This just came to me via the Council on Contemporary Families:

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenage sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies. The report is being released today by the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. A spending bill before Congress for the Department of Health and Human Services would provide $141 million in assistance for community-based, abstinence-only sex education programs, $4 million more than President Bush requested. The study – conducted by a senior research scientist at ETR Associates – says that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex-education programs were having “positive outcomes,” including teenagers “delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.” ETR Associates developed and markets several of the sex-education curricula reviewed in the report.

Come on kids. Are we surprised? Read more about it in this past Wednesday’s Arizona Daily Star.

Ok, I credit this post to having gotten “engaged.” Yesterday, my friend Daphne trusted me (trusted ME!) to hang out with her toddler, Talia, while she went to an event. This here’s a very blurry picture of said toddler, outside the dog run in Washington Square. Pretty darn cute, huh? And I neither tipped her stroller, nor let her get eaten by a dog. Feeling pretty proud of myself today.

The seventies are IN! In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the First National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas 1977, The Bella Abzug Leadership Institute and Girls Speak Out are sponsoring a conference at Hunter College this weekend called the National Conference for Women and Girls, Freedom on Our Terms: From Houston 1977 – NY 2007. The schedule is posted here.

A very breathy and ambitious (and I’ll admit, inspiring) description of it all is posted here (scroll down to the program summary). In a nutshell, participants will examine the 26 planks that resulted in the original National Platform for Action established in Houston back when I was, um, 8 years old, which dealt with all aspects of women’s lives. The goal of the weekend is to “boldly strategize to update the platform to the present, and identify and target goals for the future.” Sounds good, and my hope is that the feeling there will be authentically intergenerational.

Well now this is interesting–and on a continuum, somehow, with the National Organization for Women’s late 1960s protests against sex-segregated help-wanted ads in the New York Times. As Lynn Harris reports over at Broadsheet, my local NOW chapter (NYC-NOW) has scored a homerun with their anti-human trafficking campaign. Specifically, New York magazine announced this week that it would no longer be running ads for sexual services, including escort agencies and suspicious “massage.” And according to the New York Post, it’s the 15th publication to do so this year.

Writes Lynn, in good third-wave feminist style,

To be sure, not every “Punjab Princess” advertising in New York is doing “bodywork” against her will. And it’s hard to imagine that Pink Orchid is going to close up shop just because it can no longer snare New York readers pretending to be looking for the Approval Matrix. But those are hardly good reasons to shrug and keep running the ads, or to dodge an opportunity to make a move based on principle. One of NOW’s stated goals is to “shed light on how the trafficking industry is a part of the local economy and identify the legitimate businesses that do business with traffickers.” At very least, it’s a necessary reminder that women and men are trafficked not just in Bangkok, and not just in hidden brothels, but right next to our own crossword puzzles.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers often express mixed feelings about publicists–their own, and others’. (If you’re reading this, Cheryl, I love you. I honestly truly do!)

Yesterday, Marci Alboher of NYTimes blog Shifting Careers fame posted an excellent list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for publicists–aka other authors’ publicists–who seek her attention. Marci is my hero. It’s really a very good list.

(Note: Marci’s post is inspired by Wired magazine editor and book author Chris Anderson’s, which has inspired much ado. You see, Anderson very publicly published a list of e-mail addresses of publicists he never wants to hear from again.)

And WTF are my bangs doing in this picture? Because it’s freezing in NYC today and I’m having a hard time remembering what it was like being in the tropics last week, thought I’d post some pics to remind myself I was there! To the left, Marco all geared up for snorkeling. To the right, me goofing around submerged. Ah, Puerto Rico….I miss ya already.

Yesterday I attended a Corporate Circle panel at Lehman Brothers on flexibility in the workplace, sponsored by my colleagues at the National Council for Research on Women. Flex in the city. Flex appeal. Ok, I’m having way too much fun here with “flex.” Because the term itself is out of vogue.

Flexibility has become the new “f-word” among savvy work/life researchers, advocates, and implementers. Why, you ask? Because the word places the emphasis on accommodating or satisfying employees rather than on the business imperative to create agile workplaces that are more in sync with the changing needs of the 21st century workforce–which is where the emphasis belongs.

Other ways corporate change-makers are talking about what used to be”flex”: “mass career customization” (Deloitte) and “the agile workplace” (Catalyst).

And speaking of ahead-of the-curve, here’s a call for proposals for a hot conference–do pass it on!:

Families and Work Institute and The Conference Board are seeking proposals on innovative work life practices and approaches for our 2008 Work Life Conference, How We Work and Live Today: The Impact on Employee Engagement and Talent Management, which will be held March 5-6 in Atlanta, GA at the Westin Buckhead Hotel. The online workshop submission form is available here. Suggested workshop topics include:

* What’s really going on with men and women in the workplace today—what’s changed, what’s the same?
* Best practices in responding to the needs of employees at different career and life stages
* How to “flex” flexibly
* Beyond rhetoric—what does it mean to create a respectful workplace?
* How does technology affect work life—and what are companies doing to respond?
* What are companies doing to promote health, wellness, and stress reduction?
* How to help front-line managers deal with their own work life issues so that they can deal better with those of their employees
* Work life and hourly/entry-level employees—what’s new, what’s working?
* New practices in full life cycle dependent care

The deadline for submissions is November 30, 2007.

And speaking of girls who dare….I just heard about a cool anthology that’s about to launch. It’s called Red the Book, and while I’m not sure I fully get the title yet (do you? am I missing something here?), the substance sounds amazing. Here’s the blurbage:

A vivid portrait of what it means to be a teenage girl in America today, from 58 of the country’s finest, most credentialed writers on the subject

If you’re a teenage girl today, you live your life in words-in text and instant messages, on blogs and social network pages. It’s how you conduct your friendships and present yourself to the world. Every day, you’re creating a formidable body of personal written work.

This generation’s unprecedented comfort level with the written word has led to a fearless new American literature. These collected essays, at last, offer a key to understanding the inscrutable teenage girl-one of the most mislabeled and underestimated members of society, argues editor and writer Amy Goldwasser, whose work has appeared in Seventeen, Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. And while psychologists and other experts have tried to explain the teen girl in recent years, no book since Ophelia Speaks has given her the opportunity to speak for herself-until now.

In this eye-opening collection, nearly sixty teenage girls from across the country speak out, writing about everything from post-Katrina New Orleans to Johnny Depp; from learning to rock climb to starting a rock band; from the loneliness of losing a best friend to the loathing or pride they feel about their bodies. Ranging in age from 13 to 19, and hailing from Park Avenue to rural Nevada, Georgia to Hawaii, the girls in RED-whose essays were selected from more than 800 contributions-represent a diverse spectrum of socioeconomic, political, racial, and religious backgrounds, creating a rich portrait of life as a teen girl in America today.

Revealing the complicated inner lives, humor, hopes, struggles, thrills, and obsessions of this generation, RED ultimately provides today’s teen girl with much-needed community, perspective, and validation-and helps the rest of us to better understand her.

Ok, so can someone explain to me the title? Is it a riff on Little Red Riding Hook? Red Book? Read the Book? Red, like your period? (Sorry — I’m just kind of confused, and I know there’s something I’m missing here….)

Thanks to the ever-savvy Lauren Sandler for the heads up!

I’m not a mom of a girl, so perhaps my take on this is off. But I really dig The Daring Book for Girls. Though that’s just the point, argues Judith Warner at Domestic Disturbances (and, echoing her, Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet). What’s cool to Gen Xers is too cool for school to their progeny. But I’m voting girls will dig it. Has anyone test-driven the book with girls yet? I’d be eager to hear the results!

Meanwhile, judge for yourself. There’s an excerpt from the book and a video of the authors’ Today Show appearance here. And a listing of other upcoming appearances and events here.

(I’ll be posting more fully on my response to the book in December, as part of the book’s blog tour.)

Ok, so maybe I’m just catching up after being in la-la land for a few days, but I just saw that Lisa Belkin wrote a nice piece the other day called “The Feminine Critique,” in which she cites Catalyst’s recent report on the double-binds women in leadership face. I don’t quite agree with Vanessa at feministing’s take on this research and urge folks to read the actual report for more.