“At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner seemed to have it all, a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job and apartment in NYC, and a handsome boyfriend. But this golden girl was hiding a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions, she fell in love with the wrong person…”

Watch the video trailer for Crazy Love here.

According to The Telegraph, Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer broke up because of his “Twitter obsession!”

The source added: “Jen was fuming. There he was, telling her he didn’t have time for her and yet his page was filled with Twitter updates. Every few hours, sometimes minutes, he’d update with some stupid line. And in her mind, she was like ‘He has time for all this Twittering, but he can’t send me a text, an email, make a call?’.”

Sounds easy enough, but you see, girls require more than 140 characters at a time.

Happy perfect birthday to FOBG Dale Hrabi’s hiiiii-larious The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, out today.

Here, just for a wee taste, are some perfect baby names to start considering prematurely on your next perfect date!

A judge has thrown a shoe the book at the Bush-era FDA’s restrictions on emergency contraception, ruling that the agency must scrap its policy of preventing young women under 18 from buying Plan B over the counter. He gave the administration 30 days to make the change, snarling — rightly — that the “political considerations, delays and implausible justifications” (not to mention whispers of teen sex cults!)  tripping up the approval process for Plan B in general had stinkety-stank to high heaven. Rawk.

As Ellen Goodman wrote in 2005 of the redonkulous restriction: “What no one dared suggest is that just maybe teenagers should have the easiest, not the hardest access to Plan B. Aren’t the youngest precisely those who should be most protected from pregnancy? Or do we still think that motherhood should be the punishment for sex?” And: “If teenagers also need Plan B it’s because Plan A — abstinence — fails more often than condoms. Too many teenagers end up pregnant, facing Plan C: abortion or motherhood. In the name of protection, we are leaving teenagers far too vulnerable.” Now, one hopes, no more.

Today’s lesson: it’s hard to be homophobic when the gay guy is your cool teach.

Speaking of Carrie and Randy, I told you so.

From today’s New York Times:

Moreover, teenage girls can’t be expected to support Rihanna just because of her gender, youth culture experts say. They see themselves as sharing equal responsibility with boys. Parity, not sisterhood, is the name of the game.

During a presentation about dating violence [!!!] to ninth graders at Hostos-Lincoln Academy this week, one girl said, “If they hit you, smack them back. Both my parents say that to me.”

When Danielle Shores, 17, a high school junior in Austin, Tex., heard about the fight, she thought: “Yeah, men hit women, and women hit men. It was blown out of proportion because they’re celebrities.”

She sounded miffed. “My best friend got hit by her boyfriend, and I don’t see people making a big deal about it,” Ms. Shores said.

Good: girls see themselves and their peers as strong, expected to take care of themselves. Sad: that means hitting back — and shrugging it away* — rather than telling anyone who hits them to step the eff off.

What, if not this, is it gonna take? For the moment, I have no answers.

* At least outwardly. Wonder how many are trembling, or at least conflicted, inside.

An impressively dopey article on CNN.com alerts us to the news that Washington-based publisher Bluewater Productions has released a series of comic books featuring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“We really want to show strong, independent, female role models in comics,” said Darren Davis, Bluewater’s president, who didn’t explain how Palin got on that ticket, either. The first two issues in “Female Force,” already out, feature Clinton and Palin. Up next: Caroline Kennedy — huh? – and Michelle Obama. (Well, we know she’s got guns.)

“Comic fans approve of the idea,” note the not-so-ace reporters. To wit: “‘I think it just says, like, that women are important,’ one comic book fan told CNN.'” (Quoth our tipster, “Who’s doing this sourcing, Judy Miller?”)

And: “Another [!] added, ‘It shows that comics aren’t just about guys in tights beating each other up — it’s about information, it’s about understanding people a little better.” (“It’s about information”? This is a job for…The Quote Puncher-Upper!)

Plus: “We’re in a very politically-minded time right now,” said Richard Laermer, CEO of a public relations firm and author of several books on banalities marketing.

We “fans” well know that comics are by no means only about “guys in tights beating each other up” in the first place. But, dopey piece notwithstanding, Female Force’s fare could totally be good, you know, if it’s good. But honestly, I’m already impressed enough with [most of] these women in real life.

Another day, another survey showing many teens blame Rihanna for this mess.

From the Boston Herald:

“Experts say teens may be inclined to be sympathetic to Brown because of his popularity and the ‘normalization of violence’ in pop culture. ‘(Chris Brown) is or had been promoted as the kid next door, he was familiar and likeable,’ said [Deborah] Collins-Gousby, who works for Casa Myrna-Vazquez, a Boston-based anti-violence organization that operates a 24-hour teen violence hotline and a citywide outreach program. ‘Among teens, I think their first reaction was, well, what did she do to deserve a beating that significant?'”

The right question to ask, of course, is, “Who says anyone ‘deserves’ a beating?” The attitude captured in these surveys speaks to a disturbing misunderstanding of and desensitization to violence, “dating” and otherwise. That said, I also think there’s some interesting, if misguided, feminism at work underneath: the sense that today’s young women are now too strong to be mere “victims.” It’s utterly wrong-headed in this context, yes, and the “silver lining,” such as it is, is tarnished  by the incident that brought it all up. But: no one in this conversation is about to call women “the weaker sex.” And that, in its own twisted way, is progress.

Listen to Oprah! Tyra too! (And BG!)

In an act of ultimate woo-pitching, your male luv-uh seduces you on the beach, on a hot summer night, under a full moon… pinch me, I’m dreaming? No, but you are about to get pinched in all the wrong places by a horseshoe crab.

That’s just one of the nifty, species-specific mating rituals outlined in this food-for-thought post over on Wired’s science blog. Collectively, they sound an awful lot like, well, dudes.

“Some of these rituals are designed to convey reproductive fitness. Others are meant to trick reluctant mates into a one-night stand. And — hermaphrodites withstanding — it’s nearly always the males who try to catch the attention of ladies,” says the piece.

The animals listed engage in acts of attraction that sound either dizzyingly romantic (oh, to find an elephant of one’s own!), oddly gender-flippy (it’s the male grouse that shakes his caboose to catch the gal’s eye) or eerily reminiscent of the worst Saturday-night meat market ever (skull-butting, peen jousting).

Or would you rather be a fish?