The anesthetizing against caring really threw me for a loop. I was seeing it with 15-year-olds. It was how they were starting their intimate lives. It alarmed me.

The notion is called wabi-sabi life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss.

One of the challenges is to create an equally positive, satisfying sense of femininity and feminine identity in a different way so that there are things you're saying yes to and satisfying that urge that your daughter has to be assert her girlness. The surface level of the culture, and really several inches into it, makes that very hard to do. I hate to put another thing on parents' plates. But the culture is very intentional in what it's telling your daughter and what it's telling you about the message of femininity. And if you're not intentional and conscious back, you lose.

Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.

We're afraid if girls find out sex is pleasurable they'll stop being gatekeepers, they'll go out and have sex.

I had a lot of girls ask me whether it was weird that they didn't make a lot of noise during sex. I would get so irritated that they had learned this.

We continue to think of virginity as first intercourse. That ends up minimizing and marginalizing other things kids are engaged in, like oral sex. And it's not going to feel particularly good for girls as the big marker of adulthood.