Tony Abbott and I have something in common: we've both been having the sex talk with our teenage daughters.
As my 16-year-old firstborn navigates the world of opposite-sex attraction and ever-deepening relationships, my husband and I have sat her down and dispensed advice not dissimilar to that favoured by the Opposition Leader: think carefully and rationally before making any permanent decisions, respect yourself deeply, don't allow fleeting love to disrupt your academic pursuits, and, if you decide to go ahead and have sex, for God's sake use contraception.
It's a bittersweet ritual, the virginity talk: the final frontier of parental influence, this hollow script is recited to savvy teenagers across the world each year, energised only by the degree of love and expectation with which it is delivered.
It is in the murky subtext of this generic message that Tony Abbott and I part ideological ways. For no matter how seriously I take my parental advisory role, and no matter how desperately I long to extend my daughter's precious childhood, I realise that by proselytising on sex I am employing an outdated and irrelevant technique, broaching a subject on which she is already well informed and over which my right to exert control is rapidly diminishing.
Like other enlightened parents, I have acknowledged that sex does occur; not among all teenagers and not all the time, but regularly enough to render any furious denials quite pointless. Trying to suppress sex, particularly among hormone-fuelled teens and young adults, is like halting a tsunami with the palm of one's hand.
For many, virginity ceased to be a virtue a long time ago; an unmarried woman's dignity no longer depends on her chastity. Not because women have turned into lascivious pigs, but because we have come to see that the shame of 'impurity' suffered by women for millennia is negative and shackling. We have also learned that we are perfectly capable of making our own choices — not least when they relate to sex.
Socialised by the inflexible mores of the 1980s, during which I was a teenager, I still reflexively quake at the thought of gratuitous bed-hopping and mindless adolescent sex. But it's precisely this debauched, fantastical notion of sex, rather than the more realistic and mundane version of it, on which the morality police fixate when eviscerating the fragile new sexuality of teenagers. As guardians of