As the (Teen) World Turns
What were “teen girls” (searchable term) in the news for during the past few days? Here’s a sampling:
Two thirteen-year-old girls charged with stealing a woman’s handbag allegedly bashed their victim in the head and pushed her to the ground before robbing her.
Happily (okay, poor choice of words), this took place not in the U.S. but in Australia, a country that, as we know, was originally settled by boatloads of British prisoners.
A new study conducted by the Boston University School of Public Health found that one in 13 girls ages 14 to 20 have engaged in “multi-person sex.”
It now even has an acronym, MPS, which makes it sound like a disease rather than a party. I thought the most disturbing thing about this (very small sample) study was not that 7.3 percent said they’d had group sex, and not even that the average age of their first group-sex experience was 15.6 years old. The most disturbing thing was that the majority of the girls reported being “pressured, threatened, coerced, or forced to participate” at least once.
There was also this, from the Obvious Survey Result Department: Teen girls are sending close to 4,000 text messages a month. A new study from Nielsen shows that texting and data usage are surging among teens with the average teenager sending 3,417 texts per month. However, when they broke that number down by gender it came out to 3,952 for girls and 2,815 for boys.
And finally, there was this heart-warming 1950s-era feature… 13-year-old Cydni Baldwin decided to join her love of gingerbread houses and her passion for Girl Scouting with her entry in the Raleigh Area Gingerbread House competition, where her green-bedecked house won third place in the youth category. The accompanying photo is a portrait of a smiling, self-composed young lady any of us would be proud to call daughter and a very big very green cake. Cydni, it turns out, runs a website, (cimplycydni.com), aimed at getting kids interested in cooking.
And that, dear readers, is the yin and the yang of it: award-winning gingerbread houses and nonconsensual orgies, with assault and battery thrown in. The world is, in general, a pretty confusing place. For teens, even more so. Best we step up our game.
