A few days ago, while searching online for a clip from a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live,’’ I came upon an ad that, for the first time in my history of using YouTube as a procrastination device, compelled me to keep watching. In it, a woman in a sleeveless fuchsia dress, with a disposition that suggests she has never been confounded by a teleconferencing system, looks into the camera and wonders if anyone watching — by which she means anyone female — has ever gone out with the intention of having one or two glasses of wine but instead ended up having a third or fourth and regretting it.

Images follow of gloomy-looking young women in that dolorous morning-after condition, flagellating themselves, we are to imagine, for submitting to so many glasses of Syrah that sapped so much productivity. It turns out that you do not have to live this way, the woman in fuchsia tells us. Through certain cognitive exercises she teaches, you can control your consumption of alcohol so effectively that you might just drink one or two glasses of wine a week.

For the past several years, a certain cultural panic around the drinking habits of affluent, educated women has taken hold, with no obvious corollary for men from a similar demographic position, even though the men seem to be causing all the trouble. Recently the magazine Mother Jones ran a piece that circulated widely online titled “Did Drinking Give Me Breast Cancer?”

Generating a lot of anxiety, it argued that women ought to be gravely worried about the health effects of moderate drinking, even though the author of the article had no proof that drinking caused her illness.