A Cleveland Plain Dealer series on teen dating violence, told through the story of a high school student raped and shot by her ex-boyfriend, and a NPR report on the epidemic of rape on Native American reservations are winners of the 2008 Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.

Established in 1995, the annual Dart Awards, presented by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington, recognize “outstanding reporting that portrays traumatic events with accuracy, insight and sensitivity while illustrating the effects of trauma on victims’ lives and the process of recovery from emotional trauma.” From the release announcing this year’s winners:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer received the Dart Award for “Johanna: Facing Forward” (Rachel Dissell, reporter; Gus Chan, photographer). This remarkable nine-day series traced events leading to the 2007 shooting of 18-year-old Johanna Orozco by her 17-year-old boyfriend. Exploring the roots of relationship violence through Johanna’s eyes, the series – reported and photographed over six months – particularly struck a chord in Cleveland’s Latino community and led to the creation of abuse-awareness programs for teens. [...]

National Public Radio received the Dart Award for “Sexual Abuse of Native American Women” (Laura Sullivan, correspondent; Amy Walters, producer; Maria Godoy, Digital Media Producer), a startling two-part investigative series that opened a new window onto a national disgrace. The series exposed both the fate of women assaulted on reservations, and the web of impunity protecting their assailants.

I was very moved by the NPR report and wrote about it last year when it first aired.

When I find the time, I’m going to read the full Cleveland Plain Dealer series. The paper’s website offers online extras, including story updates, podcasts and resources. Last month, Joanna wrote a letter describing her recovery one year after the assault and her plans for the future.

All too often we’re appalled by insensitive or incomplete coverage. The excellent reporting reflected here deserves widespread attention. More Dart Award radio and newspaper finalists can be found here.

The New York Times has recently published several items that may be of interest to OBOS readers:

Fat Bias Worse for Women – The Well Blog points to a study in the International Journal of Obesity in which researchers surveyed adults about their experience of discrimination based on weight and height, gender, race, and other factors. Perhaps not surprisingly (yet still disappointingly), women reported more height/weight-based discrimination than did men.

The Murky Politics of Mind-Body – This piece reviews a bill passed in the House to make insurers provide equivalent coverage for mental health as for physical health, and the resulting debate over what should be covered and why.

Students of Virginity – This lengthy piece in Sunday’s Magazine profiles a Harvard student advocating abstinence on campus.

Study Finds Many Patients Dissatisfied With Hospitals – You can read the piece for an introduction, and then compare measures at your own local hospitals using http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/.

When women’s health writer and activist Barbara Seaman died Feb. 27 of lung cancer, her death sent shockwaves through feminist and women’s health communities.

Also shocking was The New York Times story on Seaman’s death, which many OBOS readers said they found insulting and mean-spirited.

The first half or so provides a fair, if limited, overview of Seaman’s work and the impact she had on the women’s health movement, which included co-founding the National Women’s Health Network in 1975. But it s surprising that there are no comments from any of Seaman’s colleagues or those familiar with her work.

And once Seaman’s books and the surviving family members are listed, the story takes a turn for the worse. The only quote included is a book reviewer’s critique, in which Seaman is called “a conspiracy theorist by temperament and training.” Attention is then turned to this 20-year-old episode:

In the 1990s, Ms. Seaman also began to speak out publicly against domestic violence, from which she said she had suffered during her marriage to Mr. Forman. Though she did not identify Mr. Forman by name in the news media, court records show that in 1988 he was arrested and charged with assault after Ms. Seaman accused him of punching her in the face. The criminal case against Mr. Forman was later thrown out, Dudley Gaffin, his lawyer at the time, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Reached by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Forman denied having assaulted Ms. Seaman, calling the accusation of assault “a divorce tactic” on her part.

It’s amazing that the past is dredged up like this — and, after doing so, the last word is left to Seaman’s ex.

In a letter to The New York Times, Our Bodies Ourselves Executive Director Judy Norsigian wrote:

I was taken aback by the petty and gossipy nature of parts of the obituary for Barbara Seaman and hope that the Times will consider issuing an apology at least to her family. The comments of her ex-husband and his lawyer were particularly inappropriate (as one reporter noted to me, there are all sorts of reasons that a case is dropped – and they often have nothing to do with the culpability of the accused). Readers were left with a pretty clear sense that the NY Times thought that Barbara had made false accusations about Milt Forman’s behavior.

Mostly, I am getting emails about the poor taste exhibited on the part of the Times. Rather than include some of the more substantive criticisms and disagreements that she may have had with colleagues, the piece relied on a few rather general and unopposed character assaults.

As someone who has been close to other luminaries whose obituaries in the Times could easily have included far more damning commentary than was noted in this obituary (and with far better evidence for the character assault), I was left wondering if there was some mean-spirited motivation at play here. In any case, I was sorry to see what I consider a major journalistic lapse.

Naomi at A Little Red Hen offers a similar critique. Her post is also a personal remembrance of Seaman — both women were students at Oberlin in the 1950s and their paths had crossed several times since then.

After referencing “a respectful obit” in the Washington Post, Naomi writes:

How unregarded significant women like her continue to be is apparent in Saturday’s New York Times obituary. First, I’d have expected that it would have been written by someone who knew her work, not someone from the obit staff. Most of the week after Barbara’s death had been taken up in the Times with paens to the conservative writer, William Buckley who charmed many in the media. Barbara did not charm. Was this the reason the Times focused on details of her personal life rather than her continuing role as a muckraker, still writing about the dangers of estrogen all these years later.

For comparison, read the more thoughtful obit in the Washington Post — or this one from the L.A. Times. Both are representative of obituaries that a woman of Barbara Seaman’s insight and intellect deserves.

Plus: For an even more intimate view, read OBOS co-founder Norma Swenson’s passionate remembrance of Seaman that focuses on their involvement in the early women’s health movement.

“School Newspaper Drops a V-Bomb” reads the headline of this L.A. Times story about the confiscation of a high school student newspaper that featured a labeled diagram of a vagina on the front page of the Valentine’s Day issue.

The paper’s editor-in-chief, 15-year-old Richard Edmond, said he was trying to raise awareness of violence against women with a lead story about playwright Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal,” Edmond said. “But they are really upset.”

Edmond said administrators did not explain to his satisfaction why this copy of Le Sabre was unfit for distribution. He said he was told by administrators: “This is not in the taste of the school; this is a high school, not Hollywood Boulevard.”

That didn’t jive so well with the students. The next day, Edmond and others went to school wearing homemade white, black and pink T-shirts reading “My vagina is obscene.” School officials sent home Edmond and two other protesters who refused to change their clothes.

My favorite quote has to be what Edmond told the Student Press Law Center: “My deans said, ‘We understand there’s violence against women, but we have to send you home because that’s our job. I don’t think there should be a ‘but.’”

* * *
This Chicago Tribune headline, meanwhile, promises more bang than the story delivers: “Sex-Ed Fight Began with Condom and Banana.”

No mess here; rather, it’s about a New Jersey peer-to-peer sex-ed course that has drawn the ire of some parents. Indeed, the original headline to the Philadelphia Inquirer story was a more subdued “Sex Ed Led by Teens is Dividing Parents.”

The program involves faculty-supervised juniors and seniors who conduct a series of five seminars attended by freshmen. The New Jersey Teen Prevention Education Program (Teen PEP) is sponsored by the N.J. Department of Health and Senior Services, HiTOPS Inc. (Health-Interested Teens Own Program on Sexuality) and the Princeton Center for Leadership Training.

Favorite quote:

“Students listen to each other anyway,” said Alex Van Kooy, 16, a Clearview peer educator. They talk about sex “in the halls and at the bus stop, and we’re just trying to give the correct information instead of rumors and whispers.”

Echoing that point, columnist Michael Smerconish writes in a related piece that everything he needed to know about sex he learned playing street hockey.

“In those teenage years, sex came up just about everywhere,” writes Smerconish. “Playing sports. At the movies. Drinking a Frank’s soda. All over. Except home. And certainly not in any classroom.”

His column includes a number of great comments from Michael Porter, a high school English teacher who also serves as a Teen PEP adviser. Tongue in cheek, Porter says, “When I first started to hear some of the revolting things that were happening in Teen PEP workshops, I was ready to start protesting the group myself, until I remembered that I was in charge of it.”

All joking aside, Porter gets that talking about some subjects may be uncomfortable at first, but it’s far easier than dealing with a sexually transmitted disease or unplanned pregnancy.

“I am the father of a 15-year-old girl,” Porter said. “Believe me, I am terrified of the sexually saturated culture that she is surrounded by. I sincerely hope that she chooses to postpone sexual involvement for a long, long, long time. At the same time, as a second-best alternative, I want her to have the information to be safer, should she make a different choice.”

The New York Times last week published an incredibly dismissive page-one story about fibromyalgia, questioning whether it is a “real” disease.

The hook for the story are the advertisements for Lyrica, the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition:

In November, Pfizer began a television ad campaign for Lyrica that features a middle-aged woman who appears to be reading from her diary. “Today I struggled with my fibromyalgia; I had pain all over,” she says, before turning to the camera and adding, “Fibromyalgia is a real, widespread pain condition.”

Author Alex Berenson writes that doctors who specialize in treating fibromyalgia welcome Lyrica — and the other fibromyalgia drugs likely to receive FDA approval this year — because they will encourage doctors to address a disease that is undertreated and whose sufferers are not always believed.

“What’s going to happen with fibromyalgia is going to be the exact thing that happened to depression with Prozac,” said Dr. Dan Clauw, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan who has consulted with Pfizer, Lilly and Forest. “These are legitimate problems that need treatments.”

While the point that this is a legitimate problem is appreciated, it’s disturbing that it’s left to a drug company to provide the validation. In fact, I wish that instead of questioning the existence of fibromyalgia, the story had focused mainly on questioning the drug’s safety and numerous side effects (which comes up in the last third of the story) — as well as the potential for exploiting the health concerns of people who don’t have fibromyalgia.

Instead, the author’s dubious tone mars what could have been a useful piece. As Paula Kamen, who writes about women’s health and chronic illness (most notably in her excellent book “All in My Head“), notes:

A red flag is that, as the article described early on, fibromyalgia primarily affects women — and even worse, “middle-aged women.” Combined with the fact that pain is invisible, and it is a primarily female disease (like most pain and fatigue disorders), the burden of proof the article demands for fibromyalgia patients is unduly heavy, laden with double standards that other patients do not face.

Kamen continues to hit on why this story fails on multiple levels — including its lack of medical context:

Another immediate red flag was that Berenson immediately added that these patients are likely to suffer from “other similarly nebulous conditions, like irritable bowel syndrome.” First of all, Berenson has used the world “nebulous” to show his own bias; this was not a quote from a source. Meanwhile, Berenson fails to consider the basic medical concept of co-morbidity, or of one brain chemistry imbalance underlying one disorder as likely to cause others. This follows the old “logic” that to discredit a woman’s pain, a doctor would show that she complained about “too many ailments” and had “somatization disorder.”

Despite the controversy reported in the Times, the American College of Rheumatology, the Food and Drug Administration and insurers all recognize fibromyalgia as a diagnosable disease.

So, apparently does The New York Times: It has established a permanent health guide for the disease complete with potential causes and symptoms.

Too bad this story took a page from the past.

The Times published more than half a dozen letters from patients and doctors taking issue with the coverage, including one from Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., a professor of neurosciences and director of the Pain and Fatigue Study Center at U.M.D.N.J.-New Jersey Medical School, who wrote:

“Your article will make doctors, relatives and friends of millions with fibromyalgia conclude that their symptoms are just a ‘physical response to stress, depression, and economic and social anxiety.’ This is an opinion ignoring published medical literature showing brain abnormalities in fibromyalgia and drugs that clearly improve patient health.”

“What’s needed,” Natelson concudes, “is less talk and more federally financed, peer-reviewed research.”

Exactly. While there are many illnesses and ailments that we don’t understand and can’t quantify, those without a clear cause are often blamed on that all-too-available catchall: “stress.” As noted in Our Bodies Ourselves, “Women are particularly vulnerable to having our ailments dismissed as the results of stress. For example, before the cause of multiple sclerosis — an illness that disproportionately affects women — was known, women who experienced its symptoms were often considered to have a mental impairment and diagnosed with ‘hysteria.’”

Whether or not people with fibromyalgia are suffering from a clearly defined illness or a constellation of similar symptoms, their suffering, as one of my colleagues put it, is physical, real and often brutal. Doctors who believe that “diagnosing the condition actually worsens suffering by causing patients to obsess over aches that other people simply tolerate” deny patients the language to articulate their experiences.

And if there’s one thing that most definitely causes anxiety, it’s when a doctor says there’s nothing there to worry about when the pain says otherwise.

Plus: For more information, visit the Fibromyalgia Network and the National Fibromyalgia Association.

Sex Ed Battles: Via the Washington Post, in Montgomery County, Md., opponents of a new sex-education curriculum approved by the school board last year — the first in the district to address sexual orientation as a classroom topic — are challenging the part that describes homosexuality as innate, insisting it doesn’t meet the “factually accurate” standard set by Maryland state law.

Opponents also object to references made during the condom instruction to anal and oral sex. Their attorney said those passages violate a state prohibition against material that “portrays erotic techniques of sexual intercourse.” The case is being heard by Circuit Court Judge William Rowan III, who is expected to issue a written ruling. Here’s more background.

And in Park Ridge, Ill., there’s controversy over a freshman high school biology curriculum at Maine South High School (which happens to be where Hillary Clinton spent her senior year) that teaches about birth control. The lessons follow state code, said School Superintendent Joel Morris, but some parents are less than enthusiastic, especially about the part describing how to put on a condom.

Choice Stories: Courtney Martin reviews a new anthology, “Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion,” edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont.

“In consistently original voices and beautifully crafted writing (not always such a hallmark of anthologies),” writes Martin, “these stories enfold you in a dark but deeply compelling fog and remind you of how totally powerful and pained we sometimes are.”

Birth Trends: The Washington Post looks at college-educated couples who have decided to have children while they’re still in their 20s, which strikes some as very young; according to demographic research, college-educated mothers are usually about 30 when they give birth to their first child.

“This is very significant data. It’s giving numbers to a trend people have been only inferring,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. The data, she said, show that “there is this increasing divergence of highly educated women and less-educated women.”

Politics and Misogyny: You probably already read Bob Herbert’s amazing column this week, but if somehow you missed it, go now for honest truths like this: “If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.”

The Chris Matthews Fairy Tale: Echidne of the Snakes offers an all-inclusive take-down of Chris Matthews’ sexist comments about Hillary Clinton and other female politicians and authors. You might call Matthews’ apology a wee bit “incomplete.”

The Correct Clinton Stereotype: In an op-ed at the L.A. Times about gender stereotypes, author Susan Faludi describes a recent experience she had watching women skillfully and persistently handle their mothers’ medical needs and relates it to attitudes toward Hillary Clinton.

Global Population Under a Democratic President: “If a Democratic president enters the White House about a year from now, some experts in family planning anticipate a boon for mankind: a greater effort by the United States government to restrain world population growth,” writes Christian Science Monitor columnist David R. Francis in this piece on reversing the global gag rule.

Doctors Respond to Email: Ever see a health email take on a life of its own? Tara Parker-Pope at the New York Times reports on a controversial message that has circulated online for years urging women to request a special blood test (CA-125) to screen themselves for ovarian cancer. A group of doctors has responded with their own email that they hope will soon be communicated as far and wide.

Deep Freeze: As I write, it’s 2 degrees in Chicago — and it’s expected to plunge to -20 below with wind chill. According to The New York Times, I have no excuse not to stick to my running. (Damn.) Of course, anyone with a fireplace and a good winter brew can easily convince me otherwise … Hope you all are warm!

Writing at the Huffington Post, Gloria Feldt outlines the dismal statistics for women in media, both in terms of corporate ownership and the inclusion of women’s voices in the news.

But before you get too despaired, consider Feldt’s call to action:

Fortunately a number of organizations with bold visions and courageous agendas have emerged to rectify that situation. So, after a lifetime of leadership in issue advocacy organizations, I choose now to contribute my volunteer time and money to groups working to close one of the last gaps in women’s equality. I believe this work is absolutely essential to bringing forth simple justice for women, by bringing women’s faces, voices, stories, and influence to parity in our media saturated world.

In so doing, I am convinced also we are creating a media that strengthens democracy and enriches public discourse. A media that is powerful, not a media that merely serves the interests of the powerful.

Feldt lists five organizations that she currently writes for or supports in some capacity, including the Women’s Media Center, SheSource, Women in Media & News, Women’s eNews — and Our Bodies Ourselves. She writes:

One mother of women’s media endeavors is Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), also known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), is a nonprofit, public interest women’s health education, advocacy, and consulting organization. Beginning in 1970 with the publication of the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, OBOS literally fomented a global women’s health movement revolution through its groundbreaking book that is now available in multiple languages and on-line resources.

In media discussions, it’s easy to overlook the essential role OBOS and other women’s publications historically have played in bringing attention to women’s issues and reframing topics to include the voice and perspective of women. Kudos to Gloria Feldt for highlighting OBOS alongside the other terrific media organizations mentioned.

Plus: OBOS’s newest book, “Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth,” will be released in March 2008. It joins “Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause” as one of the specialty titles on women’s health and is the latest example of how OBOS is continuing to present a feminist perspective on health research and political and cultural issues. More details on the new book will follow soon!

I’ve been a big fan of RH Reality Check since it started way back in, oh, 2006.

Yes, that’s right. It’s only been around for a year. Yet in a very short amount of time, the UN Foundation-supported site has become a major player in online political discussions, bringing together journalists, activists and medical experts on domestic and global reproductive health issues.

It’s now getting the attention it deserves. Writing at Women’s eNews, Sheila Gibbons gives a great overview of how RH Reality Check smartly counters anti-choice rhetoric, noting the contributions from well-known bloggers and its role as a “reference hub for material coming out of reproductive and maternal health advocacy groups, think tanks, universities and health research organizations.”

“We began as a simple little blog to introduce the concept to the leadership of the major advocacy organizations in the reproductive health community. Then we began to put the pieces together to grow what is a thriving new media site” says Editor Scott Swenson, who describes more about what RH Reality Check has in the works here.

RH Reality Check is also interested in coalition building among reproductive health advocates.

“The advocacy community is very strong but a lot of conversations seem to have been behind closed doors,” Associate Editor Amie Newman tells Gibbons. “RH Reality Check has the potential to bring the dialogue out in public. It’s a little scary for the reproductive health communities to have this out in the open, but through the site we can host articles from major leaders and writers who can discuss political strategies and a whole range of issues.”

RH Reality Check makes it easy for readers to customize news preferences and engage in dialogue with writers and other readers. Learn more about submitting articles and other ways to get involved, including becoming a wiki editor. Very cool.

A small survey from 2004 suggests that more than 80 percent of women seek health information online.

Meanwhile, a Google search for “women’s health” returns almost 6 million results, the Department of Health and Human Services’s 4parents.gov (intended to help parents talk to teens about sex) has been criticized for inaccuracy both before and after revisions, and an alternative to Wikipedia is being created to combat a perceived lack of credibility and expertise from the online giant.

So how can you make sense of the millions of websites and find online health information that is reliable?

MedlinePlus, from the National Library of Medicine, is often a good starting point, and offers this list of quality criteria health websites should meet to be considered reliable, and this guide to healthy web surfing. The Medical Library Association and the National Cancer Institute offer similar guides.

However, you can’t always trust government websites and sources to tell the whole story, as evidenced by the 4parents.gov controversy (see this July post for background) and reports of agenda-based pressure on the former Surgeon General, Dr. Richard Carmona.

Likewise, non-profit organizations often receive funding from sources that may influence their web content (such as pharmaceutical companies), and individuals may not have a firm grasp on or honest interpretation of the material they present that is drawn from other sources. A site’s purpose may simply be to sell something (such as supplements or weight loss products), limiting the balance of the information presented.

Some basic questions to ask when evaluating the reliability of health information websites:

- Who is the author? What are the author’s credentials? Does the author have an agenda to promote?

- Who pays for the site? Is the site selling something that affects the information it provides?

- Is the information up to date? Information can change quickly, such as new safety data on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Can you tell when the site was last updated?

- Can you verify the presented facts or opinions? Are there any references that point you to the source of the information? Can you tell what is presented as a fact vs. an opinion?

Sites displaying the HON Code accreditation have met a basic threshold of quality and trustworthiness. Additionally, remember that even when sites present references in support of an agenda, those references may not support their claims when scrutinized.

These basic guidelines should give you a good start, as long as you keep a healthy dose of skepticism while looking for health information online.

Of course, you could always just start with the OBOS Health Resource Center – OBOS provides its own guide to navigating healthcare information, and is part of a coalition that rejects pharmaceutical-dominated approaches to disease in favor of prevention.

Need recommendations for good websites on specific health topics? Leave your questions in the comments!

A Year of Notable Setbacks: Columnist Ellen Goodman celebrates Women’s Equality Day — the anniversary of Aug. 26, 1920, when the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became law — with the Equal Rites Awards, her annual tribute to “those who have labored over the last 12 months to set back the cause of women.” Among the many highlights:

Patriarch of the Year Prize. It goes with disappointment to US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose opinion restricting abortions rested on the retro notion that women needed to be protected from “regret,” “grief,” and “sorrow,” even if it meant protecting them from their rights. We send the paternalistic justice a hook to bring him back to the 21st century.

and …

The Our Bodies/Our Daughters Award goes to Mattel. The folks who brought you Barbie are collaborating on a new line of make-up — for 6- to 9-year-olds. For this we award them and all their ilk a special cosmetic for the next year: egg on their face.

Plus: Gloria Feldt discovers it’s easier to find a card celebrating National Toilet Paper Day than women’s suffrage.

Pour Me Another Cup: “The caffeine in three cups of coffee or tea a day may help maintain mental sharpness in older women, but caffeine consumption appears to have no effect in men,” reports The New York Times. The study appears in the journal Neurology.

The Skinny on Hollywood: Rachel Abramowitz begins this L.A. Times story with a search for body fat in Hollywood. “It’s the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and judging by the standards of the youth-obsessed network’s magenta carpet, blubber, let alone curves, or even softness is out of fashion. Girls — and I mean girls, given their lack of womanly heft, glide by.”

It’s a good story, but the photos meant to portray the shrinking body size of Hollywood stars manages to fetishize them at the same time — yet another indication that the incredible shrinking woman is something to envy.

“‘Glamour’ Editor To Lady Lawyers: Being Black Is Kinda A Corporate ‘Don’t'”: Just go read Jezebel — it’s all there.

New Primer on Health Care Costs: The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a primer on health care costs (PDF) that examines “the rapid growth in the nation’s health care costs since 1970, when the average growth in health spending exceeded the growth of the economy as a whole by an average of 2.5 percentage points.”

“It also examines the impact of health care costs on families, with insurance premiums rising 87% between 2000 and 2006, more than four times the growth in wages,” continues KFF. “The primer describes the types and sources of health care spending and the demographic factors associated with higher or lower levels of spending. It also discusses other factors that influence health care spending growth, including the use of new medical technology, population changes, and changes in disease prevalence.”

Human Trafficking and HIV: A United Nations report released Wednesday notes that tens of thousands of women forced to work as sex slaves in Asia are at risk of contracting HIV and spreading the virus, reports the AP. If nothing is done to stop human trafficking in the region, “there is just going to be an explosion” of infections, said Caitlin Wiesen of the United Nations Development Program. More from Reuters.

More Doctors Banning Vaginal Births After C-Sections: NPR’s “All Things Considered” last week covered the increase in the number of cesarean births, in part because more and more medical centers have policies against vaginal birth if the mother has already had a c-section.

Plus: Rachel points to CNN’s list of five ways to avoid a c-section.

Monkeys Use “Baby Talk” to Interact With Infants: And you thought only cutesy humans communicated this way. Researchers have found female rhesus monkeys on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico use special vocalizations while interacting with infants, too. When a baby wanders away from its mother, the other female monkeys use the vocalizations, suggesting they are trying to get the infant’s attention.

“The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations called girneys may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of human motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants,” said Dario Maestripieri, associate professor in comparative human development at the University of Chicago. The study, “Intended Receivers and Functional Significance of Grunt and Girney Vocalizations in Free-Ranging Rhesus Macaques,” appears in the journal Ethology.

Women’s eNews held its sixth annual 21 Leaders for the 21st Century gala earlier this week.

Check out the amazing honorees — “Seven Who Will Not Be Stopped,” “Seven Who Exert the Power of Their Voice,” and “Seven Who Stake Our Claim to the Future” — and read editor Rita Henley Jensen’s preview of the event.

Video interviews with each of the 21 Leaders will be posted on the Women’s eNews website next month.

- Inspired by the case of Kathy Sierra and by two recent research studies, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post looks at how threats and general harassment are affecting women writers on the web — and how their intensity and frequency seems to be increasing:

Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to “sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”

Arianna Huffington summarizes the dilemma succinctly to Nakashima when she says that the anonymity of the world allows “a lot of those dark prejudices toward women to surface.”

Plus: Lucinda Marshall has more with “Silences Redux”

- A new edition of the Scholar & Feminist Online has just been posted: “Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance,” co-edited by Jessica Valenti and Gwendolyn Beetham, features articles by feminist scholars on cyberactivism and online movement making; women and politics in the blogosphere; gender disparity and web access; and building online communities. The publication, created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, includes a first-ever blog portion.

- Dana Goldstein at Campus Progress points to an easy way to determine how many times the words “he” and “she” appear on a website. The findings, of course, are skewed in part by a reliance on using “he” in gender neutral contexts, along with the higher percentage of men in the news. I wonder, though, if the only sites where “she” ranks higher than “he” are woman-centered websites, like this one.

Viagra’s new ad campaign (only shown in Canada at the moment) is acting as a microcosm of everything wrong with the unfettered marketing of pharmaceuticals.

For the duration of the ad, men and women talk in a made-up language. Among the suggestive winks and nods, only the repeated word “Viagra” is comprehensible. From The New York Times:

“Viagra spanglecheff?” says a man to a friend at a bowling alley.

“Spanglecheff?” his friend asks.

“Minky Viagra noni noni boo-boo plats!” the first man replies, with a grin that suggests he is not talking about the drug’s side effects. The ads end with the slogan, “The International Language of Viagra.”

An executive from the advertising firm that created the ad bluntly admits, “It’s not as though we need to tell people what it does, because they already know. Consumers can fill in the blank for themselves.”

To that sentiment Dr. Sidney World, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, responds, “In an ideal world, companies would have to sell drugs based on accurate and balanced information. That doesn’t seem to work well enough, so instead of that they’re substituting gibberish.”

Check out these titles for some good reading:

Full Frontal Feminism: Interviews with Jessica Valenti, executive editor of Feministing.com and author of the new “Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters,” ran last week at AlterNet, Salon and New York magazine.

Huffington Post is running a book excerpt, along with Valenti’s touching explanation for why the book is dedicated to “Miss Magoo.” And Valenti’s six-point manifesto for becoming a feminist is posted at The Guardian. In it she writes:

“I wanted to write the book I wish I’d read as a teenager. A book that would cut through the nonsense stereotypes and tell it like it is. A book that would talk about how amazing it is to be a feminist. And how necessary. Because I truly do believe that feminism is necessary for women to live happy, fulfilled lives — especially given the society we live in, which constantly and consistently tells women that we’re just not good enough.”

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: Courtney Martin, a contributor to Feministing.com and other media outlets, is getting lots of press for “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body.”

Writing in The New York Times, Holly Brubach calls it, “a smart and spirited rant that makes for thought-provoking reading.”

“She opens with some sobering statistics,” continues Brubach, “seven million American girls and women with eating disorders, and up to 70 million people worldwide.”

Brubach goes on to quote from the book: “Ninety-one percent of women recently surveyed on a college campus reported dieting; 22 percent of them dieted ‘always’ or ‘often.’ In 1995, 34 percent of high-school-age girls in the United States thought they were overweight. Today, 90 percent do.”

How Sassy Changed My Life: Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, co-authors of “How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time,” appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” last week to discuss the magazine described on the program as the “antithesis of the homecoming queen, please-your-boyfriend culture. It published articles about suicide and STDs while Seventeen was still teaching girls how to get a boy to notice you.”

NPR has also published an excerpt from “How Sassy Changed My Life.” More at Venus and Media Bistro.

Just call her E.J. Graff, feminist myth-buster.

After debunking the idea that women in huge numbers were “opting out” of the workplace for a more domestic life, Graff, a senior researcher at the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism, is now taking on the media’s latest construction: the “Mommy War Machine.”

Graff identifies a number of recent articles and talk-show topics that resurrect a long-standing story: the “juicy tale of mothers who work and moms who stay home, dissing each other on playgrounds and in school parking lots with junior-high-level bile.”

But this war is a fiction: “The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds — and the marketing machines — of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s. All while the number of working mothers has been rising.”

Listen to Graff talk about “The Mommy War Machine” on Monday’s edition of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Plus: “Ask This,” a project of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, is running a series by Graff that suggests ways for reporters and editors to focus on what Ruth Rosen has called the “care crisis” in America. Here’s part one, part two and part three.