I never expected, when I had a daughter, that one of my most important jobs would be to protect her childhood from becoming a marketers' land grab.

Sex-ed courses look at girl's internal parts: for boys it's about ejaculation, erection and wet dreams; for girls, it's periods and unwanted pregnancy. We never talk to girls about sexual self-exploration or self-knowledge.

While I completely disagree with the "purity" concept, it was the only place I saw fathers talking to girls about their expectations and attitudes to sex and expressing love and support. I didn't see liberal dads having similar conversations with their daughters.

Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.

My kind of nightmare quote is from Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire and is, I think, brilliant. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them how sexual experience made them feel, they respond by how they think they looked; they think that how they look is how they feel.

Parents tend to name all of baby boys' body parts, but with girls they go from belly button to knees with this void in the middle. That doesn't change as kids go into puberty.

There is a way hook ups are serving young women. And it was important for me to always talk about how behaviours were serving girls, not just making them the victims.