• Thomas Daley, a Pennsylvanian landlord, is accused of wiretapping and secretly recording footage of his female tenants in their apartments for 20 years. • According to a new studyconducted in conjunction with Clairol Nice n' Easy, women who dye their hair feel more confident. • UC Santa Barbara has created a graduate program that will offer a MA and a PhD in feminist studies, beginning in the fall 2009 semester. • A report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has found that self-harm among teen girls has risen by one-third in the past eight years and is more likely to cause hospitalization. • Sally Cluley will become England's youngest pilot this weekend when she receives her Private Pilots License on her 17th birthday on Sunday. • The FDA launched a crackdown today on eye wash and papain-based eye creams that are currently not approved by the FDA. • A lesbian soldier is seeking about $800,000 in compensation after a male officer in the Royal Artillery made sexual advances on her and then told to keep quiet by other unsympathetic officers.• A town in northern Italy joins a Tel Aviv suburb in using a DNA database to fine dog owners who don't scoop their dog's poop. • Ever wanted to tear someone a new asshole but found the job physically impossible? Now you can do it! • A radiation seed implant called ballon brachytherapy can shorten radiation treatment for breast cancer and will hopefully lead more women to seek out radiation therapy. • Morocco's top body of Islamic scholars have condemned a Muslim theologian's decree that girls as young as nine can marry. •

• There has been an 8% decrease in Canadian teen girls who say they have had sex, while the percentage of boys who say they have had sex has remained unchanged. • Legalized abortion in Mexico City, one of the few places in Mexico where abortion is legal, may face a battle in the supreme court over abortion's legality. • PETA says that one of its wealthy donors has expressed interest in buying one SeaWorld park, set all of the animals free into the wild, and replace them with animatronic and virtual displays. • A new report claims that African American girls are twice as likely to be hit as white girls by their teachers, and Native Americans and disabled children are the most likely to be abused by teachers and authorities at school. • Two elderly women in China who applied for permits to protest during the Olympics were told they would have to face a year of forced labor just for applying to protest.

Though the attack shocked Sheriff Grady of Polk County — "That is animalistic behavior. It's pack mentality," he says — it's probably not that shocking to anyone who has witnessed a roving pack of schoolgirls firsthand. Growing up in New York I learned that girlfights were almost always scarier than any rumble the guys could muster up. Scratched eyes, pulled hair, ripped earlobes from snatched earrings — girls can be vicious. And the victors in these battles gain respect and support, as scientists have now "discovered."

According to the Telegraph, more than 600 students were asked to rate their school's cliques on popularity. Casey Borch, a professor of sociology at Alabama University, who worked on the study, says, "A lot of popular kids may not be well liked, but they are relationally aggressive and their peers think that they are popular." He also noted that girls as young as nine learn that being nasty can boost their "social visibility" and that girls are more likely to use aggressive behavior than boys.

And it's not just aggression: In a savvy marketing move, the Florida cheerleaders intended to post the video online, where it would not only serve as a testament to their dominance, but as a warning to others. Sheriff Judd says, "When we had them in custody at the station, they were laughing about it, saying, 'Well, I guess this spring break we won't go to the beach.' One of the suspects asked the detective, 'Am I going to get to go to cheerleading practice tomorrow?' They showed absolutely no remorse at all." Maybe because they were so secure, so sure that nastiness and treachery would earn them respect and recognition — and it has.

Cheerleaders Pummel Girl For 30 Minutes In 'Animalistic' Ambush Attack, Police Say [Local 6]
Cheerleaders Tape Themselves Giving Former Friend 30-Minute Violent Beat-Down [Breitbart]
Teens Arrested Over Filmed Beating [CBS News]
'Mean Girls Are The Most Popular Students' [Telegraph]

"With all due respect," the mom replied, "Fuck yourself."

Okay, not really; she said something maybe slightly more polite, but it was that sort of typical male-female exchange that prompted Sax to do that thing where a dude throws all his assumptions into the air, replaces them with a bold new age-old assumption and dives headfirst into a brand new worldview with the help of a few supporting theories, promising studies and convincing anecdotes. The story focuses on his conversion and ideas in a cover story on the rise of the single-sex education movement, which has over the past ten years yielded 45 single-sex public schools and hundreds of schools offering single-sex classes.

Sax thinks there are vast differences in the ways that boys and girls learn. Baby boys look at mobiles; girls look at stationary pictures. Boys draw pictures depicting action, girls draw pictures depicting nuance and detail and color. Girls' brains develop earlier, with with their cerebral volume peaking at 10.5 while boys peak four years later. Girls hear and smell slightly better than boys, who don't like school because it's taught "by soft-spoken women who bore," according to Sax.

Sax: gets accused of sexism and molding the facts that support his thesis; relishes that. Sax has never been a teacher.

The ACLU and such people believe single-sex education is undemocratic. "Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there's also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

Richard Kahlenberg has also never been a teacher. This is the last sentence of the story. Has Richard Kahlenberg ever been inside a public school?

And then there is Emily Wylie. Emily teaches at an all-girl's school in East Harlem. She is an advocate for same-sex education as well, in large part because she appreciates the desexualized environment: "Sure, when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I'm giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. " "It's my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them."

So one day they can go self-confidently out into the world and spar with the likes of men like Sax, who will in turn be so bowled over by the elegant simplicty of their logic as to take up their causes with messianic zeal for themselves, fighting wars to defend their pragmatic notions, for which they can then take all the credit in the New York Times Magazine because that is the way the world works. But at least they will probably stop bothering to check their mascara first.

Teaching Boys And Girls Separately [NY Times]

King Middle School's health center - which students need general parental permission to utilize but which offers privacy on the specifics of that utlization — served 134 students in the last school year, 5 of whom reported having sex, according to the lead nurse. Middle school students are between the age of 11 and 14 (depending on the school) and, Maine's criminal code says that it's illegal for anybody under the age of 14 to have sex, period, even with one another- having sex with anyone that young isn't even statutory rape, it's "gross sexual assault" regardless of the age of the person doing it . Notably, a health care provider with knowledge of such a thing is technically required to report it to the authorities, and both kids would be subject to criminal prosecution.

On the other hand, a recent poll polls shows that most people think giving out birth control at school isn't the worst idea in the world because it can serve to prevent pregnancy and (if we're talking about condoms) reduce the spread of STIs. But, obviously, you can't get kids to ask for birth control if the only person they can ask is legally required to report them (or their chosen sex partner) to the authorities because state lawmakers have chosen to criminalize the behavior in which they're choosing to engage. So, to a degree, lawmakers in Maine are going to have to decide if it's more important to provide these kids with access to birth control or enforce their age-of-consent laws and their health-provider reporting laws (which everyone knows will just force the behavior underground again).

I think that this situation is a good illustration of the problem with the unintended consequences of these laws. Kids are going to have sex, and some of them are going to do it when us grown-ups think they are too young and too immature to make good decisions about sex or the people with whom they are having it. And, for many of those kids, they might well be too young emotionally and be making bad choices, but making bad choices as a teenager is part and parcel of being one. I agree that there is a line of "too young" where it is child abuse and not consensual sex, but the line shouldn't criminalize a freshman and a senior agreeing to have sex, even if the dude in question is an asshole. I also agree that some dude in his 20s or older pursuing 15 year olds is creepy — I thought it was creepy at 15, too — but creepy-but-consensual and deserving of jail time and permanent registration as a sex offender are two completely different things.

In my opinion, by criminalizing the consensual behavior of kids in this manner, we are just forcing it out of sight and creating bigger problems (pregnancy, disease transmission, etc.) rather than doing anything productive about it. Want productive ways to keep teenagers from starting the sex at a young age? Well, a quick lit review spotlights some pretty obvious things: talking to your kids, making them aware that you disagree with the behavior, keeping them away from kids that engage in other risk behaviors, making sure they have high self-esteem, keeping communications lines open, and all that other obvious parenting stuff that the government can't control or enforce, either.

Maine middle school to offer birth control [MSNBC]
Maine Criminal Code Title 17-A, Chapter 11, Sexual Assaults [Maine Criminal Code]
Most OK with birth control at school, poll finds [MSNBC]
Articles on Teen Sexuality [Teen-Link]
Teen Sexuality and Pregnancy - Early Sexual Activity [Library Index]
The impact of self-components on attitudes toward sex among African American preadolescent girls: the moderating role of menarche [Sex Roles: A Journal of Research]