I'm a student at Princeton, and before I even arrived on campus my freshman year, I heard the Tiger Inn stories: competitive projectile vomiting, harmonious chanting of "tits for beer," and naked guys standing on tables while strumming their "penis guitars." I looked on--kind of horrified, but also transfixed. Then sophomore year came around, and a bunch of my girlfriends made a decision that blew my mind. Tiger Inn. They were going to try to be a part of it.

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My friends aren't the only women to embrace a college culture that I think is best defined by the term "fratty": extreme rowdiness induced by the consumption of a whole lot of alcohol. An upcoming study from Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, which will be released in October, finds that college women today are more likely than men to exceed the weekly drink limits suggested by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In 2009, the Washington University School of Medicine reported a similar trend: Women in college drank excessive amounts of alcohol 40 percent more often than they did in 1979, while the numbers for men didn't change. Then there were the Miami University hotel shenanigans that went viral in 2010: college women having sex in the caterer's closet, playing toss with crystal vases, and attempting to urinate in the bathroom sinks.

The big question is why. Professor Richard Grucza co-authored the 2009 Washington University study, which analyzed 27 years of results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. While he found that generally, levels of binge drinking have declined since 1979, college students, and particularly college women, were the exception. Of all the different demographics that Professor Grucza studied (groups divided by age, sex, ethnicity, and student status), women in college showed the steepest increase in binge drinking.

"To me, the reason for this trend is obvious. Since the 1950's, men and women have been dwelling more and more in the same spaces," Grucza said. "It is natural for their social habits to converge."

In a separate study that covered a wider age range of women, Columbia Assistant Professor Katherine Keyes saw rates of binge drinking increase among women born in the 1990's. (Most women currently enrolled in college were born between 1991 and 1995.)

"There is empirical evidence to suggest that, in countries that allow women more access to higher education and where women delay childbearing, there is more female binge drinking," Keyes said. "As countries become less traditional, women have more alcohol disorders. With this loosening of gender roles also comes a loosening of the constraints surrounding drinking for women."

Most of the women that I talked to in Tiger Inn chose their eating club because they felt like gender roles were less rigid in a place like TI. It wasn't necessary for women to act "all put-together." They could relax, which was exactly what they wanted. As one rising TI senior told me, "The guys always want us girls to chug a beer or take a shot, or be a man. There is no pressure for a girl to be a girl."