Gloucester girls are easy

Ace's grasp of the motivations of the knocked-up Gloucester teens is uncanny:

You can take away the natural economic penalty for bearing children out-of-wedlock at a young age, but so long as you maintain the social inhibitions against it, the problem will be limited to the most dysfunctional.
You can take away the social inhibitions against such puerile stupidity, but as long as the natural economic consequences of such actions remain mostly in place, again the problem will be limited. Awful for those who affirmatively choose stupidity, but at least limited [to] a select number of hardcore sexual recidivists.
Take away both -- effectively pay very young girls to get pregnant, and give them nice little heavily-subsidized apartments, and also remove all social inhibitions against out-of-wedlock young-teen childbirth, and you get this.

Ace knows this stuff because he spends his weekends getting teenage girls pregnant. However, his keen insight notwithstanding, my analysis of this situation boils down to one simple fact: Girls in Gloucester, Mass., are notorious sluts.

It's true. The promiscuity of Gloucester girls is legendary all over eastern Massachusetts. If some guy in Rockport tells his buddies he's got a date with a girl from Gloucester, high fives will be exchanged. On Saturday night, guys drive from as far away as Ipswich and Peabody seeking to score in Gloucester, traveling down Route 128, locally known as "Easy Street."

The whoredom of Gloucester has been celebrated since colonial times, when wayfaring seamen taught the world to sing this 18th-century drinking song:

Here's to the sluts of Gloucester!
I think you all know what I mean.
Tho' they look quite a fright,
They're all right for a night.
Who cares if they're only 14?

Which is to say, it's not a modern problem. That Time magazine reporter just didn't do her research.