I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency.

I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency.

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.

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.

It's not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girl's identity to appearance.

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.

Parents tend to name all of baby boys' body parts, but with girls they go from belly button to knees with this void in the middle. That doesn't change as kids go into puberty.