I talked to a junior in college, and she was fed up. She said, "I'm not doing other girls any favours by faking orgasms and not calling out guys when we're having unequal experiences."

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

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.

Displaying yourself as sexy doesn't do anything to increase sexual self-knowledge or pleasure.

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.

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.

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.