My mom ran and got my dad. I do not recommend this. I recall sobbing.

Thanks for the 'shroom, All Day Breakfast!

BasementDweller, that's dreadful! I would've been mortified if my mom had done that. To take what I said above a step further, I think one of the messages it's really important for parents to send to their daughters (especially when puberty hits) is that your body is yours and yours alone despite the constant barrage of cultural messages to the contrary. One of the easiest ways to do this is to respect young women's privacy and right to not be teased, harassed, or questioned about the physical changes they're going through. I remember what a shock it was for me when I started to go through puberty and all of a sudden everyone started commenting on my body (whether critically or appreciatively) as though that was what it was there for- as if they had the inherent right to judge me physically because I was becoming an adult woman. It was completely flabbergasting (and enraging, and humiliating) how differently I was treated and how suddenly something that had never mattered before became one of the first things people noticed about me and commented on.

Yeah, suddenly you were an object. At 12. It sucked. Especially with all the creepy older men.

For me the hardest part was being treated differently by all my male peers, who suddenly thought it was okay and even "cool" to make pointed sexual and sexist comments when they never had before. I don't think most of them even recognized they were doing it, but as we got older it became more and more pervasive. I felt like my intelligence, which was a big part of my personal identity, wasn't valued or even seen by many of my peers anymore.

When I was thirteen my best male friend suddenly decided he was "in love" with me and stopped wanting to actually hang out (we had previously spent hours at a time together reading, talking about books, wandering around the huge park between our houses, playing made-up games, eating junk food from 7-11, having dinner at my house, etc.). He did, however, sometimes still invite me to go to the park but would just hide and watch me until I realized he wasn't coming and left (and then tell me he'd been watching me when I saw him later at school) and leave me love letters and poems that he pushed under my kitchen door at night (he lived close and had a mostly-absent single mom). When I told him he was weirding me out and I didn't want to date him, he basically told all his friends (in our class of 25 in a school of 100) that I was a bitch. Then one of his friends wrote the story for an assignment and read it aloud in class. So basically one of my best friends stalked me, left creepy notes at my house in the middle of the night, then became angry and spread rumors about me. That was my first significant tangle with being the object of sexual attraction.

After a second and much more violent and damaging encounter a year later (with a different boy), I decided I was pretty much done with boys for a while. I had my high school "crushes," but I didn't date (or even kiss) a boy until I was 18. With the exception of a single male friend whom I went to a few school dances with, I turned tail and ran every time a boy seemed to "like" me. What I've found as I've gotten older is that almost every woman I know well enough to discuss these things with has variations on these stories to tell. And I have more stories than I've just written. I'm not really sure why I'm getting into it- it's just coming up. I guess I just feel like I can't even express how important I find it to teach young women that no matter what happens, their bodies belong to them alone and they deserve safety, privacy, and respect. Because god knows they aren't learning it from experience.