The Girls from Ames (cover).

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You’ve got to have friends, as Bette Midler sang back in the ‘70s.

But not many people hold on to their friendships for four decades, and counting.

Eleven girls from Ames, Iowa have done just that — through college, marriage, children, divorce, the death of family members.

They’ve stuck together, even though they’ve gone in many directions and now live all over the country. A new book tells their remarkable story of friendship. It’s a testament to how women bond.

This Hour, On Point: the girls from Ames.

You can join the conversation. What’s your story of friendship through the years? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Jeffrey Zaslow, author of the new book, “The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship.” He is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and co-author, with Randy Pausch, of the New York Times bestseller “The Last Lecture.” Click here to read an excerpt from “The Girls From Ames.”

Jane Nash is one of the women profiled in Zaslow’s book. She is a professor of psychology at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass.

Angela Jamison is also one of the “girls” from Ames. She now runs her own public relations firm in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

More links:

Here’s a video montage of the Ames girls’ pictures together through the years.

Scene from the film "I Love You, Man."

American pop culture and movies are full of male buddy tales that go way back. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the road. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — Newman and Redford — on the run. George Clooney and Brad Pitt cracking safes and knocking over casinos.

Male friendship, male bonding, are hardly new. But there’s a new vocabulary in play these days, mashing up male friendship and old-fashioned romance. “Bromance” is hot. “Mancrush.” “Mandate.”

The new film “I Love You, Man” brims with a new kind of buddy talk. So, what is “bromance”? And is something really changing?

Up next On Point: Male bonding, American male friendship, in the age of “bromance.”

You can join the conversation. Are male friendships changing? Loosening up? Mattering more? What does bromance mean to you?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Baltimore, Maryland, is Geoffrey Greif, author of “Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships.” He’s a professor at the University of Maryland and blogs on male friendships for Psychology Today.

From Montreal, Canada, we’re joined by Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association. He’s in Montreal for the 17th Annual Conference on Men and Masculinities. He’s an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Watch the trailer for “I Love You, Man” here:

The Boston Globe’s Christopher Muther writes about bromance today in a piece called “Man enough for bromance.”

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In 1972, the sexual revolution was young, the birds and bees were still a semi-taboo topic, and “The Joy of Sex” was a publishing sensation.

It was modeled on a cookbook — “The Joy of Cooking” — but the illustrations were a little different. A kind of everyman’s Kama Sutra. Looking back, maybe too much man, and not enough woman, in the huge bestseller’s perspective.

And that’s not all that’s changed in the decades since. A big, brand-new edition of “The Joy of Sex” revisits the whole subject, top to bottom.

This hour, On Point: The Joy of Sex, take two.

You can join the conversation. Do you remember the first edition, and what it stood for? Celebrated? How do you see our relationship with sex having changed since 1972?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Susan Quilliam, relationship psychologist, sexologist, and advice columnist. She’s the first woman to revise Alex Comfort’s 1972 original work, “The Joy of Sex.” Her new version, out this month, is “The Joy of Sex: The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking.” 

Read an excerpt from Quilliam’s new edition.

And from Burbank, California, is Pepper Schwartz, sociologist and sexologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.  She’s written advice columns for Glamour Magazine, Perfectmatch.com, and Medhelp.org.  Her most recent book is “Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years.”

 More links:

Read The New Yorker’s recent review-essay on “The Joy of Sex” and the story behind it.

Dalton Conley

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It’s a misty memory now. But there was a time when work in America, for most, meant 9 to 5. Evenings, long and free. Weekends, a world apart.

When you punched out of the workplace, you were gone. In your own world. No more.

The advent of cell phones and e-mail and Blackberries and instant messaging and economic pressure has put Americans who have a job in range of work all the time. 24/7.

Sociologist Dalton Conley says it’s changing our fundamental relationships. Even when we’re home, we’re elsewhere.

This hour, On Point: When work never ends.

You can join the conversation. Are you always on call? Never really free from work? These days, are you glad to have it anyway? Or worried something is wrong?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Dalton Conley, professor of social sciences and chair of the sociology department at New York University, and author of “Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.” You can browse inside the book at RandomHouse.com

The Sean Bell case in New York has thrown a big spotlight on American big-city police and policing. An unarmed man on the morning of his wedding day — no crime, no offense –cut down in a hail of 50 police bullets, and last week all officers cleared in the case.

Peter Moskos is watching closely. The Harvard-trained sociologist spent a year on the beat, as a cop on the toughest streets of Baltimore. Now he’s telling what he saw. The heroism, and the madness.

This hour, On Point: Out of the ivory tower and into the squad car. We’re on the beat and in the heat with Peter Moskos.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Peter Moskos, professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District.”

America is in the middle of a tattoo craze. Forty percent of Americans aged 26 to 40 have been tattooed. More than a third of Americans 18 to 25 have already been inked somewhere — sometimes in ways shocking to their elders.

But the U.S. tattoo culture is nothing compared to some of the world’s body art traditions.

New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people sustain an ancient tattoo tradition that puts bold spirals and family history on their faces.

It was banned. It’s come back.

This hour, On Point: the old original tattoo tradition of the Maori, and America’s tattoo culture today.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Karen Kramer Russell, curator of the Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibition, “Body Politics: Maori Tattoo Today.”

Whare Heke, Maori artist and bone carver, he works out of his Moana Nui Designs studio in Watertown, Mass.

Mary Kosut, professor of sociology at Purchase College, State University of New York, and director of the college’s Media, Society and Arts program, she has spent more than a decade researching American tattoo culture.

It’s not new but it’s truer than ever — more and more young American couples are waiting later and later to start a family and have their first baby.

Fifty-two percent of college graduate first-time mothers are now thirty or older — not just out of high school, not just out of college, but well into life and jobs and relationships and expectations.

Then come the kids. Like an earthquake — of course.

So what does it mean for budgets and dreams and lives and marriages to launch so late?

This hour, On Point: starting families after thirty — and what postponed parenthood means for American marriage.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Pamela Jordan, a professor in the department of Family and Child Nursing at the University of Washington, she is creator of the Becoming Parents Program.

Amelia Tyagi, co-author, with Elizabeth Warren, of “All Your Worth: The Life-Time Money Plan” and “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.”

Julie Diop, On Point producer.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Humans do it, and when it’s “on the side” they call it infidelity. But infidelity is understood, practiced and paid for in many different ways around the world. In some countries it’s astonishingly common. In many others it’s not.

In the United States it is, perhaps, to most taboo. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman has found the statistics and followed the trail of infidelity around the world, from the USA to Paris and Moscow, Tokyo and Togo.

This hour On Point: Pamela Druckerman talks about her new book “Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee.”

-Tom Ashbrook

“I got the idea because I was a foreign correspondent and realized that you can learn a lot about foreign cultures by looking at people’s private lives.” Pamela Druckerman

“Men in poor countries cheat a lot and men in wealthier countries cheat a lot less.” Pamela Druckerman

“Women in wealthier countries cheat more than women in poor countries.” Pamela Druckerman

“America, the Philippines and Ireland are the most disapproving of infidelity.” Pamela Druckerman

“In America, the contemporary wisdom on infidelity is that it’s not the cheating, it’s the lying.” Pamela Druckerman

“When affairs happen, Americans are profoundly shocked.” Pamela Druckerman

Guest:

Pamela Druckerman, author of “Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee”