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

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.

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.

Intimate justice touches on ideas of gender inequity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health. I don't expect a 15-year-old girl to have that figured out; it's hard enough to have it figured out when you're 50.

The point of creativity is to express and challenge yourself, to make meaning, to embrace your life.

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.