This post was meant for Tuesday — apologies for the delay!

The CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate Monday night included questions from women about gay marriage, race, healthcare and — from a Planned Parenthood staffer — whether the candidates had ever talked to their children about sex education, using medically accurate and age-appropriate education.

They were terrific — and though I very much enjoyed the format, ultimately I agree with Alessandra Stanley’s point that “over all, the evening turned out to be a showcase for video-savvy viewers, not a showdown between candidates.” With few exceptions, the candidates delivered overly safe, polished responses (as Anna commented here).

The blog Real Women, Real Voices did the numbers and discovered that “of the 39 viewer-submitted questions aired by CNN, 30 featured men speaking and only 12 featured women. (One question, #33 showed four clips, two women and two men.)”

The post also links to the video for each question.

Jenn Pozner of Women in Media & News has more analysis on the under-representation of women here. “The fact that YouTube and CNN would bill their debate as a bold new step for participatory democracy yet would so significantly underrepresent women’s participation is another indication that media accountability is needed even in this brave new world of online communication, despite the much-ballyhooed gender equity it was supposed to bring,” writes Pozner.

Before the steam iron, before the vacuum cleaner, we had vibrators. They debuted in the early 1880s as a medical treatment for “hysteria.” They were subsequently introduced as a home medical appliance in 1899 and appeared in magazine advertisements as early as 1904.

A $5.95 model had made the Sears catalog by 1918.

This fascinating but hidden history is the subject of the a new documentary, “Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm,” which premieres this Saturday at Lincoln Center in New York. It will have its West Coast debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October.

Filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori based their work on a critically-acclaimed book-length study by Rachel Maines, who stumbled upon the early advertisements while researching the history of needlework.

As Natalie Angier writes in her review of the book “The Technology of Orgasm” for the New York Times, Maines learned that the history of vibrators — especially their invention as a medical tool — was tied into the entire social history of women’s health:

Her investigations led her to conclude that doctors became the keepers of the female orgasm for several related reasons. To begin with, women have been presumed since Hippocrates’ day, if not earlier, to suffer from some sort of ”womb furie” — the word ”hysteria,” after all, derives from uterus. The result was thought to be a spectacular assortment of symptoms, including lassitude, irritability, depression, confusion, palpitations of the heart, headaches, forgetfulness, insomnia, muscle spasms, stomach upsets, writing cramps, ticklishness and weepiness.

Who better to treat the wayward female plaint than a physician, and where better to address his ministrations than toward the general area of her rebellious female parts?

Of course, this history has its colorful side as well — which would seem to make it a very marketable, if offbeat, subject for a documentary. After winning a fairly competitive process the get the rights to the book, though, Slick and Omori had difficulty securing funding, according to Patricia Yollin, who writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about their struggle and their unflagging desire to make the film.

“Wendy and I both came out of the sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation,” Omori said. “We thought we knew it all. We hardly knew anything.”

The photographs that accompany the article are a must-see. (Here’s one example of an antique vibrator.)

With a budget of less than $150,000, they still were able to interview many well-know and not-so-well-known characters in this expansive narrative. Betty Dodson, “the godmother of the masturbation movement” shook up the establishment in the 1970s with her simple feminist message: “Independent orgasm, I guarantee, will lead to independent thoughts.”

Texas housewife Joanna Webb was arrested in the 2004 for selling vibrators at Tupperware-like parties — a felony offense. Her life fell apart as a result of the case.

Obviously, this history continues to be written.

The Popularity of Plan B: “The popularity of the morning-after pill Plan B has surged in the year since the federal government approved the sale of the controversial emergency contraceptive without a prescription,” reports the Washington Post. But advocates for women’s health are quick to note that teenagers under age 18 still do not have access.

“There’s no medical basis for restricting teenagers’ access to emergency contraception,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, which is suing the FDA to remove the age restriction. “This not about morality, it’s about public health and cutting America’s alarmingly high teenage pregnancy rates.”

Plus: The teen birth rate hits a record low. Here’s the government study on which the data is based.

Think This Would Fly in U.S. Schools?: The award-winning Romanian film about abortion, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” will be shown in French schools, “following a u-turn by government officials who had initially vetoed plans to show it,” reports The Guardian. “As well as winning the top prize at Cannes, Cristian Mungiu’s film was the recipient of the National Education Prize, which is awarded to a Cannes-selected film with the relevant artistic, aesthetic and educational values each year. The chosen film then receives government funding to allow a special educational DVD to be produced for upper-secondary schools, which teach children between the ages of 15 and 18.”

OBOB previously covered abortion in movies and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” here.

Going for the Gold: “If hypocrisy were an Olympic event, Senator Vitter would get the gold medal,” writes James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth. Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, apologized after his name appeared on the client list of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “D.C. Madam.” Vitter is also chief backer of a bill to reauthorize funding for abstinence education.

But Viiter “wouldn’t be the only ‘family values’ champion lining up for the gold,” adds Wagoner, who goes on to name a few other contenders.

Reality Bites: Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified before Congress this week that his term was compromised by political pressure to weaken or suppress important public health information. The accusations would seem surreal if we haven’t all been reminded in so many ways how backward this administration has been:

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

Trading Shots Over a Vaccine: The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the competition between Merck and GlaxoSmithKline to develop the world’s top cervical-cancer immunization.

That Pew Survey on Mothers And Work: Good analysis from Echidne of the Snakes on Pew’s latest survey.

Bridal Media Send “I-Do” Message on Overspending: “Where once a bride could design a memorable day using an etiquette guide and a good caterer, the specialized wedding media of today feed a $161 billion per year industry enriched at the expense of many of the people it purports to serve,” writes Sheila Gibbons at Women’s eNews.

Is Soap Clean?: This was an ongoing debate one year in my college dorm … The New York Times answers the burning question about sharing individual bars of soap.

“In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity,” the Los Angeles Times reported this week.

Those states are on to something.

On Friday, a report produced by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. for the Department of Health and Human Services noted the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only education. The study is available here in its entirety (PDF); here’s an overview that describes the impact of the four abstinence education programs under review. From the executive summary:

Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. Contrary to concerns raised by some critics of the Title V, Section 510 abstinence funding, however, program group youth were no more likely to have engaged in unprotected sex than control group youth.

Scott Swenson at RH Reality Check has the reaction from all sides:

“This report should serve as the final verdict on the failure of the abstinence-only industry in this country,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). “It shows, once again, that these programs fail miserably in actually helping young people behave more responsibly when it comes to their sexuality,” Smith continued.

In 1996, the federal government attached a provision to the welfare reform law establishing a federal program for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. This program, Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, dedicated $50 million per year to be distributed among states that choose to participate. States accepting the funds are required to match every four federal dollars with three state-raised dollars (for a total of $87.5 million annually, and $787.5 million for the eight years from fiscal year 1998 through 2006). Programs that receive the Title V funding are prohibited from discussing methods of contraception, including condoms, except in the context of failure rates.

On a call yesterday organized by the Abstinence Clearinghouse, abstinence-only proponents were clearly rocked by the potentially ruinous news in the report. High profile abstinence-only advocate, Robert Rector, led the preemptive damage-control planning. He outlined several strategies the abstinence-only movement could use to rationalize the findings in the report saying, “The other spin I think is very important is not [program] effectiveness, but rather the values that are being taught,” Rector said. Whether or not these programs work is a “bogus issue,” Rector continued.

How bogus? 10 years worth of public funding to the tune of $1.5 billion.

And the value of disseminating ineffective and sometimes dangerous and demeaning misinformation (PDF)? Priceless.

Some good news concerning the national sorority that last month ousted almost 23 members at DePauw University based on their appearance and popularity.

DePauw University President Robert G. Bottoms made it known today that the university is severing ties with Delta Zeta sorority. The decision was announced in a letter delivered this morning to the sorority’s national president, Deborah A. Raziano, in which Bottom noted, “[We] at DePauw believe that the values of our University and those of the national Delta Zeta Sorority are incompatible.”

As you might recall, university officials had been engaged in a public dialogue with Delta Zeta’s national office about its treatment of the students since December. In a statement released Feb. 28 (scroll down), the university addressed why it did not immediately revoke Delta Zeta’s charter:

Initially we hoped that we could reach an acceptable resolution for our students by communicating on their behalf with Delta Zeta national officers. When that did not occur, a formal letter of reprimand was sent by President Bottoms to the national office outlining our dissatisfaction with Delta Zeta’s treatment of our students. As this issue has continued to unfold, we have tried to be sensitive to the remaining student members of Delta Zeta who continue to live in the chapter house and to the DePauw Delta Zeta alumnae who played no role in their national office’s decisions.

Though admittedly we were skeptical this relationship could (or should) be salvaged, it looks like the final straw was the decision by the national Delta Zeta office to publicly criticize the students it ousted on its website, along with their campus supporters. I can’t get on to the Delta Zeta site (update: it’s reportedly “undergoing maintenance”). But according to The New York Times today, Delta Zeta published the following:

“Delta Zeta National apologizes to any of our women at DePauw who felt personally hurt by our actions,” the sorority said in a message posted earlier this month on its Web site. “It was never our intention to disparage or hurt any of our members during this chapter reorganization process.”

That apology, however, did not bring reconciliation at DePauw.

“It’s like a thief who’s sorry that he got caught, rather than for what he did,” said Rachel Pappas, a junior who left the sorority before the evictions and organized a campus event about it last month.

In addition to the apology, the sorority also posted on its Web site statements critical of the women who were forced out of the DePauw chapter, and of faculty members who supported them.

Bottoms also alluded to the website in his letter — along with Delta Zeta’s decision, as of March 1, to stop communicating with the news media:

Now, three weeks after my initial letter to you, my dissatisfaction with your organization continues to grow. I am proud of our DePauw students and the way they reacted to an unwarranted situation. Our students have shown a maturity beyond what one might expect of undergraduates. Yet postings on your Web site attempt to discredit any DePauw student critical of your actions. Your Web site has also been critical of our faculty for their willingness to openly discuss the way the membership review took place within the Delta Zeta chapter.

In summary, we at DePauw do not like the way our students were treated. We also disagree with your portrayal of the University in the media. We are opposed to your media freeze. One of the foundations of a university is free and open communication, which has been a hallmark of how we at DePauw have responded to this situation. We also vehemently contest the assertion on your Web site that “at all points in this process we (Delta Zeta) have worked with the University, sought their advice and acted upon their advice in our reorganization efforts.”

Sheesh. Delta Zeta’s actions just might inspire one of the other 165 campuses with Delta Zeta chapters to re-think whether this is a sorority with supporting. With sisters like that, who needs enemies?

Plus: Check out the published letters of support for DePauw from Delta Zeta alumnae.

In honor of International Women’s Day, we take a look at coverage of women from around the globe.

Have an IWD-related post or story to share? Link to it in the comments section!

For starters, InternationalWomensDay.com provides some historical background and maintains a search-by-country listing of events.

World Marks International Women’s Day by Honoring Women — and Pledging to Improve Their Status: From China to Afghanistan to London, the AP goes around the globe, gathering quotes from world leaders and looking at the status of women:

In Bangladesh, men — celebrities, athletes, students — vowed to fight the disfiguring and often deadly practice of attacking women with acid as a means of punishment.

In Mumbai, India, a company launched a new taxi service for women with female cabbies at the wheel, and in Vietnam, men bought their wives and girlfriends bouquets, turning Thursday into the communist nation’s version of Valentine’s Day.

In Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao met with women lawmakers.

“I want to take this opportunity to send my regards to you and hope you are all successful in your career and have a happy life,” Hu said, shaking their hands in the Great Hall of the People.

However, in Iran, women released after being detained for holding a peaceful gathering earlier in the week were warned Thursday not to attend a women’s day protest outside parliament.

Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: MADRE released this report Tuesday on the incidence, causes and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The report condemns the Bush administration for refusing to protect women’s rights in Iraq.

Here’s more on the report from Frida Berrigan, who writes at WIMN’s Voices about the lack of media coverage of gender-based violence and discusses the links between the “systematic oppression that women are experiencing in Iraq with the systematic de-funding of every education, health care, welfare, housing, childcare and food assistance programs aimed at women here in this country.”

Making Women’s Health an International Priority: “It has been said that the health of a society is measured by how it treats its women,” writes Lucinda Marshall. Looks like we have a crisis.

A Snapshot of the Status of Women: Roxanne notes the lack of U.S. media coverage of IWD and also points to this U.N. snapshot on the status of women, as part of this year’s focus on “Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls.”

World Fails to Treat Rape as Crime: “Rape is weapon of war and the world fails to treat it as a crime, two U.N. agencies said on Wednesday as the Security Council called for justice for women and girls who are victims of violence,” reports Reuters. “The U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that while 104 out of 192 countries in the world had made rape a crime, these laws were poorly enforced.”

News from the Feminist Peace Network: FPN points to stories from Moscow, Afghanistan and Pakistan; World Pulse Magazine’s special IWD edition; and the arrest earlier this week of 32 Iranian women who were protesting in front of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court.

As of this morning, three of the women remained in prison; an electronic vigil in solidarity with the detainees is underway.

The Japan That Can’t Say Sorry: “By denying that Japan’s military coerced women in conquered countries into sex slavery between 1937 and 1945, and by refusing to issue an official apology for those crimes against humanity, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has added fresh insult to old injuries suffered by ‘comfort women’ who are still alive today,” begins this Boston Globe editorial. The New York Times has a story today on how former sex slaves are coping with the denial.

Blank Noise Action Heroes: Check out this blog-a-thon for women’s stories about how they’ve dealt with street sexual harassment — and emerged feeling like a hero. Here’s some background on the blog-a-thon.

Plus: It’s also Blog About Sexism day. While describing her own call-to-feminist-consciousness, Amanda poses some questions for readers to consider.

The community of John Jay High School in Westchester County, N.Y. is in a tizzy over the word “vagina.”

It seems that three female high school juniors received permission to read part of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” during a public open mic session. But they were told to avoid using the word “vagina,” which is mentioned in the excerpt, because young children would be in the audience and it would be taped for local cable TV. (The students have countered that the youngest audience member was in ninth grade.)

With us so far?

The students — Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson — divided the piece into thirds and then read the final line of this section together:

My short skirt is a liberation
flag in the women’s army
I declare these streets, any streets
my vagina’s country.

They have all received one-day in-school suspensions — not for saying “vagina,” exactly, but for disobeying school officials. The students told the Journal News that they debated not saying “vagina,” but ultimately decided it was important to stay true to the work.

Both the students and the principal held press conferences on the controversy. And the principal sent this statement Tuesday morning outlining the school’s position.

As we wonder at what age, precisely, vagina is an acceptable word, we turn to the Journal News for the community reaction:

“When I was able to say the word ‘vagina’ and be proud to say it … and it wasn’t crude and it wasn’t inappropriate and it was very real and very pure, it was important to me,” Reback said yesterday. “We were willing and ready to take whatever came.”

The administrators’ decision to suspend the girls has caused an uproar within the school, with students making T-shirts and posters to protest the punishment. A group opposed to the suspension has been created on Facebook.com, a popular Internet networking site, and had attracted more than 350 members yesterday.

The move has prompted parents to write to the Board of Education and circulate e-mails calling the suspension a “blatant attempt at censorship.”

Eve Ensler, who grew up in the same county, has weighed in: “What is wrong about the word ‘vagina,’ which is the correct biological term for a body part?” Ensler asked. “It is not slang. It is not dirty or racy. The fact that it was censored is an indication of exactly what is going on in American schools, where girls and boys are not being educated about their bodies in a healthy way. We’re pushing everything into the closet.”

“We need open, healthy sex education where girls know and love their bodies,” added Ensler.

The Journal News notes that the U.S. Supreme Court has said students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Public school officials, however, may regulate student expression that substantially disrupts the school environment or that infringes on the rights of others. Many courts have held that school officials can restrict student speech that is lewd, The First Amendment Center said.

The courts have been very generous to school authorities over the years, but It’s difficult to see how using the the word “vagina” does any of the above or could be considered “lewd.”

Allen Hershkowitz, a former town councilman and father of two students at John Jay high school, is right on when he says, “No one should be embarrassed to use the word ‘vagina.’ … It’s exactly the opposite message we should be teaching our children.”

I’m in recovery from a long, snowy drive back to Chicago following a media conference (the five-hour delay on the flight in was nothing compared to the cancelled flight on the way out!). So instead of a long round-up, here’s a quick look at two long stories in Sunday papers:

First up — The New York Times covers student-run sex magazines on college campuses. “I’m not a feminist. Feminism has this premise that men and women are equal, and I have a more biological view of things. I don’t think men and women are equal at all. I think we’re different, and what’s wrong with that?” says the new editor of Harvard’s H-Bomb, to the disappointment of the former editor. There certainly will be much to discuss about this one.

And — ready? — “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is back, in print. Los Angeles Times interviews Joss Whedon about the comic book series, the “Wonder Woman” that will never be, and “Goners,” “an original screenplay he wrote and is developing to direct for Universal that he called ‘a ghastly tale of female empowerment — something new for me!’”

Someone give this man a TV show already.

The New York Times offers a fascinating look at the mindset of a national sorority that sought to boost recruitment at DePauw University by boosting its members’ sexual appeal.

The national office of Delta Zeta house decided to clean house by kicking out members who didn’t fit a very specific look — white, thin and attractive to frat guys.

The 23 members who were asked to leave — via a letter declaring that “a membership review team has recommended you for alumna status” — included everyone who was overweight (the NYT story doesn’t define “overweight”). Sam Dillon writes:

They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

It seems that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta — headquartered in Oxford, Ohio — has a history of attracting “brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women,” according to former members; “socially awkward,” is how some DePauw students describe the sorority, according to a recent campus survey.

And that didn’t fly with the national office. In fact, for one recruiting event, writes Dillon, national representatives “asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University.”

National officers say the young women who were asked to leave were not committed to meeting recruitment goals, a point with which the women vehemently disagree. The university president sent a letter of reprimand (PDF) to the national office, and faculty members circulated a petition, calling the action unethical.

“We were especially troubled that the women they expelled were less about image and more about academic achievement and social service,” said Robert Hershberger, chair of the modern languages department.

You’d think Delta Zeta would have learned from its mistakes by now. In 1982, the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta did not allow a black student to join. And in 1967, the chapter tried unsuccessfully to keep out a women with a black father and a white mother.

In the cutline of the second photo from the top on this page, Elizabeth Haneline, who was among those evicted, is quoted making this observation: “The Greek system hasn’t changed at all, but instead of racism, it’s image now.”

For all the story elements that inspire an incredulous, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding response, what I found particularly charming about this unfortunate turn of events is that six of the 12 girls who were asked to stay quit, angered by the treatment their sisters received.

And I loved this quote:

“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”

Sisterhood can be wonderful. Too bad Delta Zeta didn’t value the women who valued its true meaning.

Media Update: Kudos to DePauw University News for tracking local and national media coverage — an obviously smart move, but it’s still difficult to conceive of every university taking a public stand. Check here to download video and for media updates. As of Monday afternoon, it looks like some of the former members will appear on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now,” which airs at 8 p.m. EST, as well as on Tuesday’s 8 a.m. segment of ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The Office of Fraternity & Sorority Life features the latest correspondence between the university and Delta Zeta on the future of the sorority chapter at DePauw.

The Care Crisis: “The great accomplishment of the modern women’s movement was to name such private experiences — domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape — and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political,” writes Ruth Rosen in The Nation. “Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America’s working families. Call it the care crisis.”

Mom’s Mad. And She’s Organized: “For years, mothers have been taking to the Internet to blog or post messages about the travails of motherhood, commiserating, fuming or laughing about their shared lives,” writes Kara Jesella in The New York Times. “But in the last year there has been a marked increase in those who are going beyond simply expressing their feelings. In a throwback to their mothers’ — or was it their grandmothers’? — time, they are organizing about family and work issues.” For more information, visit Moms Rising.

Ending Female Genital Mutilation: “Some human rights advocates believe that a tipping point is at hand — if the momentum against the practice, spurred on by the work of many government-supported agencies and nongovernmental organizations in Africa and around the world, continues,” reads a L.A. Times editorial.

AIDS Posters: This week’s Scout Report points to the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library digital archive of 625 AIDS posters from 44 countries, including Australia, Costa Rica, New Zealand and Poland. “Overall,” notes a Scout Report editor, “the collection is well-thought out and executed, and one that will be of interest to students of public health, graphic design, and other related fields.”

Circumcision Reduces HIV Risk: A study published in The Lancet confirms earlier reports linking circumcision to a reduction in HIV transmission. The “conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men’s chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent,” reports the AP.

And at the American Prospect Online, Beth Schwartzapfel reports on the new, improved diaphragm: “In a large-scale clinical trial that’s the first of its kind, researchers are currently testing the impact that diaphragm use has on HIV infection rates in Africa — where methods of protection that women can initiate without requiring their partners’ consent are badly needed. The new diaphragm, known as SILCS, tested well in early trials and is poised to enter the market before the end of the decade.”

“Got Pole?”: The upside of late-blogging … an early peek at tomorrow’s New York Times story: “Pole Dancing Parties Catch On in Book Club Country”

No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam: Speaking of book clubs, check out “Infidel,” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. William Grimes writes, “The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of ‘Infidel,’ her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.

“At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali describes a journey ‘from the world of faith to the world of reason,’ a long, often bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion and the clan-based traditional society that defined her world and that of millions of Muslims all over.”

The American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report this week detailing the omnipresence and damaging effects of sexualized images of girls and young women in American culture.

While much of the first part of the report confirms what most media observers already suspect, it is still enlightening to hear such a precise and thorough analysis. The APA report breaks down the consequences on multiple levels, looking at the effects of sexualized images on mental and physical health, development of a girl’s sexuality, and the development of general attitudes and beliefs concerning femininity and sexuality. The research links sexualization to three common mental health problems among young women: low self-esteem, depression or depressed mood and eating disorders.

It also explores the impact of these images — not just on young women, but on men and society at large. And while the report focuses on advertising and media representations, it also discusses how a girl’s interpersonal relationships with parents, other authority figures and peers often reinforce the media’s portrayals.

The task force summarizes its findings emphatically:

In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner (e.g., dressed in revealing clothing, with bodily postures or facial expressions that imply sexual readiness) and are objectified (e.g., used as a decorative object, or as body parts rather than a whole person). In addition, a narrow (and unrealistic) standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized. These are the models of femininity presented for young girls to study and emulate.

The most intriguing part of the report, though, discusses the sweeping impact these images have on all aspects of a young woman’s life:

Psychology offers several theories to explain how the sexualization of girls and women could influence girls’ well-being. Ample evidence testing these theories indicates that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs.

Although most of these studies have been conducted on women in late adolescence (i.e., college age), findings are likely to generalize to younger adolescents and to girls, who may be even more strongly affected because their sense of self is still being formed.

Report contributor and psychologist Sharon Lamb told the Washington Post: “I don’t think because we don’t have the research yet on the younger girls that we can ignore that [sexualization is] of harm to them. Common sense would say that, and part of the reason we wrote the report is so we can get funding to prove that.”

Eileen Zurbriggen, an associate professor of psychology at UCSC and co-author of the report, told UCSC Currents Online that part of the impetus for the report came from APA staff concerns.

“Like a lot of parents, they were worried about what they were seeing around them — thong underwear for 7-year-olds, pole dancing for girls on television,” said Zurbriggen.

And in film, and on the internet and in games that promise to teach kids how to pole dance at home. The images — and messages — are ubiquitous. And corporate denials insisting it’s all in good fun just seem pathetic. From the Washington Post:

Isaac Larian, whose company makes the large-eyed, pouty-lipped Bratz dolls, says, “Kids are very smart and know right from wrong.” What’s more, his testing indicates that girls want Bratz “because they are fun, beautiful and inspirational,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Not once have we ever heard one of our consumers call Bratz ‘sexy.’ ” Some adults “have a twisted sense of what they see in the product,” Larian says.

Fortunately, the report, which is supposed to be a guide for psychologists in their own practices as well in their collective public advocacy, also offers a series of specific recommendations, including emphasizing the need for “co-viewing” of media with informed parents and as part of school’s official curriculum and encouraging girls to become cultural creators and critics:

Girls and girls’ groups can also work toward change. Alternative media such as “zines” (Web-based magazines), “blogs” (Web logs), and feminist magazines, books, and Web sites encourage girls to become activists who speak out and develop their own alternatives. Girl empowerment groups also support girls in a variety of ways and provide important counterexamples to sexualization.

If you ask me, a good place to start might be About-Face, Girls, Women + Media Project or My Pop Studio. You can find an annotated list of other sites at Women, Websites and Body Image. More media literacy resources are available here. As for magazines, I highly recommend New Moon for girls 8-13 and Teen Voices for early teens.

In the Washington Post article, author Stacy Weiner does an admirable job of personalizing and historicizing the APA findings. She includes many interviews with girls and their parents — and she talks to experts who place the sexualization we are presently seeing in a fascinating context:

When do little girls start wanting to look good for others?

“A few years ago, it was 6 or 7,” says Deborah Roffman, a Baltimore-based sex educator. “I think it begins by 4 now.”

While some might argue that today’s belly-baring tops are no more risqué than hip huggers were in the ’70s, Roffman disagrees. “Kids have always emulated adult things,” she says. “But [years ago] it was, ‘That’s who I’m supposed to be as an adult.’ It’s very different today. The message to children is, ‘You’re already like an adult. It’s okay for you to be interested in sex. It’s okay for you to dress and act sexy, right now.’ That’s an entirely different frame of reference.

At another point, Weiner cites Wheelock College professor Diane Levin’s argument that much of the consumerism problem can be traced back to the deregulation of the children’s television in the 1980s — when product placement really began.

With the rules loosened, kids’ shows suddenly could feature characters who moonlighted as products (think Power Rangers, Care Bears, My Little Pony). “There became a real awareness,” says Levin, “of how to use gender and appearance and, increasingly, sex to market to children.”

And companies have run with it. As Peggy Orenstein all too briefly touched on in her recent New York Times story, “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?” Disney seems intent on selling purity via pink princess culture, until girls grow up and naturally move on to “Dark Tink” panties — as in Tinkerbell — described as “the bad girl side of Miss Bell that Walt never saw.”

“We need alternatives to the predominant message that says, ‘You are valued only because you’re sexy,’” Zurbriggen, the report’s co-author, told UCSC Currents Online. “We have to ask ourselves if corporate profits are really worth the damage we’re doing to the next generation.”

Lamb, who is also co-author of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes” (St. Martin’s, 2006), notes that the particular representation of sexuality that children are exposed to is damaging in itself.

“The issue is that the way marketers and media present sexuality is in a very narrow way,” says Lamb. “Being a sexual person isn’t about being a pole dancer [...] This is a sort of sex education girls are getting, and it’s a misleading one.”

The Montgomery County (Md.) Board of Education has approved a sex-education plan for students in eighth and 10th grades, reports the Washington Post. Much to the frustration of opponents, it addresses homosexuality without identifying it as morally wrong — and lawsuits may follow.

The WP’s Daniel de Vise writes that the lessons teach “what it means to be homosexual but say little about how people become gay, resisting pressure from a divided community to define homosexuality as nature or nurture, right or wrong.”

Approved by a unanimous vote, the lessons mark the first time Montgomery schools will introduce the topics of sexual orientation and homosexuality. The materials, including a new 10th-grade condom-demonstration DVD, will be field-tested in a handful of middle and high schools in spring, barring intervention by the courts.

Some school board members said they expect a lawsuit from the same community groups that persuaded a federal judge to halt a version of the curriculum in spring 2005. [...]

“I believe we will be sued. That’s okay. . . . Bring it on,” said board member Sharon W. Cox (At Large).

Leaders of the protest groups said yesterday that they would consider their legal options and signaled that they have the same objection to the new curriculum as to the old one: They say it offers one viewpoint, favorable toward homosexuality, anal sex and premarital sex. Observers on both sides have predicted that “viewpoint neutrality,” or lack thereof, would eventually form the basis of a lawsuit.

More frustrating to this observer is that the board didn’t go far enough in incorporating language in support of gay, lesbian and transgender students. But the board was, understandably, under a great deal of pressure to stick to agreed-upon language. (Speaking of, OBOS’ chapter on relationships with women includes coming out tips for teens, along with these online resources.)

It’s been a fascinating story to track. Montgomery County includes a number of upscale communities bordering Washington, D.C.; not the first place that comes to mind for lawsuits and multi-year delays over discussing sexual orientation.

Both sides were organized: Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, along with Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, sued to prevent implementation of the first version of the curriculum, which was introduced in 2004. On the other side, Montgomery County parents and their supporters formed Teach the Facts.

A summary of past events is provided in a related story de Vise wrote earlier this month:

The lessons, approved by the county school board in fall 2004, introduce sexual orientation topics to eighth- and 10th-graders and correct condom use to 10th-graders. Board members decided to add a discussion of homosexuality, which Montgomery teachers had been barred from broaching except in response to students’ questions.

The lessons, which take place during health class, consist of two 45-minute sessions in grade eight and three sessions in grade 10.

Parents organized against the curriculum and an eight-minute condom demonstration video, in which a young health educator unrolls a condom onto a cucumber. Critics said that the lessons tacitly encouraged premarital sex and homosexuality and failed to voice varied views, such as that sexual orientation is a choice or that anal intercourse can pose particular medical risks.

In 2005, the citizens groups sued. In May of that year, U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. issued a temporary restraining order, opining that the curriculum “presents only one view on the subject — that homosexuality is a natural and morally correct lifestyle — to the exclusion of other perspectives.” The litigants reached an agreement in June 2005, and the school board agreed not to broach religious beliefs in the revised lessons.

The fact that the school board vote this week was unanimous is a good sign it’s ready for a fight.

The 8-0 vote “sends a message that we stand firm on the balanced approach that we have taken with these revisions,” said Board of Education President Nancy Navarro.

Women’s eNews has announced its 2007 list of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. “From a peacemaker who returned to her native Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban to help women run for political office to a Dominican woman who walked down the East Coast in a wedding dress to increase awareness about domestic violence, this year’s 21 Leaders for the 21st Century demonstrate the risks that women are willing to take to make change in the world,” writes Irene Lew.

Check out the list here. Honorees include Shelby Knox, whose advocacy of sex education became a national story when the film “The Education of Shelby Knox” aired on public television; Marisa Rivera-Albert, president of the National Hispana Leadership Institute; Bushra Jamil, founder of Radio Al-Mahabba in Iraq; and Jane Mansbridge, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and author of the introduction to the sexuality section of the first edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

There’s one man among the mix: Jackson Katz, co-founder of the Mentors In Violence Prevention (MVP) program, a violence prevention initiative aimed at professional and college athletes. His most recent book is “The Macho Paradox.”

Bike Messengers: A group of female college students in India recently completed a week-long motorbike trip to raise young people’s awareness about violence against women and HIV/AIDS.

Apeksha Todkari, a third-year student, said: “We want to change the mindset. We want to tell them to live equally and exercise their rights. There should be no discrimination. It is only then can the woman say no to unprotected sex.”

The story is particularly noteworthy because the women braved the reactions of their own families, who thought their daughters had no business traveling on their own.

Unbound: Jim Yardley of The New York Times talks with Wang Zaiban, 84, and Wu Xiuzhen, 83, whose feet are “historical artifacts,” as they are survivors of an era when bound feet were “considered a prerequisite for landing a husband.”

No available man, custom held, could resist the picture of vulnerability presented by a young girl tottering atop tiny, pointed feet. But Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Wu have tottered past vulnerability. They have outlived their husbands and also outlived civil war, mass starvation and the disastrous ideological experiments by Mao that almost killed China itself.

In recent years, drought drove them out of the mountains of Shaanxi Province to this farming village beside the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia. They now collect cigarette cartons or other scraps for recycling, or they help in the fields. They are widows, grandmothers, mothers and, more or less, migrant workers.

At this particular moment, they are resting.

Conference Against Female Circumcision: Also from the Times, a reprint of an article from Der Spiegel about the recent conference involving Muslim scholars and academics from Germany, Africa and the Middle East, who spent two days discussing female genital mutilation. The story’s unflinching description of female cicumcision can be difficult to read; kudos to the Times for reprinting it.

Anniversary of Montreal Massacre: On Dec. 6,1989, Marc Lepine entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on a mission to murder women. In the end, 14 women lay dead. Lepine committed suicide, leaving behind a lengthy anti-feminist rant in which he blamed all of his problems on women.

Plus: Amie Newman from RHReality Check on unsafe abortion as a human rights abuse; Broadsheet on Bollywood’s kissing crisis and the news, via the BBC, that an Indian village has given its blessing to a lesbian couple’s marriage (after payment of a pair of oxen among other items).

“But what’s a little bribery in return for changing the definition of marriage?” asks Broadsheet’s Carol Lloyd. “Considering that there’s virtually no amount of money that could persuade Mary Cheney’s community to sanctify her love, this story seems like a drop of enlightenment for our backward land.”

P.S. WIMN’s Voices is up for best new blog — vote here!

Get With the Program: You’d think by now all employees of every store/airline/restaurant would be better trained in dealing with breastfeeding moms. The latest incident involves a woman who was kicked off a Freedom Airlines flight (hold the irony) from Vermont to New York after declining a flight attendant’s suggestion she use a blanket to cover up while breastfeeding. Upon hearing the news, more than a dozen Vermont mothers went to Burlington International Airport for a nurse-in.

Today Freedom Airlines, which runs commuter flights for Delta, announced that it had disciplined the flight attendant for acting contrary to company expectations. Spokesman Paul Skellon also apologized for stating earlier this week, “A breast-feeding mother is perfectly acceptable on an aircraft, providing she is feeding the child in a discreet way.”

“To clarify our policy,” said Skellon Friday, “Freedom Airlines firmly supports a mother’s right to breast feed a child. We understand that air travel presents particular difficulties to a nursing passengers. Moreover while blankets are available for passengers convenience, we do not expect (and will not in the future request) that nursing mothers use a blanket to cover their child while nursing. My comment in the original article to the contrary was not an accurate statement of our policy.”

Meanwhile, 27-year-old mother Emily Gillette disputes the airline’s assertion that she was invited back on the flight and has filed a charge against both airlines with the Vermont Human Rights Commission. Breastfeeding is protected under Vermont’s Public Accommodations Law. (Wondering where your state stands? Check out the National Conference of State Legislatures 50-state summary of breastfeeding laws.)

Check out Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner’s post on this subject — contact information for the CEO of Delta included.

A Big Welcome to Dr. Eric Keroack: “Putting this guy in charge of the federal family planning program designed to ensure the sexual and reproductive health of low-income women? Sounds like a match made in heaven,” writes Andrea Lynch at RH Reality Check. “Once he starts his new job (conveniently, there is no confirmation process), Dr. Keroack will join a pantheon of anti-abortion, anti-contraception, homophobic ideologues hand-picked by the Decider-in-Chief to staff federal agencies and oversee federal programs over the past few years.”

Grandmothers in the Middle: From Newswise: “Grandmothers who have living parents or in-laws and find themselves raising grandchildren experience a greater sense of burden and depression, according to University of Missouri-Columbia researcher Teresa Cooney. She believes that the increased burden and depression was due to the potential demands placed on middle-generation women.”

The study, “Women in the Middle: Generational Position and Grandmothers’ Adjustment to Raising Grandchildren,” was published in the summer 2006 issue of Journal of Women and Aging, also looks at the influence of education on a woman’s sense of burden.

“University casts out radical old ‘womyn’ for younger, less ardent ‘women’“: That’s the headline of this National Post story about a change of name for the University of Waterloo’s campus women’s center.

Reminder: Lung Cancer is Deadliest for Women: “More than 72,000 women nationwide are expected to die of lung cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society. That’s more than a quarter of all cancer deaths in women and 30,000 more deaths than from breast cancer,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. But it’s not sexy.

“The Wrong Egg”: From Salon, “When a fertility clinic mistakenly placed a client’s sperm in the wrong woman, the man sued for the right to be called the baby’s father. Trouble is, the law says he’s nobody’s daddy.”

From the Archives: L.A. Times rediscovers “A red letter day for feminism.”

Five Years Later: Photographer Paula Lerner and Marla Gitterman, program director for Bpeace, answered questions online at the Washington Post about the multimedia Women of Kabul.