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.

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.

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.

Girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of what people think it might; it actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older.

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.

Mothers are doing a better job talking about risk, danger, reproduction, consent, unwanted pregnancy. We're not talking about how to balance the risks and joys and we're really not talking about the joys.

All girls over age 14 remove pubic hair. The only touching is to remove hair. That's grim.