6/85Average age at which American girls began to menstruate in 1900: 14.3
Federal funds spent last year to promote celibacy among teenagers: $3,000,000
6/88Rank of “night,” “girl,” and “street” among the nouns most often used in Bruce Springsteen’s songs: 1,2,3
7/90Number of uninterrupted hours a Boston girl played Nintendo before having an epileptic seizure: 3
4/91Average number of months an American teenage girl is sexually active before using birth control: 12
4/91Rank of white, Hispanic, and black girls, among those who lose the most self-esteem during puberty: 1,2,3
6/92Number of days a Hamilton, Ohio, high school girl was suspended in March for accepting two Tylenol from a classmate: 5
1/94Profits earned last year by two men selling used girls’ underpants from vending machines in Japan: $96,000
3/94Chances that an American girl whose mother receives welfare will also receive welfare as a young adult: 1 in 3
5/94Percentage of Americans who say that women “sometimes deserve to be hit by their husbands or boyfriends”: 12
Percentage who say that men “sometimes deserve to be hit by their wives or girlfriends”: 29
12/96Days an Ohio public school suspended a 11-year-old girl last October for giving a Midol tablet to her classmate: 80
6/97Chance that a U.S. teenage girl will be pregnant within one month of becoming sexually active: 1 in 5
9/98Percentage of all girls’ school facilities in Afghanistan’s Taliban territories shut down since 1996: 100
5/99Ranking points by which the name Monica has dropped in popularity among those given U.S. girls since 1997: 24
6/99Hours before NATO began bombing Kosovo in March that NPR aired its last e-mail from a 16-year-old Albanian girl there: 6
Percentage change since then in the incidence of self-induced vomiting among girls there since TV came to the island in 1995: +300
Chance of this: 1 in 20
12/00Price for which an eight-year-old Colorado girl was offered for sale by her mother over the Internet last year: $4,000
2/00Rank of self-inflicted wounds among the top injuries for which teenage girls were hospitalized in New York State in 1998: 1
Rank of assault among the top causes of injuries for which teenage boys were hospitalized that year: 1
6/01Performance of Ricky Martin in bed, on a scale of one to ten, according to his new girlfriend: 20
10/04Factor by which the number of U.S. girls under 19 who got breast implants last year exceeded the number who did in 2002: 3
2/04Number of a Texas toddler’s burned fingers amputated in 1992 after she was left in a car with her mother’s lit cigarette: 9.5
Settlement Philip Morris paid the girl’s family last May: $2,000,000
4/05Number of preteen “secret agents” in the Girls Intelligence Agency, a market-research firm: 16,000
9/06Rank of AIDS and pregnancy, respectively, among the top causes of death worldwide for girls aged 10 to 19: 1,2