At first glance, a paper published in the journal Pediatrics may seem to imply that young women are virtually unaffected by body image: As The Washington Post's The Checkup blog reports, researchers found "no association between high-school girls' body-mass index -- which indicates whether a body is under-, over- or of normal weight -- and their ever having had sex." But once the University of Pittsburgh team began to break down their results by high-school girls' race, perceived weight and a matrix of especially risky sexual behaviors, the findings became more complicated.

Overall, the study found that underweight girls, as well as those who were or believed they were overweight, were less likely to use condoms than their normal-weight counterparts. Of the many things this might suggest, what seems obvious to me is this group's lack of agency and self-worth. Girls may be seeing their (real or perceived) larger size as a flaw they must compensate for, and those with low self-esteem may already be starving themselves. (Personally, I'd be interested to see how much overlap there was between the group of girls who were actually underweight and the group that considered itself to be overweight.)

And the findings only get stickier when race enters the equation. Here's how The Checkup breaks them down:

These results are, of course, all over the map, and more research is likely necessary to determine why the racial differences are so pronounced. But a few common threads emerge: Girls who are or believe themselves to be over- or underweight seem most likely to be leading dangerous sex lives. And, for some reason, young Latinas are especially vulnerable, regardless of real or perceived weight.

So, now that we are beginning to understand how weight, race and body image can play into girls' early sexual experiences, what can we do to decrease their risk-taking behavior? For Dr. Aletha Akers, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of gynecology and and reproductive sciences at Pitt, it comes down to better sex education. "This study will contribute to sexual health education prevention efforts, which can be tailored to address how cultural norms regarding body size may influence adolescent sexual decision making," she says, in a press release. "Knowing how a girl perceives her weight may be just as important as knowing her actual weight." More specifically, the study concludes "that girls at weight extremes and those from different racial backgrounds may have unique sexual health education and prevention needs."

I have no quibble with Akers' recommendations; in fact, I hope politicians and those who design sex ed curricula are listening to what she has to say. But I think it's also important to point out that not all sex education happens in school. If we want girls to feel good enough about themselves that they wait until they're ready, practice safe sex and avoid other risky behaviors, we're also going to have to help them interpret the messages they're getting from more informal sources -- from friends and siblings to magazine and TV.

These frequent incursions would send William into a tizzy of giggling, squirming and (he'll kill me one day for writing this) positioning himself so she would do it again. Coming off the tail end of the evening witching hour, I would be sitting on the floor at the threshold of the bathroom -- one ear aimed to the room across the hall where "Hardball" blared from the TV, the other in the direction of my kids -- when I'd note a peculiar tone to their laughter. It would sound higher pitched and more joyful than normal.

"What's going on?" I'd yell, summoning my inner Archie Bunker, knowing full well what was going on.

"Jessie's grabbing my penis!" William would yell back, snort-laughing as water splashed around the tub.

So long, Chris Matthews.

I'd rush to the tub and tell Jessie she shouldn't touch William's privates because they were, well, his privates. Soon, I'd find myself so awash in vague euphemisms and instructions that I'd just stare at them dumbly, then tell them it was time to get out.

But knowing William didn't really mind his sister's incursions, I had to come up with a reason for him to stop making himself so readily accessible. I crafted the half-baked explanation that he should discourage her from touching him, or she might start grabbing the penises of all the boys in her preschool class and then she wouldn't have any friends. (I made a mental note to use the same argument in a different context years hence.)

That seemed to sober him up, and over time, her interest in his penis ebbed, eventually dying down altogether. At least I thought so.

The other night, we were in the playroom, cleaning up toys before bed, when Jessie looked down at herself and said, apropos of nothing, "I wish I had a penis."

My heart stopped beating, I dropped the handful of Legos I'd just scooped up and Sigmund Freud, complete with pipe and pocket watch, crashed through our ceiling to land on the couch, where he sat staring at us with a raised eyebrow. Thoughts of Jessie's feelings of inadequacy, of penis envy, of adolescent confusion and despair flooded my mind in a tangle of maternal angst and worry. What can I say to this child to fend it all off, at least for a day?

I took a deep breath and said, in my most upbeat mom voice, "Well, you don't have one of those, but you do have something verrry special."

I could feel William freeze in rapt attention behind me. Whatever could I be talking about?

Jessie looked at me quizzically and said, "I do? Where?"

"There," I said, nodding to her nether region.

Her eyes widened.

"What is it?" she asked, with the kind of anticipation one usually reserves for the opening of a much-touted gift.

I must pause here to say that, although I grew up post-sexual revolution, my parents were unmistakably pre-sexual revolution. The closest anyone in our house ever came to anatomical correctness was to utter the words "tonsils" or "appendix." Even now, at 40, such language doesn't roll easily off the tongue. I inherited from my mother, as she did from hers, a decided reluctance to name names. I can't even remember when or how I learned the proper terms for the parts of my body. All of which leaves me in a bit of a pickle when it comes to teaching my own kids about their bodies. With no clear role models to summon from my past, I long ago realized I'd have to wing it.

I just didn't know I'd be winging it so soon, with my toddler, on the playroom floor. But what could I do? I stiffened my spine, looked Jessie in the eye, and said, "You, Jessie Joan, have a vagina."

At that she smiled wide and proud, as if shocked by her good fortune, though I don't think she had any idea what I was talking about. But it didn't seem to matter.

The next moment, Jessie walked over to William, put her hands on her hips and, swaying back and forth, sang to the tune of nana-nana-boo-boo: "I have a vagina! I have a vagina!"

I'd done it! I'd had my first sex talk with my daughter and hadn't flubbed it. She was buoyant as ever in her body. She could name her private parts without shame or hesitation. And her strong sense of self had remained intact. I knew that as mother and daughter we had many more miles to travel, and some would be rocky. But at least we were off to a good start.

Later that night, William taunted her by saying, "Jessie, do you know where your vagina is?" But she didn't take the bait. With a blasé air I've spent my whole life longing for, she patted her hoo ha and said, "Yes, I do. My bajina is right here."

Not Sarah Palin! No, this wizard decided the best way to tackle the (understandably irritating) problem of her loose-lipped would-have-been son-in-law was to publicly rebuke the kid, in a grandiose statement of denial and affronted morals, the weekend before the offending interview was to air, thereby ensuring that the episode of "Tyra" would become must-see television.

Which is how I wound up sitting in front of "The Tyra Banks Show" on Monday afternoon, watching a multi-segment interview with 19-year-old Levi Johnston, his sister Mercede and mom Sherry, who together gave an empty-calorie interview that touched on Levi's sex life with the former vice-presidential candidate's daughter, the tensions between the Johnston and Palin families and the inability of Levi and his kin to gain access to young Tripp Palin, access that is not likely to get any smoother thanks to their time on Tyra's couch.

Palin really should have watched the interview before fluffing this flaccid 40 minutes into a full-blown media tempest. In her statement this weekend, she made the whole thing sound way more exciting than it was, accusing the Johnstons of "engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of [Levi and Bristol's] relationship," as part of what Palin called their "quest for fame, attention, and fortune." (It would also have been wise of Palin to avoid using words like "distortion," "exaggeration" and "lies" in the same statement in which she described her daughter Bristol's interest in "advocating abstinence," when in fact, six weeks ago, Bristol told Greta Van Susteren that abstinence is "not realistic.")

But Palin has never been known for her nimble handling of nuance, or truth, or words.

So here everyone was, thanks to Tyra's best publicist, Gov. Palin, to see what the fuss was about. As it turned out: absolutely nothing. Levi Johnston showed up in an untucked button-down, grey pants and a bright blue sweater vest, sounding no more or less like an anxious dumbass than you might expect of a teenager who wants to talk about his private life on "Tyra."

He was affable and monosyllabic, giving mostly grunting "yes" and "no" answers to Banks' questions. Did he cheat on Bristol? "No." Had he moved in with the Palins before Tripp's birth? "Yes." Did he and Bristol share a room? "Yes."

But Levi was downright eloquent in comparison to Banks, who treated him with a combination of condescension and obsequiousness unmatched in my recent television watching experience.

When Banks grabbed Johnston's hand -- her nails painted a bilious green -- to show off the "Bristol" tattoo he'd gotten on his ring finger, she spoke to him as if he were a toddler. Pointing out that he was a teen dad, she felt free to affectionately note, "you're like a baby yourself!" At another point, when she inquired about whether he and Bristol practiced safe sex, Banks creepily rubbed her hand on Johnston's knee, assuring him he was on "Tyra's couch" and could answer personal questions.

When she wasn't coddling, sympathizing with or inappropriately touching him, Banks was voicing repeated wonderment at the fact that Johnston and his family were "breaking their silence" by coming on her show.

The reason for the silence-breaking, according to Levi, was that "there have been a lot of things in the newspapers and news ... saying I'd done steroids and drugs and cheated on Bristol ..."

"That are lies," Banks helpfully affirmed, without ever asking whether he had, in fact, done drugs or steroids.

Levi, looking surprised at the easy credulity, added with something that sounded like mature perspective, "at the same time they're kind of funny, [the media] ain't got nothing better to do than pick on young kids."

Levi offered a raft of observations about how the course of young love does not always run smooth. Then, "I think we were ready for a kid," he stammered, "[but] she said she wanted to wait a couple of years or something like that?"

Here Tyra showed the clip to which Johnston was murkily referring, in which Bristol told Van Susteren that though she loved her son, and though Levi was a good hands-on father, she wished they had waited 10 years to have their child. At this, Johnston mildly concurred, saying, "I wish we probably would have waited a little but, at the same time, I wouldn't go back and trade it for anything."

Given the forum and circumstances, Johnston was relatively gracious, and even classy, when holding forth on both Bristol and her family. He said that the Palin family applied no pressure to get married, claiming that he and Bristol had always planned on marrying before the pregnancy: "We'd been together for a long time, it was something we'd always thought of." Asked what attracted him to Bristol at the beginning, Levi said, "Her whole family is big-time into hunting and fishing and that kind of thing. She's not a big-time shopper city girl. She's really smart, I guess, a pretty intelligent woman, and that's enough for me." He also allowed as how he believed Sarah Palin knew that he was having sex with her daughter, because "moms are pretty smart," and said that even though he assumed it would make it harder for him to see his son, he would still vote for Palin for president against Barack Obama (though the degree to which that admission was precipitated by his dislike of Obama was unclear).

The part of the interview that has already gotten the headlines is when Tyra asked him if he and Bristol practiced safe sex. He repeatedly answered yes. As she pressed him harder and harder about whether they were safe every time, he finally said, "Most of the time." Breaking news: Bristol and Levi sometimes didn't practice safe sex.

Banks' feints at media watchdogging were laughable. At one point, she asked Levi about reports that his MySpace page once read that he was a "red-neck" who did not want children. Yes, Levi said, but those MySpace comments were 3 years old, and had been dug up in the course of the campaign. "And the press'll make it seem like you said that after Bristol was pregnant," Banks pointed out reprovingly, not pointing to a single outlet that reported Levi's MySpace comments as post-pregnancy enunciations. "See how the press works? Mmmmhmmmm." Banks later congratulated herself and the Johnstons for not having been paid to be on the show, noting that "some journalists do that" but that that's not what had happened in this case."You all are not being paid and you are just here. That is so important and I think they deserve a round of applause."

But what was so barkingly obvious about the whole exercise was that the Johnstons didn't need to be paid for coming on a talk show. This is America. Someone in this family had the sense to know that, with their split from the Palins, their Warholian quarter-hour was winding up, and that a talk show tour might help them pad out the last 15. And that it might also be the only way to get some of their undoubtedly real and vexing frustrations into the open.

Mother Sherry wanted to say that there was more to the story of her arrest on drug charges than met the eye, and even though she was not free to talk about it, someday she would get her day in court and be able to explain that her story "had twists in it." Sister Mercede wanted to tell the story of how she wasn't allowed at the hospital the day that Tripp was born even though all of Bristol's cousins and friends were allowed in. Sherry wanted to say that she doesn't have any pictures of her grandson, and that Levi had always wanted to be a father, and how he used to say his son would be on skates before he would walk. Mercede wanted to talk about how the rumors that she's a jealous sister are untrue because the whole thing is that Bristol is jealous of her because she and Levi are so close, and she has a tattoo of Levi's name on her arm, and she warned Levi not to get the tattoo of Bristol's name on his finger.

Yes, if there was any crumb of a story revealed in this interview -- and the narrative value of that crumb would have to be weighed on a "Days of Our Lives" scale of hourly revelation -- it was that Bristol and Levi's breakup had much less to do with Bristol and Levi than it had to do with the girl-girl dynamics of the ruptured friendship between Bristol and Mercede. As Levi explained about the difficulty of seeing his son, "Her and my sister have gotten into some fights. They don't like each other very much. That's a big problem with her not letting me come over to the house."

As it turns out, Mercede was the crazy-pants star on "Tyra," as she surely was anxious to be. Frustrated, she said, at not being able to see her nephew, and at the bad press her family has received, Mercede was visibly brimming with a desire for the attention and publicity that had so unfairly landed on the shoulders of pregnant Bristol.

In another time, another tax bracket, another television genre, Mercede could have been a character on "My So-Called Life," regaling anyone who would listen -- please, please listen -- with underminey, labyrinthine, impenetrable adolescent narrative about how Bristol doesn't like how she's friends with a lot of Levi's exes and then one day she was out with a friend who used to date Levi in middle school and Bristol sent her a text about how she was white trash and her friends were white trash and then 10 minutes later all of Bristol's random friends were texting about the whole family was white trash and then someone -- uh, I wonder who? -- must have leaked it to the press that Bristol called her family white trash.

Whatever, cheddar. The thing is, Mercede is no different from any of the girls and boys who jabber mindlessly into the cameras on "My Super Sweet 16" or any reality show, thrilled that someone is pointing a camera at them and asking them to rattle on about their lives.

Why should the Johnstons be any better, or different, from the rest of America, which is encouraged by every reality show, every top chef and next model and bachelor and swapped wife, to believe that life in this country only really makes a mark if it is lived on television?

No wonder they wanted, or needed, to show up on "Tyra" and talk. Here they had been thrown into a spotlight that we are taught to crave. The lenses of a nation and a world were pointed at them, their family, their MySpace pages, their hockey games. But because of the strictures of a presidential campaign, and their association with a governor determined to control a story line that was clearly out of her control from the start, these people were never offered a mike.

So here. They got one. They are as boring and ordinary and dysfunctional as any other family to get on a talk show stage and tell an audience of their arguments, their disappointments, their sex lives and their text message fights. The only difference here is that their dull emissions were amplified by the interference of the woman who was trying to muffle them. In doing so, Sarah Palin only wound up drawing a wider audience, more of an impetus to keep talking, and a vivid example of why her friends, associates and family members would want to take up microphones and defy her. In her statement renouncing Levi, Palin not only repackaged Bristol's position on abstinence, she also made the following spooky and controlling statement: "Bristol realizes now that she made a mistake in her relationship and is the one taking responsibility for their actions."

Palin's unstoppable desire to speak for and talk over anyone around her -- be it her daughter, or her would-have-been son-in-law -- must be maddening. But it surely also inspires in them a desire to yell louder, and with greater defiance, to get Greta on the phone, or Tyra, if necessary, to rebel in any possible way from the steel-fisted but inept message mangler.

My hopes for young Piper growing into a radical feminist politician grow brighter by the day.

She donned these costumes for "Green Porno," an endearingly oddball series of short, educational films made for the Sundance Channel. The first season, about the sex lives of bugs, premiered last year. Created, written and acted by Rossellini, the two-minute movies were designed to be viewed on computers, cellphones and MP3 players. In each episode, Rossellini dressed up as one of those tiny insects, giving viewers a human-size look at the animal kingdom's hidden sexual dramas. With a commitment to anatomical accuracy and utmost sincerity, Rossellini played opposite giant paper cutouts, which served as inanimate partners for her vigorous copulation. On April 1, the series begins its second season, this time focusing on the sexual habits of marine animals. Rossellini talked to us about her unintentional male-animal fetish and the naughty side of nature. 

How did you come up with the idea for the series?

Robert Redford [founder of the Sundance Film Festival] came up with the idea that the Internet might offer the opportunity to relaunch the short film series format, which had disappeared. The other thing is that Sundance is very interested in the environment. I’d just worked with them on a project called "My Dad Is 100 Years Old," that I wrote about my father, Roberto Rossellini, and they offered me the opportunity to do these short films about the environment.

How did you end up deciding on marine animals for this season?

The first series I did on animals that I knew, that were in my garden and I had studied --  I could just lift a stone and find my earthworms. I wanted animals that everybody knew. We did the same for the sea creatures with the starfish and barnacle and clams, everything that people know. And the third series that comes out in the fall is again about fish, but this time it's called "Bon Appetit Green Porno." It is about animals we eat,  but again it has sea animals, because I found an incredible accomplice in a marine biologist called Claudio Campagna. I get the information from  books, but then to verify that I really understood it -- when we do the costume, is it plausible that he has antennae like this? -- it's nice to have a real scientist collaborating.

You played male creatures in most of the first season, or a hermaphrodite, and you stuck with that this time around. Why?

You know, sometimes I play male because they move more. Like the spider, the female is four, five times bigger than the male and she just sits there on her spider web and it's the male who has to walk and approach her.  So, I never really thought, "Oh, I’m playing male" -- I was already playing spider. But after that people say, "You notice that you’re always playing male?" "Oh," I say, "really? I played hermaphrodites too. I played female, I played the queen bee." I think it’s more dictated by the costume. This series the costumes are sometimes 6 feet tall, 9 feet tall, you know, 10 feet tall!

The series is intended for online viewing or cellphones. What can you do online that you can't do on TV or film? Is it a more flexible medium, or is it just cheaper?

The fact that it was mostly going to be seen on a small, mobile screen made me feel that it gave it this cartoonish look, four or five colors per film. So we have the background that is one color, and then I am the animal and I might have two or three colors, very contrasted. Because we saw that when you look at animation it looks very good on film, on television, and on a mobile. But if you see "Lawrence of Arabia," you know, already on television you miss half of the film and if you see it on mobile, forget it, better not watch it. So that dictated the look of it: strong, vivid colors, simplicity in the art direction.

Have you ever wanted to do an animal whose sexual behavior was deemed too raunchy for the series?

No! I mean, there's no censorship, you know, and I think that my commitment is to tell it as it is, the way it is in nature, and nature is infinitely scandalous.

Listen to the conversation here.