At the same table, with the same drinks, women often get drunk faster than men — and alcohol can affect women's brains differently, making its effects stronger, sometimes more rewarding. But also more addictive. Even in Paris' hard-drinking intellectual circles, French philosopher and feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir found that a glass of wine hit harder than expected. De Beauvoir once joked that two glasses left her feeling quite dizzy, long before any existential debates began. Decades later, science can explain why: Women process alcohol differently from men — often faster and more intensely — and women's brains also respond more strongly to its rewarding effects, even when drinking the same amount as men. Alcohol affects the body almost immediately. Before it hits the stomach, taste buds signal the brain, causing small changes in heart rate, blood flow and brain chemistry to get the body ready. When you swallow alcohol, a little is absorbed in the stomach, but most moves to the small intestine, where it quickly enters the blood. Some of it is broken down in the stomach and liver by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), a process known as first-pass metabolism (FPM). In 1990, researchers gave 20 men and 23 women the same amount of alcohol — adjusted for each individual's body weight. The women drank the same amount as the men — but their bodies filtered out less alcohol early on, so more of it entered the bloodstream, resulting in higher blood alcohol levels on average. But intoxication isn't only about how fast alcohol enters the blood. What happens next — in the brain — also differs by biological sex. Scientists broadly agree that women, on average, feel the effects of alcohol sooner. Where they disagree is on why this is the case. Rainer Spanagel, a German neuropharmacologist and addiction researcher, cites body weight as the dominant factor. "It's not the enzyme," he told DW, "it's body weight." Ethanol, Spanagel explained, distributes evenly throughout the body's so-called compartments — including the brain and organs. Smaller bodies mean smaller compartments. "If a man drinks half a bottle of wine, and a woman drinks the same, the same amount of ethanol accumulates in a smaller body." But other researchers argue that weight alone does not explain everything about alcohol's effect on women.