Teenage girls across North America are snapping up T-shirts with risque slogans on them, including assorted variations on the number 69, Playboy, and declarations of general naughtiness.

Parents, journalists, and even a few politicians are getting predictably perturbed. (My, aren’t these grownups just so immature?)

News flash: Adolescents have hormones, and love to make a big tease among their peers. Adolescents also love to proclaim their independence and impending grownuphood, and there are few better ways to do that than by publicly announcing one’s sexual arrival.

What’s new? Just the particular pride and explicitness in these T-shirt statements.

Three years ago, one of my ex-Stranger colleagues tried to get a deal to write a book about high school girls who were really virgins but were branded as sluts by other girls, merely for looking or acting insufficiently ladylike. Three years, of course, is the standard turnover rate for teen trends; so the younger sisters of those ‘90s shunned girls are now proudly proclaiming slutdom as a status symbol.

(Of course, today’s assertions of slutdom probably have as little to do with reality as yesterday’s accusations of slutdom.)