.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the relationship that college females have with alcohol is becoming more and more unhealthy. According to a study led by the University’s Richard Grucza, research assistant professor of psychiatry, binge drinking among females ages 21-23 has grown 40 percent since 1984.

I read Gabe’s column shortly after reading an opinion piece by Maureen Dowd about how women have steadily rated their level of happiness lower and lower since 1972, how the great triumphs of feminism have led women to feel more and more pressure about the choices they make to guide their lives—ineradicable pressure. It’s the same pressure that we all feel as college students: The pressure of choosing the paths our adult lives will take leads us to self-conscious, emotional and consistent re-evaluation of our circumstances.

And this pressure is the traditional collegiate justification for binge drinking. We inhabit a campus where the dominant sentiment is “Work hard, play hard,” where long hours in the library are commonly neutralized by tequila shots and beer bongs. This process of neutralization has, perhaps, become more appealing for girls as we face the pressures of career success alongside the pressures of success in our family lives, as anxieties about being able to speak articulately and inflate our GPAs run parallel to anxieties about body image and reputation.

We must remember, though, that binge drinking can take us to scary places. Even if the Drunk Girl label is unfair, we cannot avoid the fact that we live in a society where a drunk girl—skanky label or none—is at risk for a wide variety of social ills. Alcohol is a pervasive part of the college experience and often acts as a much-needed social lubricant. To treat the ability to drink like men as the ultimate triumph of feminism, however, is frightening.