The classes were inspired by research that shows one in four teenage girls are hurt by a partner, and a third of girls in relationships are victims of unwanted sexual activity. Despite these statistics, only half of girls receive any sort of education about domestic violence. To remedy this, beginning in 2011 schools will teach students about healthy relationships and the unacceptability of abuse. An unnamed contributor to the plan says that the classes would be separate from sex education:

It's nothing to do with teaching them how to put a condom on. It's about teaching boys not to be violent and girls that being a sex object isn't the only way to be validated.

Schools minister Vernon Coaker says the classes will be "age appropriate." Rather than being taught about romantic relationships, younger children might learn not to bully or call names. Christine Barter, a researcher in the area of teen violence, says what's especially scary is that teenage girls keep this violence to themselves. Classes starting at a young age might encourage them to seek help when they need it — and might teach them that violence is unacceptable and should be reported. But not all parents are behind the measure.

Margaret Morrissey, of the group Parents Outloud, says, "This political correctness is turning our children into confused mini-adults from the age of five to nine." Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, concurs:

Youngsters should naturally know not to do these sort of things and must be called to account if they do. But teachers have enough to do in teaching English, maths and science to a reasonable level without addressing issues that parents should be dealing with.

Teaching young girls to report abuse and rape — and teaching boys not to commit these acts — is hardly mere "political correctness." But Seaton's criticism echoes an age-old debate about education that goes beyond "English, maths and science" — what should schools teach, and what is the province of parents? In this case, it's unfortunately untrue that "youngsters naturally know" not to abuse each other. And since violence is still so widespread, it doesn't appear that parents "naturally know" how to deal with it either. Parent-child relationships are complicated by a lot of emotions and expectations — parents may feel, for instance, that their son would never hurt a girl, or that their daughter would never stay in an abusive relationship. Teachers may be able to take a more dispassionate approach, especially since they will undergo special training before teaching the new classes. Ideally, all parents would teach their kids never to commit domestic violence, and to speak out immediately if they suffer it. But teenagers aren't getting this message, and school may be a good place to fix that.

Classroom Drive To Curb Violence In Relationships [Guardian]
School Lessons To Tackle Domestic Violence Outlined [BBC News]
Lessons On Equality And Domestic Abuse For Children Of Five [Daily Mail]

The pictures in question were taken over the summer, and showed the pretending to kiss or lick "novelty phallus-shaped lollipops." Other images showed the girls in their underwear with dollar bills sticking out. The ACLU has become involved in the case, and they claim that since the incident occurred outside school, it should not effect their standing. •  A new study from Britain's Department of Health has found that new mothers feel most anxious around five months after giving birth. At this point, the excitement has supposedly worn off, and friends and relatives are supposedly no longer offering as much support, which leads many mothers to feel isolated and nervous. • Nutrition experts have complained that Kellogg's is falsely advertising that its Cocoa Krispies cereal can help "boost immunity." Currently, the Cocoa Krispies box reads: ""Now helps support your child's IMMUNITY," alluding to the addition of vitamins A, C and E. But Kelly Brownell from Yale University says, "by their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity." • Researchers recently found that 1/5 of smokers lie about smoking during pregnancy. The study, which looked at 3,475 women from Scotland, asked women to come clean about lighting up while pregnant and followed up with the revealing blood tests. •  The Cyprus Feline Society has identified two breeds of cat that they claim are "ancient breeds" and would like international recognition for them. The two breeds include the tall and elegant "Aphrodite," and short, broad-faced "Helen." •  A professor at Harvard has announced that next semester he plans a class based entirely on the HBO show The Wire. "I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," said sociology professor William J. Wilson at a recent panel discussion.  • A new study found that while marriage rates are lower for women on welfare, receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, once they exit the system they are as likely to marry as women who were never on welfare. • International cancer specialists will meet this week to figure out how to combat the increase of breast cancer in developing countries, where almost two-thirds of women aren't diagnosed until the cancer has spread through their bodies. Doctors say part of the problem is that in some areas women worry that men will leave them if they lose a breast. "It's not a trivial consideration," says Dr. Lawrence Shulman of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, who is working to begin cancer care in parts of Africa where "the women are often seen as really either vessels for producing children or as sex slaves." • A mother in New York is challenging a judge's decision to 34 percent increase in the number of Down Syndrome births between 1989 and 2005, 15 percent fewer babies were born during that time due to prenatal testing. Some are worried that the decline in Down Syndrome cases will lead to cuts in research funding and that more people aren't even considering raising a child with Down syndrome. • A Texas health clinic operator CareNow says it regrets telling a Muslim doctor applying for a job that she couldn't wear her hijab. The company called it a "misunderstanding" after the American-Islamic Relations wrote to CareNow, explaining federal law requires employers to reasonably accommodate religious practices of an employee. • Today Michelle Obama is launching a mentoring program in which she and female White House staffers will mentor 20 high school girls from the Washington, D.C. area. The girls will get to visit their mentors' offices and gather for a group dinner. • Despite Liz Lemon's well-known love of the German language, 30 Rock is not popular in Germany. Its premiere last night on the German channel ZDFNeo earned a 0.0 rating, meaning it was watched by fewer than 5,000 people. Blerg. •

According to the AP, four Palo Alto teenagers, the youngest just 13, have committed suicide on the CalTrain tracks in the last six months. (Another boy was saved from doing so when his mother followed him there.) Greg Hermann, a spokesman for the city, says "there is no single answer" to why the kids died, but "there are intelligent steps we can be taking." These include keeping what now looks like a suicide "cluster" from growing — Merily Keller, a founder of the Texas Suicide Prevention Council, says, "One of the biggest risk factors is knowing another kid who has died by suicide." Parents, teachers, and kids at Henry M. Gunn High School, attended by three of the victims, are doing everything they can to lessen this risk. Students have created a peer support group, t-shirts that say, "Talk to Me," and a no-suicide pact. Teachers are giving out their home phone numbers, and parents are following advice to ask their kids directly if they would ever consider suicide. Madeline Gould, a Columbia University psychiatrist who has studied suicide clusters, emphasizes that prevention is necessary and possible:

These poor kids died from an untreated psychiatric illness, or undertreated. It's not as if it's a mysterious thing and it's not as if it's not preventable. Unfortunately, there is the misconception that if someone wants to die by suicide, it's inevitable. That's not the case. The impulse to kill yourself waxes and wanes.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans between 15 and 24, and while their act is sadly common, the four teens' method may seem unusual. But for Palo Alto, it isn't. For two years, I lived in an adjacent town on the San Francisco Peninsula, and I took the CalTrain to work every day. During that time, at least three people died on the tracks — it happened often enough that the CalTrain authorities at one point placed printed notes on each of the seats, apologizing to riders for the deaths. After a man committed suicide at my stop, just minutes before I got there, I learned that the CalTrain is one of the few commuter trains in America that passes through densely populated areas almost exclusively at street level — it's a very convenient mode of transportation, and also a disturbingly convenient way to kill yourself.

And it's a pretty public way to go. When someone died on the tracks, the trains would shut down in both directions for about half a day. All the commuters had to find another way to work — I remember shuffling onto buses along with a lot of shocked people in business suits, thinking that we had essentially become the suicide victim's funeral procession. The train employees were probably even more deeply affected than the passengers — especially the conductor who had the unenviable job of checking if victims were still alive. Usually when a private citizen commits suicide, family and friends grieve, but the wider world hears about the tragedy through a small notice in the paper, if at all. But just as trains bring together people whose lives wouldn't ordinarily intersect, a suicide on the tracks has a collective impact: it's an oddly civic death, one that becomes an entire community's to analyze and mourn.

Because of this, the Palo Alto train suicides seem uniquely suited to a communal response. Gunn High School's programs are a start. I know that CalTrain was working on suicide prevention back when I lived in California, but I also know that it remained pretty easy to get out onto the tracks. Better fences and gates might save lives. But Palo Alto might also think of the cultural implications of its suicide cluster. Do kids at Gunn — a major feeder for Stanford University — feel insurmountable pressure to achieve? Do the economics of Palo Alto, a high-income community that stands in stark separation to its lower-income, higher-crime neighbor East Palo Alto, contribute to this pressure? Might kids in both places do better if this economic segregation could be lessened? Hermann is right that "there is no single answer" for why four teens committed suicide, but there are many possible answers. And because of the nature of the suicides, Palo Alto is uniquely placed to seek these answers collectively, and to teach the country how to do so.

Anguish Over Calif. Teen Suicides Spurs Action [AP, via MSNBC]

The report, which will be released today by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, surveyed 7,000 people in various age groups nationwide about their past behavior and their personal ethics. They found that teens who admit to cheating on exams in high school are much more likely to lie to a customer, cheat on taxes, or lie to their spouses. Additional findings, as reported in the L.A. Times include:

Teens 17 and younger are five times more likely than those older than 50 to believe that lying and cheating are necessary to succeed (51% vs. 10%), those in the 17 and younger group are nearly four times as likely to deceive their boss (31% vs. 8%) and three times more likely to keep change mistakenly given to them (49% vs. 15%).

More young adults ages 18 to 24 reported lying to a spouse or partner than did the 41- to 50-year-old members of their parents' generation (48% vs. 22%), more made an unauthorized copy of music or a video (69% vs. 27%) and they were more likely to have misrepresented or omitted a fact in a job interview (14% vs. 4%).

The Josephson Institute of Ethics issues regular surveys on the ethics of teens, and they report seeing a steady increase in the number of kids who admitted to cheating, lying and stealing in the past years. However, this is the first study that has linked teenage dishonesty with adult misdeeds. Robert A. deMayo, a professor of psychology from Pepperdine University, believes that the erosion of teen ethics may be linked to the growth of new technology, which provides a huge amount of feedback that reinforces negative behavior by normalizing it. "The young do that in a widespread fashion and say yes, they know it's wrong; yes, it's stealing, but everybody is doing it. It becomes normalized, it becomes almost irrelevant that it's against the letter of the law," he said.

The question of teen morality feels especially salient this week, after the horrible gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in Richmond. This morning, Anna N. delved into the reasons why something like this could happen, and while the bystander effect may play a part, there was clearly much more going on than simply diffusion of responsibility. As much as I don't want to draw a parallel between this study and the Richmond case, it is difficult to read about teen ethics without immediately going back to this terrifying example of a group of young adults who lacked the basic human decency to report a violent assault.

But here's the thing: Kids - and teens - usually have to learn this behavior somewhere, and while peers do play a huge part, so do parents. Rich Jarc, director of the Josephson Institute, says he's worried about the implication of their recent findings: "When you see that teens are five times more likely than adults to think it's OK to cheat to get ahead, we have a problem. Just think if five times the number of people in business, politics and banking hold those beliefs. That's alarming."

It is alarming, but on the other hand, these teens did not spring fully formed into the world. Perhaps even more importantly, teens have always cheated on tests, lied to people, and even stolen. The study examines is based on self reports; is it possible that more teens are simply admitting to their misdeeds than ever before? Based on purely anecdotal evidence, this seems somewhat likely. I will admit, I was kind of a cheater in high school myself. I cheated on tests, cheated on a boyfriend, and routinely lied to my parents. However, my desire to cheat was vastly overwhelmed by my compulsive honesty. No sooner had I told my parents a lie than I would turn right around and confess, which made their job of reigning me in far easier. Judging from the growing trend of confessional journalism - pioneered by none other than the loathsome Liz Jones - people are becoming more and more likely to put it all out there in some (possibly misguided) desire to unburden their conscience. Maybe we're going to see a generation of liars and cheaters, but maybe we are looking at the next generation of obsessive and somewhat self-destructive truth-tellers.

Fortunately, deMayo points out that there is a silver lining: Teens today are much more tolerant than ever before. He notes that many young adults express more positive views about ethnic and gender rights than previous generations. "We want to denounce young people as immoral, but certain basic values that represent American ideals of freedom and equality seem to be on the rise with young adults." At least we have that.

Seeds Of Adult Dishonesty Sowed In Youth, Study Says [L.A. Times]

The FBomb has been online since March, and through the summer, most of the posts were written by its 16-year-old founder, Julie Zeilinger. But as she told Nikki Darling, her goal was always to provide a space for young feminists to express themselves, not to be the sole voice on the site. She explained:

The fbomb doesn't actually have any "regular" writers (as of yet) — I take submissions from anybody who wants to post. That's how I want the fbomb to be different. It's not my blog. I may have started it, but I really want it to be open to all teenage feminists, give them a chance to say whatever they want.

In the past few weeks, the site has come closer to meeting that goal. Zeilinger still posts frequently, but there are more items written by other contributors. While the site drew some negative comments from adults making tired arguments about the definition of feminism early on, the commenters now seem to be a younger, yet still diverse, group that adds thoughtful discourse to the site.

Last week Zeilinger posted a question about dating sent to her by a reader named Tinnie, who said,

My mother never taught me how to test a guy for closeted sexism or male supremacy. I want to know if any of you younger feminists have a theory on how to address this and if it worked.

Among the many commenters who weighed in with their advice and shared their stories was a high school student from the U.K., a girl from the Middle East, college students, lesbians, older married women, and a male high school student who calls himself a feminist.

Other contributors have brought up issues that teens who are in high school or starting college deal with every day, but that adult bloggers may not address in a way that's relevant to teens. Nellie B wrote that she feels uncomfortable when her high school teachers call her "sweetie" or "hon." She says:

These uncomfortable "terms of endearment," as I suppose these patronizing monikers qualify as, are not meant to be degrading and uncomfortable. I'm sure the intent is that us gals should be flattered that we are called pet names. However, as I'd like to remind them, I am not a wife, girlfriend or daughter. Every student deserves to be addressed respectfully. Inappropriate affection should not be mistaken for respect. Notice, also, that male students are not called "honey" or "babe." No, if they are called nicknames at all, it is something like "buddy," or "pal"– something that signifies their status as an equal to the teacher.

A dance on Leah RD's third day of college led her to proclaim that "the 'grinding' phenomenon demands a discussion." She writes:

Let's be honest: grinding is basically simulated sex on the dance floor. I try to be sex-positive and am generally comfortable with open expressions of sexuality. But isn't dry sex in a public setting, and with someone who you've known for less than a week, just kind of awkward? For me, yes. Maybe for some it's not, but this questions leads to the broader idea of consent and its applications. Consent doesn't only belong in the bedroom; consent should follow ambiguity wherever it may lead, which, in this setting, is the dance floor.

Sheridan T shared a personal story about becoming a feminist after she realized she and her friends spent too much time trying to perfectly apply their makeup and attract boys. She said:

My mother was the epitome of the middle-aged feminist. She gently pushed to help me make the right decisions. But I didn't listen to her because she wasn't like me – she was old and wrinkly and had bad hair and too much cellulite. Or so I believed… And then it dawned on me. My mother is a beautiful woman. A few months ago, I read The Beauty Myth. And I cried. Because what I was living wasn't rewarding in the least. And then I realized that the friends I considered beautiful were also the most fucked up. They have perfect body and facial preportions, but they aren't happy.

Other posts highlight awesome projects other young women are working on. Diane A writes that she and fellow FBomb contributor Nellie B are in a Women's Advocacy Group at their high school in Maryland and shared photos (including the one at the top of this post) of some of the signs they hung up for their school's Homecoming week. She says:

Our decorations didn't exactly fit into the designated "Las Vegas" theme, but they definitely caused a stir... Little groups would gather between classes to read all the posters, and I heard a lot of people say things like, "Wow I had no idea." This hallway represents one aspect of our group's mission to make sure "feminism" is not a dirty word in our high school. Plus, in the first few days no posters were torn down and there was only one act of vandalism, which is definitely a record!

In an interview with Bust Zeilinger said she was inspired to start The FBomb because she enjoyed adult feminist blogs but felt they were missing the teenager's perspective. She explained:

I think in a lot of ways this is because most teenage feminists aren't as comfortable or confident in their feminism as older feminists are, and don't tend to put themselves out there as much, but that's exactly why we need the fbomb - so young feminists can be confident, express themselves, and so we can build a community.

As the blog attracts more contributors and commenters, it's becoming not just a place for young feminists to voice there opinions, but for teenagers to help each other figure out where they stand and how feminism relates to their lives. We hope to see even more teens - female and male - dropping FBombs in the future.

Speaking Of Heroes... An Interview with FBombs Julie Zeilinger [Nikki Darling]
How Do Young Feminists Make Relationship Possible? [The FBomb]
Dealing with "Terms Of Endearment" [The FBomb]
Grinding [The FBomb]
The Development Of A Feminist [The FBomb]
Homecoming Week Montgomery Blair High School Style [The FBomb]
The FBomb: A Blog Young Feminists Can Swear By [Bust]

Earlier: F-bombs: Feminist Teen Blog Starts Strong Despite Adult Sniping

In a juicy profile, New Yorker's Rebecca Mead goes inside the behemoth teen taste-maker Alloy, a sort of sinister junior Clear Channel that's responsible for much of the YA bestseller list, including the multimedia Gossip Girl and Traveling Pants juggernauts and, more lately, The Vampire Diaries. And do we ever see the pink, undead, bratty sausage being made! Here's how Mead describes the efficient hit-factory:

[Alloy] pack-ges about thirty novels a year for publishers, and also generates television shows and a growing number of ideas for featurefilms. In order to do all this, Alloy has developed a process with an industrial level of efficiency. Ideas are typically suggested in weekly development meetings and, if they gain the approval of Morgenstein and Bank, are fleshed out into a short summary by an editor. A writer is asked to create a sample chapter on spec; if Alloy executives are happy with the sample, they put her (or, on occasion, him) on contract. The writer hashes out a plot with Bank, one or two other editors, and Sara Shandler, Alloy's editorial director-an alumnus of Seventeen, who, at the age of nineteen, put together the anthology "Ophelia Speaks".

It's always kind of creepy to see unabashed marketing at work, and especially when it's aimed at an impressionable age-group, however lucrative. Of course, cash-in teen-lit has a long pseudonomynous history, from Nancy Drew to Sweet Valley. And the Alloy execs would just say they're giving kids what they want. One Alloy exec defends it thusly: "Editors and publishers can get hung up on what's good for kids...At Alloy, they always think first about what kids want to read." Which, of course, isn't always - or indeed, ever - an improving tract. And the idea that the body of literature informs and shapes said nascent tastes, paving the way for a lifetime of dutiful buying - well, that's conveniently ignored. Yes, kids want candy and Easy-Mac: because they've seen ads designed to attract them. Not because it's what's best for their development, or some genetic imperative of childhood.

Sure, some of the series sound really interesting (I really want to read the second "Wish" book that they map out in the piece), and the Alloy execs say we're moving away, culturally, from the excess of "brat lit" into Twilit territory because "more serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit." And some of the book are even of historical interest! Mead mentions a new novel about
"a boy who acquires superhuman powers after being tortured during the Civil War." Then there's the new gilded-age Gossip-Girl-esque series, the cover image of which Mead describes:

The result is a look that no woman in the Gilded Age would have been immodest enough to wear beyond the boudoir or the brothel, though the Alloy team felt that the sartorial anachronism was entirely forgivable (much like the heroine's request for "ciggies"-slang that would take another sixty years to emerge). "Girls today would not relate to the more severe necklines and covered arms and horrible hair styles that girls were wearing at the time," Sara Shandler says. "We tried to do the imaginary-princess version." Or, as one of the publishers competing for the book described the gown, "the ultimate fuck-me prom dress."

And there, of course, is the rub. There's a continuing belief that kids can't relate to anything unlike themselves. Richer versions of themselves, 19th Century versions of themselves, maybe magic versions of themselves - but the feeling seems to be that kids are such incredible narcissists that any truly expanded horizons are more than they can handle. And the problem, of course, is that it's self-fulfilling. The other day I passed a poster at the bus stop bearing a still from the new Where The Wild Things Are movie. "Read," it ordered - seemingly without irony. Alloy would totally agree.

The Gossip Mill [New Yorker]

In a long and affecting new New York Times Magazine cover story, Benoit Denizet-Lewis looks at what it's like to come out at 14, 13, even 12 years old. Encouragingly, being young and openly gay seems to be getting easier. Denizet-Lewis writes that when he started working for the gay men's magazine XY in 1998, "we received dozens of letters each week from teenagers in the depths of despair." Three years later, he says, "a new kind of gay adolescent was appearing on the page - proud, resilient, sometimes even happy." He explains,

That's not to say that gay teenagers didn't still suffer harassment at school or rejection at home, but many seemed less burdened with shame and self-loathing than their older gay peers. What had changed? Not only were there increasingly accurate and positive portrayals of gays and lesbians in popular culture, but most teenagers were by then regular Internet users. Going online broke through the isolation that had been a hallmark of being young and gay, and it allowed gay teenagers to find information to refute what their families or churches sometimes still told them - namely, that they would never find happiness and love.

Thanks to the Internet and to increasing cultural acceptance of homosexuality (an increase marred, we should note, by measures like Proposition 8), kids who might once have waited until high school or even college to come out are now doing so earlier. At least 120 middle schools in the country have gay-straight alliance groups, and others let students observe the national Day of Silence in protest against anti-gay harassment. Denizet-Lewis visited LA's Daniel Webster Middle School on that day, and found 50 kids, many of them wearing pink shirts, filling out cards with slogans like "You Are What You Are - Embrace It." They were not, however, silent: "Good luck getting middle-schoolers not to talk," the school counselor said.

The youth of the Webster kids and other gay middle-schoolers is a sign of how far gay rights have come — but it's also these kids' biggest obstacle to acceptance. A telling anecdote comes from Nadia, the mom of a gay 15-year-old named Austin. She says, "We just couldn't wrap our heads around the idea that Austin would know what he was at 13, and that he would want to tell other people." But she had actually asked Austin if he was gay when she found out he had called a gay chat line. The irony of a parent suspecting her kid is gay and then refusing to believe he could know his own orientation highlights how much more difficulty some parents have with burgeoning gay sexuality than they would with a straight kid's desires.

Part of this may have to do with the misconception that you have to have gay intercourse to be gay, or that homosexuality is somehow a more "sexual" orientation than heterosexuality. But Austin tells Denizet-Lewis,

I knew I was different in second grade - I just didn't really put a name to it until I was 11. My parents said, ‘How do you know what your sexuality is if you haven't had any sexual experiences?' I was like, ‘Should I go and have one and then report back?'

Eileen Ross, director of a Mountain View, CA program for gay youth, says that when a 12-year-old boy says he likes girls, "No one says to them: 'Are you sure? You're too young to know if you like girls. It's probably just a phase.'" We are totally accepting of people who "just know" that they're heterosexual from an early age, and we recognize that heterosexuality encompasses not just intercourse but also crushes, flirting, dating, behaviors many parents of middle-schoolers not only allowed but find charming. A "schoolboy crush" is usually considered cute — as long as it's on a girl.

A lawyer in Florida argued that gay-straight alliances promote the "premature sexualization of the students," and when Austin started a gay-straight alliance, his Michigan school made him call it something "less controversial" (he chose "Peace Alliance"). But now that kids are able to come out younger, perhaps more adults will understand that liking and dating boys should be as uncontroversial for other boys as it is for girls. Denizet-Lewis reports the hopeful words of developmental psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams: "This is the first generation of gay kids who have the great joy of being able to argue with their parents about dating, just like their straight peers do."

A friend of mine came out to me the summer after our ninth grade year, when he was 14. He came out to the rest of our friends the following year, and to his parents the year after that. While his mom was trying to keep him from dating boys, my mom was telling me to date more boys. Although I wasn't a big fan of our "he's-cute-why-don't-you-go-out-with-him" conversations (nothing screams "nerd" like a mom who thinks you need to get out more), they did reflect a basic acceptance of my sexuality, even though I hadn't had sex yet — and Mom definitely didn't want me to. My friend deserved the same acceptance. And maybe today's gay kids are slowly starting to receive it.

Image via New York Times Magazine.

Coming Out In Middle School [NYT Magazine]

So, as we know, Miley Cyrus pole-danced at the Teen Choice Awards. Or, rather, she leapt up onto an ice cream cart with a pole in the middle and executed a single shimmy, obviously pole-dance inspired. Then she got down.

The dance itself wasn't that big a deal; yeah, it was completely inappropriate for a show that targets kids (because I think real "Teens" have moved on by this point), but not especially more so than her minute booty shorts or the parade of scantily-dressed dancers grinding behind her. It was, as the Examiner blog points out, a whole lot less raunchy than the pole-dance 'Fire Burning' number co-performer Sean Kingston indulged in.

Kingston is only 19, three years older than Cyrus, and he had not one but two poles. He also had two very scantily-clad ladies dancing around those poles with moves that were much more provocative than Cyrus's one shimmy. So why then is only Cyrus getting called out her inappropriate dancing and for using a pole in her performance, whereas no one is blinking an eye at Kingston's very sexy, very racy stage outing? Double standards, anyone?

Well, sure - and Scores doesn't seem to be clutching its pearl G-string over his two-pronged approach - but it's also true that Cyrus made her name as a good girl, has very young fans, and has recently started a spate of deliberate provocation: far from the remorse she espoused after last year's Vanity Fair fracas, now Cyrus is defiantly making her mark as an older entertainer, posing on the cover of magazines in overtly sexy getups and, yes, thumbing her nose at us fogeys with that half-assed gyrations.

Yes, she's just a kid. There were choreographers who put it together and parents who sanctioned it and managers who thought it was a good move, or at least trusted a 16-year-old's judgment. She doesn't deserve anyone's hate mail or the blame for society's ills. Maybe people are pissed off about it because a) it's August and people enjoy histrionics and b)now it feels deliberate. The Vanity Fair thing, most of us didn't mind: whatever, she was in over her head, it was Leibovitz, weird call on dad's part but really what's the big deal? But now, she's trying to throw off the yoke of exactly what made her famous, and while I understand chafing at Disney's stranglehold, it also feels, well, unfair to those little girls who look up to her. And she's playing deliberately with the clean Hannah Montana image that made her big. Says Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory,

That's some potent imagery: an emblem of childhood (an ice cream cart) juxtaposed with a symbol of modern young womanhood (a stripper pole). Looks like her managers are following the Britney Spears sexy-virgin path to success — or self-destruction, depending on your perspective.

Was the dance a big deal? Not in itself - it's short, not especially sexy, and frankly the song she was caterwauling was unlistenable. But will it negatively influence little girls? Frankly, I seriously hope most little girls weren't allowed to watch it, because it sucked, and the entire show was completely inappropriate. I maintain that girls are smarter than they're generally given credit for being, however impressionable their age, and that the behavior of one already-tarnished TV star isn't going to change the course of their lives.

But it does kind of depress me, because this is obviously what Miley Cyrus and her handlers/parents want for her, and for her career. I'm depressed for all the usual reasons - sexualization and cheapening and objectification and growing up too fast, and the lack of wholesome role models - but I think it's something more. I'm offended on behalf of little girls. Being a role model whom younger children look up to is not second-class. It's not a necessary minor-league servitude before the big leagues. It's not less important than attracting their older sisters. (It's certainly not less renumerative.) No, being a role model, someone who has the influence to touch and influence younger girls at a formative age, is an honor, and it's not an honor a lot of people are accorded. When I saw Miley Cyrus on that crummy pole, my heart sank a little: because, once again, she was saying that what she does, and her market, isn't important and she's eager to leave it behind. I get that for a young girl playing to kids doesn't feel sexy or glamorous, and it's natural to be rebellious. It's why kids shouldn't be in the public eye, arguably, in the first place - they have no control over what they're getting themselves into, and then, inevitably, they resent the pressures. That's sad for a lot of reasons, but not least because it plays havoc with the young girls whom Miley's growing up and abandoning, rather than the other way around.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, here's what "Ed Norwick, General Manager of SCORES, the legendary NYC gentleman's club" had to say: "While Miley did show off some skills, we at SCORES cannot encourage this kind of behavior for women under the legal age. If she'd like to come try out in a couple of years, our door's open!")

Miley Cyrus, 16, Shows Off Her Pole Dancing Skills At The Teen Choice Awards [Daily Mail]

Miley Cyrus: Too Young To Pole Dance? [Salon]
Miley Cyrus Vs. Sean Kingston: It's A Stripper Pole Dance-Off At The Teen Choice Awards [Examiner]
"Party In The USA" At The Teen Choice Awards (FULL VERSION)(HQ) [YouTube]

Some teen stars grow up unscathed by their lifestyle; others have meltdowns, drug/alcohol problems and blame the black kid when caught driving like a crazy person through Hollywood. Is Taylor the latter or the former? It's cool that she has her own band, Pretty Reckless, but is it all too much too soon? Here are five quotes from her interview that make us wonder if she's headed for trouble:

1. Hints she was forced into the spotlight.

I kind of grew up in front of the camera: I started modeling when I was two. I was never pushed into it, but I never really chose it either.

2. Possible attention problems?

I found [high school] kind of boring [She finished two years early]. I'm an artist; I'm not going to use trigonometry.

3. A false (?) sense of maturity.

I'm taking college classes online — I want to major in Language Arts… For most people, college is a place where you learn about yourself, and I feel like I'm doing that already. I'm already independent.

4. A lack of friends.

I have such trust complexes. I'm close to like two people. I've always been like that. People misinterpret what I say all the time: They think I'm being offensive, when really, I'm only being opinionated.

5. She's into older guys.

I'm not dating anyone right now, but I've had lots of relationships. My parents know that I'm not going to date someone who's sixteen. Boys are so much less mature than girls as it is; there's just no way — I would eat a boy my age alive.

On the upside, she really enjoys working on Gossip Girl; says her parents trust her and was turned down for the role of Hannah Montana when she was nine, which means she's never posed draped in a sheet for Vanity Fair. So maybe everything will turn out alright.

Iron Maiden (interview), Taylor Momsen Photos, Video From Photo Shoot [Teen Vogue]

Earlier: Teen Vogue Makes Gossip Girl's Patch-Wearing Little J Pretend To Exercise

• In efforts to better understand the causes of anorexia, scientists are using new imaging technology to study the brains of anorexic patients. They have found patterns of dysfunction in certain neural circuits of the brain, which they believe may be related to the onset of the disease. • A UK radio commercial for sausage that asked listeners to reveal "where you like to stick yours" has come under fire for the "offensive" sexual innuendo. Another line from the ad is even more explicit: "Think about all the things you can stick this tasty, extraordinarily large sausage in." • Farmers in eastern India have discovered a new way of dealing with the shortage of rain: Roping their unmarried daughters into plowing the fields while nude. "They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains," said Upendra Kumar, a village council official, which still does not explain why it has to be naked girls doing all the work. • Katrina Vanden Heuvel disagrees with Feminist Majority Foundation President Ellie Smeal and thinks withdrawing our military from Afghanistan would be best for women and children there. • Women in Herat, Afghanistan are increasingly likely to choose divorce over self-immolation, despite laws that all but automatically award custody to fathers. • In another slightly-less-than-entirely-depressing development, Afghan women are getting more midwives. • An Australian bus driver attempted to force a woman wearing a niqab to remove it to get on the bus. • But the Japanese want to make sure you're smiling on the trains. • Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been caught on tape admitting that it takes him forever to have an orgasm and advising a sex worker to masturbate more. La dolce vita, indeed. • Australian men are really, really, really concerned that they have small penises. • Borders Group has announced plans to expand their teen department, which will include various merchandise in addition to young adult fiction. Kathryn Popoff, vice president of merchandising, said that they have noticed more adults browsing in the teen section. • A woman who pimped out a mentally ill woman received a 20 year sentence. • A mother in Florida is suing because her kids learned an African-American spiritual, claiming she's upset because it has a religious theme. • If giant inflatable vaginas are your thing, we have a (NSFW) picture for you. • Some dickhead state representative in Ohio introduced a bill that has no chance of passing that would require a woman to receive the permission of the father of her embryo to consent to an abortion. And look! He got the publicity he wanted. • Congress introduced a decent common-ground-on-abortion bill, though, focusing on contraception and education. • According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the number of doctors and clinics that provide abortions has fallen by 25% since the 1990s, and some states, such as Mississippi and North Dakota, have only one abortion provider. The study, UPI notes, was concluded before the murder of Dr. George Tiller. •

In the study, girls were asked to look at photographs of other teens and gauge how likely those teens were to want to chat with them online. The older the subjects were, the more brain activity they showed in "circuitry that processes social emotion." The same effect was not observed in boys. Study author Amanda Pine says that during adolescence, a "time of heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress and peers' perceptions, girls are becoming increasingly preoccupied with how individual peers view them."

It's worth noting that the "circuitry" the scientists describe is associated with approaching people, rather than withdrawing from them in fear. So the fact that brain activity in this region seems to increase over time isn't necessarily a negative thing. However, many of us can probably remember a time before we were conscious of what others thought of us, and, particularly in times of "interpersonal stress," it's hard not to miss that innocence.

While I'm not sure I can pinpoint the instant when I started caring about other people's opinions, I do remember a watershed moment. I went to day camp at a university as a kid, and one of our "activities" was participating in child psychology experiments. I think I was about nine when I had to fill out a questionnaire with this item: "Do you think you have enough friends?" Enough friends, I thought? What? I hadn't really considered them in terms of sheer number before, but now that I've thought about it, no! There were probably some people who had more than me, so clearly I didn't have enough. I've heard other women talk about the dawn of negative body image, or the year they realized wildlife T-shirts weren't "cool" — and a close male friend of mine used to lament the day, freshman year of high school, when he understood he was a dork. Most of us do grow into an adult self-concept that exists independent of what other people think — but we can never return to a time when we were totally oblivious.

I'm still kind of mad about that particular questionnaire, but the truth is, we can't really protect kids from caring about how other kids see them. This caring has some good effects — like the development of empathy, and the realization that you shouldn't open the birthday girl's presents at her party (yeah, I did this). At the same time, it would be nice if understanding the process behind teens' increase in "social emotion" could help us mitigate it somehow, by teaching them that just because they think about other people's perception doesn't mean they have to act on them — and by remembering this ourselves.

Brain Emotion Circuit Sparks As Teen Girls Size Up Peers [Science Daily]

A study of nearsighted kids aged eight to 11 (partly funded, we should note, by Johnson & Johnson, makers of contact lenses) found that girls felt better about their appearance, friends, performance in sports, and academic ability when they switched from glasses to contacts. But the results were only significant if the girls had disliked glasses to begin with. We asked contact-wearers on the Jezebel staff if the switch improved their self-esteem. Hortense says,

Yes, because my vision is so bad that I always had to wear glasses that were pretty unflattering, and with contacts I just felt lighter and happier due to not having 90 pound frames strapped to my face. My skin cleared up, too, because I used to break out where my nose pads from my glasses would touch my skin, so that was nice. I also was able to do simple things, like wear regular sunglasses, which I thought was pretty neat when I was 13.

No, because I was 13 at the time, and it's just not a great time for self esteem in general. It was also harder to hide from people without my glasses, which I realized, once they were gone, were a pretty nice security blanket.

Margaret says, "I felt much more attractive, but there were still plenty of other factors holding me down in high school." Megan just walked around without her glasses all the time, so getting contacts helped her see better. And Sadie can't wear contacts, so it's "Coke-bottles and low self-esteem for me." The switch from glasses to contacts doesn't involve much physical risk, and if it boosts a kid's self-esteem — or allows her to actually see — it seems worthwhile. But what about more invasive modifications?

USA Today's Mary Marcus talked with Kate Deleveileuse, who had 7 lbs. of fat removed from her calves via liposuction when she was 16. Deleveileuse was of normal weight, but "didn't feel confident wearing shorts and Capri pants and knee-high boots." Now 21, she says, "I by no means think I have a perfect figure, but I am proportionate. It helped my self-esteem."

Would Deleveileuse have gotten to this place without the surgery? As Hortense and Margaret point out, the teen years aren't known for high self-esteem, and almost every teenager has a part of their body that they hate. Marcus also mentions children with cleft palates, and a boy born without an outer ear, and for these kids, surgery seems like a more sensible option. But at a certain point, the likelihood that a kid will just grow out of his or her discomfort with a certain body part outweighs the risks of surgery. And don't we want to encourage acceptance of a variety of different appearances, rather than one idea of normalcy that teenagers need surgery in order to achieve?

Megan points out that, while your teenage self may stay with you your whole life, you also develop other selves you can choose to identify with. Hortense refers to Never Been Kissed, in which Drew Barrymore's character "yells, 'I'm not Josie Grossie anymore!' but in reality, she never really was 'Josie Grossie,' — other people but that label on her." My Josie Grossie period basically lasted from age 9 to age 18, during which time I had to wear a palate expander, braces, a contraption that pushed my lower lip out like a Neanderthal's, another palate expander, a retainer, and then braces again. Actually, I don't really remember anyone being mean to me about any of this, but I felt incredibly self-conscious, and the fact that I got my first boyfriend about a month after the braces finally came off seems a testament, not to my sudden hotness, but to the fact that I didn't have the confidence to flirt with anyone before then.

Would I have been better off with invisible braces, or some kind of oral surgery that fixed my teeth fast? It's hard to say. I think I got some good things out of not dating until I was 18 (a fuller sense of myself independent of guys, a first boyfriend who was old enough to be kind and respectful and interesting to talk to). On the other hand, the girl with the weird shit in her mouth is still inside me somewhere (as Sadie points out, our physical self-concepts are often formed early on), and sometimes it's harder for me to feel attractive because of that. But as Megan and Hortense say, that girl may be inside me, but she isn't me, and as a grown-up I have the confidence to know that. Gaining that confidence probably does more for most girls than plastic surgery ever will.

Cosmetic Surgeries: What Children Will Do To Look 'Normal' [USA Today]
Girls' Overall Self-Worth Improves With Contact Lens Wear, Study Shows [Breitbart]