the quote is the musings and interpretations of a reporter, who interviewed a girl, who knows girls who got pregnant.

That's too long a chain to assume the statement is accurate.

Mabe this kid was a ringleader. Or maybe she just wanted to be. And maybe she was a matchmaker: "Hailey, Joey thinks you're totally hot. Go flirt with him!" But I'm pretty confident she wasn't a pander or pimp.

Don't forget the worthless town and the worthless school which let these girls grow up thinking they had no future to look forward to, so why not?

re: Benfer's remark about the girl matchmaking for her friends. I'm not seeing whatever you're seeing. There's certainly no overt meanness to the statement. Most groups of teens have someone like that as part of the group, who orchestrates with greater or lesser success.

I am truly amazed by Amy’s writing. The linguistic contortions this woman can perform! It’s practically the Kama Sutra of buck-passing, where Amy manages to look down the long list of culprits (the idiotic parents, the stupid boyfriends—and let’s not forget—the worthless girls who, in this day and age, couldn’t figure out how to prevent sperm from reaching their worthless eggs) and finds the real villain: the media!

Of course! It was those devilish reporters from the National Enquirer, sweeping into town with their $200.00 bills, that made these poor, innocent, virginal girls lose all sense of propriety in their rush to gain fame, fortune, and a spewing brat! Damn the media and their never-ending quest to impregnate teenage girls!

For the girls, however, and their ringleader/friend, Amy just has interest, sympathy, and could it be…jealousy? How amazing the ringleader must be, profiting off her slutty friends! How savvy, the preggos, tapping into the national unconscious! Why, they ought to start a little Massachusetts baby-collective for pregnant teenagers (if only so it would be easier to round them up and dispose them)! How villainous, the media for—gasp—condemning these girls for their stupid, stupid actions!

Amy, these girls are lucky they got $200.00. That’s more money then any of them will honestly earn (psst, welfare checks don’t count) in their entire lives

When and how in the world did "stage-manage" become a political insult? It's really starting to piss me off.

I typically see it used as an accusation of half-baked manipulation on the part of someone behind the scenes, or when a presentation appears sloppily micromanaged.

But that's not stage management; that's bad choreography.

If something appears "stage-managed" in its common political connotation, it isn't. If something is actually being stage-managed well, you won't notice; things will appear to happen all by themselves in a natural and logical progression.

What this girl has done is simply not stage management. Some kind of perverted emotional power-brokering, maybe, though I don't wish to insult any people here legitimately employed as brokers of one thing or another. But this caption is an utterly wrong and ignorant use of the term "stage-manage."

is that it's crap at interpreting sentences.

If you’ve every wondered what it’s like to be young,

Next time, please edit more carefully.

"She had always been the popular girl within her crowd, the kind of kid who sets the nightly social agenda and orchestrates the matchmaking between her friends and the older boys."

This sounds immature and mean spirited for an adult writing about teen girls.

Makes her sounds like an accessory to statutory rape.

Not to pick nits, but Gloucester is a small city of about 30,000. It's only about 30 miles from Boston on the North Shore, a bedroom community within easy commuting distance. It's no tiny fishing village. Glo-Chicks have never been behind the curve when it comes to self-promotion!

I'm pleased that Ms. Benfer limited herself to simply updating us.

However, I am curious if anyone else found the following excerpt disturbing:

"She had always been the popular girl within her crowd, the kind of kid who sets the nightly social agenda and orchestrates the matchmaking between her friends and the older boys."

?

Your description of Gloucester as a tiny fishing village is way off the mark. The population is about 30,000,larger than many small cities. Although fishing put Gloucester on the map, in fact now it is mostly a Boston suburb. Also, the town is very well known for a myriad of social problems, including a serious heroin problem.