One thing I am going to do differently as a parent is go easy on the “save sex for someone special” rhetoric with my kids – both with my daughter and my son. I noticed some unintended consequences happened among my friends and I when we were growing up with this. The “save yourself for when you really love someone” thing comes from a good place – being nice to yourself and only choosing people who are also nice to you – but it pairs up too easily with the general culture of slut-shaming that’s out there. The “precious vagina” can easily become the “shameful vagina”.

“Saving yourself” can obviously also lend itself to an exploitative situation where male sexual pleasure is centred in sexual activity. Here’s how that works. You’re a girl and you’re having sexual encounters with boys (is it different for girls only hooking up with other girls?), and they’re very nice and you’re very attracted to them but they are not “the special one” so for as long as possible you end up choosing sexual activities that don’t involve your precious, precious virginity. The safest activities for this are those aimed solely at his sexual pleasure. With some friends I think this established a pattern that took them years to overcome in their sex lives.