"Sharon Lamb, in The Secret Lives of Girls, says the two most important prohibitions for girls, entering the twenty-first century, are against sex and aggression. For women, exhibiting either kind of behavior--sexual or aggressive--is a potentially dangerous transgression. It can be seen as reneging on the promise that, according to Dana Crowley Jack in Behind the Mask, extends chivalric protections to women in exchange for their agreeing to be gentle, nurturing, and submissive. To be caught desiring either is to be caught eating forbidden fruit. And the repercussion is to be not only cast out but recast, positioned as something other than purely feminine, at once deprived of and liberated from a certain social compact."

- Without Apology, by Leah Hager Cohen