Do television shows like "Sex and the City" and "Gossip Girl" encourage teen girls to get pregnant?  Well that's the finding of a Rand Health study published last week in the November issue of Pediatrics.  According to a New York Daily news article by Jane H. Furse about the study: Rand Corp. behavioral scientist Anita Chandra found teens who watched the sexiest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.

It’s Halloween eve, a cool night in this dark end of the North Country of Abernicht. The wind whips in through the castle’s casement window and you draw your cloak more closely around your shoulders, noting the little puffs of elf-fires lighting the road far below you. You are watching Sir Sterling and his retinue making their way toward the castle after a long afternoon of hunting in the wood when suddenly, a tingle of the hairs on the back of your neck make you realize you are not alone.

A few weeks ago I boasted about how I wasn't going to be strutting my stilettos over to see the new "Sex and the City" movie. Then a few weeks later my summer movie preview post included the following quote under the heading "Movies I Would See To Please A Good Friend:

During my last gig, at the online dating service, I used to joke about how differently men and women seemed to approach online dating. In interviews and click stream behavior, women indicated, again and again, that they wished the dating service would pick out a small selection of absolutely perfect matches for them; guys, on the other hand, seem to want ways to get the broadest possible number of women to read their email, find them fascinating and write back. The women wanted quality, the men, options.

For the past few weeks, my posts have been about me, me, me. While that’s all fun, it’s time to give others a turn. This week’s post is a round up of some fresh voices that speak to me, hopefully ones you’re not already reading. Here's some recent additions to my blogroll:

So now that A and I have been more or less living together almost full time for the past seven weeks, we’re starting to argue a bit. Not full-blown screaming fights (I hate drama), but moments of heated discussion, incidents of one person getting annoyed or exasperated or angry, situations where one or both of us didn’t actually communicate all that well. They’re not so much small disagreements, but moments where we see clearly how differently we think, and/or how differently we do things.

Every February, I find myself hedging about Valentine’s Day. I hate the holiday because it’s a manufactured excuse to extract money from Americans for cards, dinners, gifts, flowers, and chocolates, as though all the concern and care lovers should show to one another can be expressed via a big credit card spend on one over-hyped night.

This winter holiday season, I went home to a chilly Midwestern city with A, the man I’ve been seeing. We wanted to share Christmas and have me meet his family. About five days into the trip, we found ourselves going on a long drive at night, having one of those meaningful talks couples have when they’re discovering each other and themselves and there is still so much to talk through and negotiate.

It was tempting, when I was working on this guide to gifts that will spice up your love life, to resolve that I’d have to test each and everyone myself.

We were drinking coffee and eating pie, post- matinee performance of Madame Butterfly, when the man I am seeing leaned over the table and said, “Let me ask you something—When you broke up with your ex-husband, did you stop loving him? Did you tell yourself you had to stop loving him?”

"Older women—they don’t tell They don’t swell—and they’re grateful as hell.” --Statement attributed to Ben Franklin, praising dating older women. In the past year or two, the Cougar as replaced the MILF as the sexual older woman. Predatory, aggressive, and sexually confident, the cougar stalks her prey, dragging the nice young man to her den and having her way with him. There are dating sites where Cougars can meet their (willing) *prey*, 20-something guys on MySpace with IDs like CougarHunter, and 21 books on Amazon.com about dating, sex and Cougars.

Sometimes I wish there could be some kinds of rules about when and how people say they love one another. It’s just all over the map. There’s the casual male friend who sent me a sweet note this week about a blog post and signed it Love, (His name), and the long-time boyfriend who says “Love you,” and all the people in between, for each of whom the L word means something different.