Word: teens
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Today's girls are also doing well by these measures, but their successes in no way diminish the progress of the boys. In fact, together our kids are reversing one of the direst problems of the previous generation: the teen-pregnancy epidemic. According to the new report, fewer than half of all high school boys and girls in 2005 were sexually active. For the boys, that's a decrease of 10 percentage points from the early 1990s. Boys who are having sex report that they are more responsible about it: 7 in 10 are using condoms, compared with about half...
Unfortunately, it's one thing to observe human behavior--count the crime reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so on--but quite another to explain it. Popular science and the best-seller lists skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year economist Steven Levitt's best seller Freakonomics chalked up the improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized...
...take the teen-pregnancy numbers. It's not enough to credit the virtues of responsibility and better sex education. Something racier is desired. According to some writers, fewer teens are getting pregnant because they've all switched to oral sex. Or maybe the phenomenon is due to a still unexplained decline in sperm counts...
...Said claims to feel the pain of Indonesia's filmmakers every time she and her team of 45 have to cut a scene, but maintains that "certain elements of society" need to be protected. She cites Kiss Me Quick, a teen romance, and Pocong, a film dealing with the violence during the overthrow of former dictator Suharto, as examples of where the censors have to draw the line. "We're getting more aggressive in what we will allow, but those who attack us are getting more aggressive as well...
...rife in Indonesian films, because those are the images that draw the kids to the theaters. In most cases, films are made for less than $500,000, and producers need to sell at least 300,000 tickets to break even. Few reach that benchmark without a heavy dose of teen romance, superstition or horror, and even then most Indonesian films aren't shown for more than a week on a particular screen. "The only films that do well now are ones kids see over and over," adds producer Wijaya. That's a formula Hollywood knows all too well...