Kristin, great post! I've been talking about this subject a lot with my friends lately. Gotta love it when there's something on your mind and you suddenly see it everywhere. I highly recommend the book Growing Strong Daughters (2nd ed.) by Lisa Graham McMinn, a prof of sociology and mother of 3 daughters. This is a book I edited for Baker (both editions) and the second edition has a great section on girls and their bodies, sex included. She, too, talks about how the focus No No No before marriage can lead to many women having difficulty saying Yes Yes Yes after marriage. About how all the things many churches teach lead to the idea that sexual sins are the worst sins ever, and that sex carries a tint of shame no matter what.

In particular, I was struck by a section titled "Keeping the Value of Virginity in Perspective" where she recounts a conversation with one of her daughters where the girl says she'd kill herself if she got pregnant because it would be so bad to be pregnant before marriage that she'd rather die than people find out. When her mother told her there were a lot worse things to have happen to her than having sex before marriage, like drug or alcohol addiction, the girl was shocked. Here's how McMinn ends that section: "While we need to teach our daughters how to recognize and avoid situations that might quickly get out of control or that might lead to date rape, we need to do so in a way that does not overemphasize their virginity as their most important quality. Our daughters' sexuality is only one part of who they are. While it is an important part, a healthy perspective can be distorted by an overemphasis on it."