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CBS: Study - 1 in 4 U.S. Teen Girls has STD (2008) "At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group. A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls - nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens, the study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. About half of the girls acknowledged ever having sex; among them, the rate was 40 percent." Excerpted from © MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

NY Times: Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day (2008) by Stephanie Rosenbloom "In her thigh-highs and ruby miniskirt, Little Red Riding Hood does not appear to be en route to her grandmother�s house. And Goldilocks, in a snug bodice and platform heels, gives the impression she has been sleeping in everyone�s bed. There is a witch wearing little more than a Laker Girl uniform, a fairy who appears to shop at Victoria�s Secret and a cowgirl with a skirt the size of a tea towel. Anyone who has watched the evolution of women�s Halloween costumes in the last several years will not be surprised that these images..." Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Washington Post: Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies (2008) by Rob Stein "Teenagers who watch a lot of television featuring flirting, necking, discussion of sex and sex scenes are much more likely than their peers to get pregnant or get a partner pregnant, according to the first study to directly link steamy programming to teen pregnancy. The study, which tracked more than 700 12-to-17-year-olds for three years, found that those who viewed the most sexual content on TV were about twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who saw the least." Excerpted from © Copyright 1996- 2009 The Washington Post Company

NY Times: Europe Takes Aim at Sexual Stereotyping in Ads (2008) by Doreen Carvajal "In Madison Avenue�s mind�s eye, women are still preternaturally obsessed with the cleanliness of their kitchen floors, while men ruminate constantly about which shaving products will render them more attractive to the opposite sex. The European Parliament has set out to change this. Last week, the legislature voted 504 to 110 to scold advertisers for �sexual stereotyping,� adopting a nonbinding report that seeks to prod the industry to change the way it depicts men and women." Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Washington Post: Decline in Teen Sex Levels Off, Survey Shows (2008) by Rob Stein "The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported today. New data from a large government survey shows that by every measure, the decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007 and the increase in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003." Excerpted from © Copyright 1996- 2009 The Washington Post Company

Newsweek: Battling Teen Latino Pregnancy (2007) by Sara Elkins "Along with many of her Latina friends at her middle school in Southeast Washington, D.C., three years ago Beverly Zeleya treated sex lightly. No one told her about contraception, so she didn't use it. As a result, she wound up pregnant and had a baby boy at the age of 13. Now in high school and a good deal wiser, she observes the same reckless behavior among her peers there. Many attend "skipping parties"�as in skipping school�where they shed their inhibitions with the help of alcohol, pot and other drugs and hook up with guys who are usually older than they are. "If the girl likes the guy, they will hang out with them and they don't think twice," says Zeleya. "They just think once." That despairing portrait is no aberration." Excerpted from Newsweek, Inc. © All rights reserved.

NY Times: What�s Wrong With Cinderella? (2006) by Peggy Orenstein "I finally came unhinged in the dentist�s office � one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games � where I�d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I�d held my tongue. I�d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with �Hi, Princess�; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her �princess meal�; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, �I bet I know your favorite color� and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself."Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: The Princess Paradox (2004) by James Poniewozik "It's the recurring nightmare of high-minded modern parents of daughters. You ask your relatives to lay off the pink pinafores at the baby shower. You give your daughter Legos and soccer balls, not Barbies. You encourage her to play fire fighter and immerse her in Dora the Explorer videos. Then one Halloween rolls around, and your empowered, self-confident budding Marie Curie tells you that she wants to be...a princess. Call it nature or nurture, harmless fantasy or insidious indoctrination, but Hollywood is discovering that it still pays not to fight the royal urge." Excerpted from © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved

CookieMag: The Pink Dress (2008) by Sarah Hoffman "Young Sam demands to wear a dress to school, forcing his parents to make a decision: protect him from ridicule or cultivate his self-expression? At seven o'clock on a Thursday morning, my 4-year-old son announced, "I'm going to wear a dress to school today." I froze, teacup halfway to my lips. I shouldn't have been entirely surprised by the statement, given Sam's history on the pink side of the dress-up box, but this time something was different. The previous weekend, Sam and I had visited his grandma in Malibu. Looking to cool down after a sunny playground romp, the three of us had wandered into a high-end children's boutique. While his grandma and I snickered over rhinestone-encrusted Converse sneakers and $600 infant sweaters, Sam was drawn to a frilly pink sundress. "Can I have it?" he asked." Excerpted from Cookie © 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.

Scienceline: Are Girls Really Meaner Than Boys? (2008) by Frederik Joelving "If you saw the movie �Mean Girls� from 2004 about high school cliques, you might think that gossiping, backstabbing and catty manipulation � known to psychologists as indirect aggression � are girls-only territory. But you would be wrong, according to a recent study that reviewed and analyzed more than a decade of research into child aggression. �We primarily wanted to dispel some of the myths that have been perpetuated in the scientific community and in popular culture,� says psychologist Noel Card of the University of Arizona, who led the study." Excerpted from A project of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. © NYU Journalism

NY Times: Body-Conscious Boys Adopt Athletes' Taste for Steroids (2002) by Timothy Egan "They want to be buff. They want to be ripped. They want to glisten with six-pack abs and granite pecs like the hulks on Wrestlemania. But more than ever, American boys are trying to find designer bodies not just in a gym but also in a syringe of illegal steroids, or a bottle of the legal equivalent from a mall nutrition store, law enforcement officials, doctors and teenagers say. Steroid use has long been widespread among athletes looking for a quick way to add strength or speed. Athletes ''on the juice,'' as the term goes, can be found in nearly any high school or college or among the ranks of top professional athletes..." Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: Taking on the Thin Ideal (2008) by Sanjay Gupta, M.D. "There's nothing new about TV and fashion magazines giving girls unhealthy ideas about how thin they need to be in order to be considered beautiful. What is surprising is the method psychologists at the University of Texas have come up with to keep girls from developing eating disorders. Their main weapon against superskinny (role) models: a brand of civil disobedience dubbed "body activism." Since 2001, more than 1,000 high school and college students have participated in the Body Project, which works by getting girls to understand how they have been buying into the notion that you have to be thin to be happy or successful." Excerpted from Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

NY Times: Zapping Teenage Torment (2008) by Anna Jane Grossman "Adolescence is an awkward time to grow a mustache. Especially if you�re a girl. When Vidya Srinivasan was 7, girls would make her play a man in games of make-believe because of the downy hairs on her upper lip. �It really started messing up my self-esteem,� said Vidya, now 13. �I got to thinking that maybe there�d been a mistake and I was really born a boy.� Her mother, Dr. Hema Sundaram, a dermatologist in suburban Washington, tried to reassure her. The amount of hair a girl sprouts (and where) varies widely based on genetics, hormones and ethnicity, Dr. Sundaram said, and a bit of facial hair is not uncommon among women who, like the doctor and her daughter, are of Indian descent." Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds (2008) by Sara Rimer "The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued. The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math � the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers � they are rarely identified in the United States." Excerpted from Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Press-Register: Differences in Learning Abilities of Girls and Boys are Myths (2008) by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett "Do boys and girls learn so differently that they need to be taught in separate classrooms? That's the question behind a national debate, and a local one, too. The American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to the Mobile County Public School System challenging a middle school's decision to place all boys and girls in separate classes. According to the ACLU, the policy violates the Constitution and Title IX � the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in public schools. Are single-sex classrooms the magic bullet that will produce high academic achievement in public schools? Or, are they a trendy idea based on bad science and even worse public policy?" Excerpted from © 2009 Press-Register. All rights reserved.

Washington Post: No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says (2008) by Valerie Strauss "A new study to be released today on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade. The report by the nonprofit American Association of University Women, which promotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories. The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said..." Excerpted from © Copyright 1996- 2009 The Washington Post Company

Chicago Tribune: School Discipline Tougher on African Americans (2007) by Howard Witt "In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions. In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites. In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended. Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been." Excerpted from Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune

Washington Post: Less Exposure to Violent Media Makes Youth Less Aggressive (2008) by Alan Mozes "Children and young teens with only minimal exposure to violent entertainment in the media are far less likely to engage in aggressive behavior, a new survey suggests. "We're looking at a slice in time, so I can't tell you that the media exposure is causing violent behavior, or in the reverse that violent kids are looking for violent media," noted study author Michele Ybarra, president and research director of Internet Solutions for Kids -- a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Ana, Calif. "But what we can tell you is that kids reporting that none or little of the media they are exposed to depicts violence are significantly less likely to be violent or aggressive than kids exposed to some or a lot of violent media..." Excerpted from © 2008 Scout News LLC. The Washington Post. All rights reserved.

HealthDay News: TV Commercials Color Gender Choices for Careers (2008) by Robert Preidt "The way that men and women are portrayed in television commercials can have a major impact on how people behave in their daily lives, suggests a University of New Hampshire study. It found that men, in particular, are influenced by commercials that more often depict them in a career setting than doing domestic chores. �Gender is one of the most studied social concepts, as it is the main standard that people use in determining how to act and interact with others. Because television advertisements transmit cultural ideas about gender, they help to socially construct gender. Commercials may affect the way that people think about their own gender, and contribute to the ongoing social stratification of genders in our society,� study author Valerie Hooper, a graduating senior in sociology, said in a prepared statement." Excerpted from Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.