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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Love me, love my guns
A shotgun tumbled from a closet and my husband drifted from my heart.
By Susan Straight
[10/21/99]

Against maternity clothes
What does a hipster mom-to-be do when she has to trade her leather jacket for pink jumpers? She cries.
By Sarah Madsen Hardy
[10/20/99]

Beached whale or bitchin' babe?
Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew?
By Helene Stapinski
[10/20/99]

For the bad times
Sometimes a friend in crisis is better than a friend for life.
By Lauren Kessler
[10/19/99]

For all the girls
First, my daughter came out. Then, she took me out with the girls -- to see the Sinatra who packs a dildo.
By Lee Uttmark
[10/18/99]

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Noting that the "TV hostesses" have been all over her to talk about this trend, she says, "I'm very surprised by the response in the popular press. Mainly, I think the American public just didn't know about this research." When she considers the leap the media makes, from early puberty to early sex, she says they're barking up the wrong tree. "Environmental factors may be influencing girls' behavior, but not biology. That hasn't changed since the 1950s."

But no matter. The press still loves this story, or non-story, which has been a perennial favorite for almost 25 years.

Before the Herman-Giddens study there was the J.M. Tanner study, which appeared in 1976 and is resurrected regularly in the press as a scientific novelty. Tanner discovered that the age of menarche had fallen dramatically among Americans. While the average age of menarche in the United States today is approximately 12 and a half, Tanner, an authority on physical development, noted that in the early 1800s, the average age at the onset of menstruation was 17.

More current academic work on the topic suggests a far less precipitous decline, from 14 in 1890 to 12 today, where it leveled off in 1947; and, in fact, this irrefutable marker of puberty hasn't changed since. Tanner's report, like the Herman-Giddens study, was hardly earth-shattering and probably would have slipped quietly into academic obscurity. Instead it contributed to an outbreak of inflammatory rhetoric about adolescent promiscuity and a teen pregnancy epidemic.

Even though Tanner's contemporaries, like historian Vern Bullough, immediately questioned the study's accuracy, it was snatched up by Newsweek, Time and the Nation, among others. Their stories all hyped the trend as current; none noted that the trend toward early menarche had stopped 30 years earlier, in 1950.

In September 1980 Newsweek went with "The Games Teenagers Play." They used Tanner's study to confirm that "something has happened to those enduring young charmers who used to wobble around playing grownup in Mom's high heels." With a predictable swipe at working moms, reporters explained that kids "are reaching puberty earlier, finding new freedom from parental restraints, taking cues from a pleasure-bent culture and playing precocious sex games in the bedroom -- often while Mom and Dad are at work."

The danger was not randy boys, but Lolita girls. "For adolescent boys, sex has always been regarded as a rite of passage, like getting permission to drive the family car," Newsweek allowed. Bemoaning "sexual adventurism among young girls," the teen-pregnancy "epidemic" and the "rampant" venereal disease resulting from this "carnal knowledge," the magazine then used the Tanner study as a springboard to launch into a diatribe about girls whose "sexual awareness thus runs breathlessly ahead of their emotional development." Full of euphemisms for sex, like "stampeding into sin," "going over the brink" and "unseemly sexual stirrings," Newsweek fanned the flames of "precocious puberty" alarmism, roundly condemning this new breed of copulating schoolgirl.

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