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My favourite new friend is a girl called Diana Keisha-Marie. Diana, 18, is smart, confident and expertly dressed. There is almost a generation between us, but it turns out she knows as much about the nuances of being a female in 2007 as I do. According to Diana, these nuances boil down to one thing: you have a brain and a body, and, in this world, it is acceptable to use both; but the way you choose to use them, and in what proportion, will determine where you end up.

Although Diana is special, she isn’t unique. She is a member of a generation of girls more savvy and open-minded about the tools you need to get by in this world than any before it — and for this reason, the media is fixated on it. This year, every newspaper and glossy magazine ran at least one lavish feature dedicated to — and sometimes edited by — teenagers. Underage Festival, a day run for and by the under-18s, got column inches to rival Glastonbury.

The obsession peaked two weeks ago in moral panic, with the publication in America of a book by Carol Platt Liebau, the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. Called Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, it decries a culture that values looks over intellect or talent.

Liebau argues that what might have begun as sexual emancipation has been twisted by the media and commodified by brands to the point that girls are no longer capable of separating their self-worth from their sexual power. "Girls are being led to believe they’re in control," she writes, " . . . but they’re actually living in a profoundly anti-feminist landscape where girls compete for attention on the basis of how much they are sexually willing to do for the boys."
Liebau has a point. Paris Hilton’s sex tape, ads for P Diddy’s fragrance — featuring him in bed with two women — and almost every Britney video ever made send out clear messages to teenage girls that using their sexuality is the fast lane to success.

But are teenage girls really as ill-adapted to processing these messages as adults think? Recently, I watched a Mediabox-funded short-film project called My Generation, directed by and featuring 15-year-olds, who discuss all the teen issues that so intrigue their elders. What emerges is a generation (though, in the case of the film-makers, an overwhelmingly urban, middle-class one) surprisingly well prepared to manage the barrage of consumer choice, celebrity iconography and mixed messages about how to live and love.

That they’re superficial, there is no doubt. Asked what they rate most highly, beauty or brains, the most visually literate generation in history unequivocally and unanimously replies: "Beauty."

"At our age, you don’t pick your circle around who’s intelligent," says one of the directors, 15-year-old Camilla Babbington. "If one of your friends failed an exam, it wouldn’t make a difference. Looks, dress sense and how you act make a huge difference."

But what about sex? To some, "sexy" is power. For others, it’s a dirty word. "A lot of our friends worry about being seen to be too sexy," says Sophie Glover, 15, another of the film’s co-directors. "It’s much more important to be cool."

Your attitude to sex depends on your background and education, obviously, but also on the music you’re into — without independence, a job, money or free will, music is the primary way you define yourself as a teenager.

Dip into any R&B club and girls dressed in not very much will be doing the booty shake, Beyoncé-style, loading up on free drinks supplied by a nightclub full of willing males. At a Fall Out Boy gig — a band at the mainstream end of the sub-genre of punk called emo — you’ll be hard pressed to distinguish girl from boy, as everyone is wearing charity-shop clothes, flat shoes and splodges of black eyeliner. There are more teenage tribes than there have ever been, each with its own complicated codes of behaviour, and each with its own way of dealing with the increasingly contradictory world outside.

If Liebau questions why today’s teenagers are applying their intellectual energies to making choices about clothes, accessories, hair and sexuality, any parent of teenage girls past will tell you they always have. What’s different is that they make no apology for it. In the new St Trinian’s film, one of the protagonists uses her sex appeal to unashamedly pull off a clever ruse. The message is: bright girls don’t compete to be the school swot because they are too busy being sexy.