Saying "yes" [to sexual activity] is a pretty low baseline for sexual experience and I wanted to write about what was happening to girls after "yes."

It's particularly important as parents in our conversations with our daughters and our sons to consider ideas intimate justice when we talk about and set them going on their early formative experience.

Marketing to girls constantly presents a hypersexualized idea of girls; they're expected to appear sexy but be cut off from their sexuality.

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.

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.

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.

Sexualization is imposed from the outside as opposed to sexuality, an understanding of the body's responses and desires and ability to communicate that, cultivated from within.