I'm in my mid 30's. Paris Hilton wasn't around when I was under 25, but the women surveyed in that article could have been me in my 20's. Of course, I didn't equate "ditzy" with "sexy," ever, at least not as it applied to me (in fact, the only woman I know of who could pull that off was Marilyn Monroe). But the rest of this article sounds like the same stuff we dealt with in the 90's.

Intelligent and sexy - isn't that what we've always been expected to be?

i strove for both brains and beauty a-way back in my twenties, but if i were advising my baby sister, i'd say focus on brains first -- you get the most life options that way. exercising enough to stay healthy and strong works wonders for your looks. shopping, hair, and makeup are huge wastes of time!

...in the 1890s as well? Not to mention 1790, 1690...?

Every young person wants to be sexy. The smarter ones will want to be smart as well. I don't see anything new or wrong with these pressures. We should all strive to be sexy and smart.

The real problem is the pressure to conform. In a world where people have so many opportunities and so much freedom, it's amazing how fearful we still are of being different.

Not a single thing in this article is news. Every factoid presented in this supposedly new survey is something I've been hearing since the 60's at least.

Girls don't know if they should be smart or sexy? Old news. We were angsting about that back in high school, and it was an old problem then.

Girls think they should show a little skin? Gee, I think mothers have been up in arms about their daughters doing that since at least the 1920's.

Girls think having sex isn't a big deal anymore? YAWN. Let me introduce you to a decade we call the 70's. You wanna see young people screwing around and shrugging it off? These pikers have NOTHING on us 70's kids.

Christ on a cracker, where exactly has the staff of Broadsheet BEEN the last fourty years? I'm amazed time and again with how completely out of touch you people are, but this takes the cake.

What is so dissapointing about young women showing skin to look "hot"? Like we older women preferred wearing burkas when we were teens. Or now. I have apolicy of avoiding discussions on political/ social ramifications of women's clothes, since the simplest,. best way to look at women's fashion is to let each woman decide what is comfortable or flattering on herself, period.

So, the entire upcoming generation of young women is being labeled after a Spice Girls song pimping Pepsi.

I think that says more than anything else in the entire article.

is that if one of them is good enough you don't need the other

The author posts, "It's unfortunate that young women experience the stress of trying to be all and do all, but there's something to be said for the fact that they don't see beauty and brains, or desirability and independence, as so mutually exclusive that it would prevent the pursuit, however conflicted, of both."

Beauty and brains are NEVER conflicted -- nor are desirability and independence. Both beauty and brains come from DNA, neither can be enhanced through force of will. Does the author imply going to college makes a woman less beautiful? My observations are that most college educated women are better looking than the average.

Also, do young women have some special burden that the rest of us don't? As a middle-aged man, I've been through many phases in my life, none of them have been without stress. It's absurd to assign them some special, "woe-is-me" designation to young women -- get a life.

It's such a shame that every five years all the information everyone knows has to be re-thought as something BRAND NEW. Don't today's hot 20-somethings talk to their older sisters, cousins, parents or heaven forbid, friends? A woman's value in our culture has always been perceived, by self and others, as closely connected to the external appearance she projects. Just ask any plain, brilliant person. A lot of life's struggle for a bright woman (the small daily nagging kind of struggle, not the big stuff)is in learning to see and appreciate her internal persona as more intrinsically herself than whatever she looks like from the outside. It's hard for a beautiful young woman to be taken seriously, though, however smart she may be. There are two obstacles: plain women are one. Men are the other. Neither sees past the surface very easily.

young men want to look good (check out the men on the weight machines at my gym), be smart, and make money. Is this different from what young women want? Is it a problem to want to look good and be attractive?

"Young women are taught from the moment they're born that the way they should experience their bodies is as someone looking at them, as opposed from internally."

It took me a long time to realize that this was how I thought of my body. Like it existed for the pleasure of others instead of my own. It's something that I still have to actively remind myself not to do. I think that that is one of the biggest problems for young girls, not being hot and smart at the same time.

Because this story's motif has been recycled since...probably Cro-Magnon days.

Some people expect you to be pretty and smart. I'll stop the presses--Gutenberg's comes to mind--while you grasp this expectation.

From my personal experience with my peers (I'm a teenager), there doesn't seem to be a "I want to be both smart and pretty" mentality at all, rather a "I want to be smart OR pretty" mentality. What I find even more confusing is that most of my peers lean towards wanting just beauty, not brains. Girls who are born with both brains and beauty take advantage of their intellect by never paying attention in classes, never doing homework, etc. They'd rather portray the "dumb but cute" stereotype then be valued for both.

It's sad, really.