First of all, don’t just teach her about boys. Teach her about a love that exists regardless of gender, which means you’ve gotta teach her about other girls too. Or maybe even people who are combinations of the two. Or people who were born one gender but didn’t feel comfortable that way mentally, and chose to switch physically.
Tell your daughter that in a perfect universe, a parallel universe maybe, everybody she meets would treat her body and her mind with respect, and that the phrase “mind over matter” would always be true. Because if you’ve taken basic physics, you know that matter is something that has mass, aka a living, breathing body, and the way your daughter’s body looks- cellulite, wide hips, big lips, skinny ankles and all-is nowhere near as important or relevant as what’s inside her brain. And in a parallel universe, boys or girls or whomever pays any sort of attention to her would want to feel up her brain first, all those juicy neurons and synapses and firing impulses that make her smile widen when she’s happy, or make that engaging conversation about the existence of an afterlife possible. And her body would come second in line, not first.
But that’s not the universe she and you live in, and you know it. So set her down in a chair and make her look at a photograph of big ol’ beautiful planet Earth, and tell her about how sometimes there are going to be toxic people in her life, and they’re going to be the wound instead of the bandage. They’re going to be the people that make her lean over the toilet, not the ones that hold her hair back when she’s sick. They’re going to treat her like a single tiny cell instead of a complicated, extraordinary giant mass of infinite cells that work together and make up this incredible human being.
Tell her she doesn’t have to take shit from anyone who can’t see past her mouth or her eyes or her long blonde hair, her cropped-close-to-the-skull black hair, her flaming red bob, and past her skin into all the tissues and organs and beating heart. If a boy or a girl or someone in between isn’t willing to take a microscope, even a metaphorical one, to look into your daughter’s heart and into her thoughts, then she shouldn’t be willing to settle for them only getting a surface look.
Let her know that there’s going to be someone, or maybe someone(s), who want to take her out past curfew and cross her boundaries and kiss her so hard and so fast in her car without her permission that she sees galaxies in the back of her eyes from the pressure of their mouth. Your daughter’s made with fists like thunder and she can thunderclap whoever that person is across the face if she doesn’t feel comfortable pressed up against the steering wheel.
Hold your daughter’s hand when you remind her that there will be a breakup that involves mascara-stained tissues (or just plain old tear-stained ones if she has no interest in makeup, which is fine too), music played at full blast on her bedroom stereo, and nights spent curled up under the blankets with only a holey sweatshirt to keep her warm. Tell her that maybe you don’t really care much for swearing yourself, but even so, she’s allowed to say “fuck it” to that person who hurt her.
Make sure your daughter knows that being alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, that after a breakup or a cheating scandal she can spend as much time as she wants by herself in her room, reading books, listening to her iPod, sketching abandoned buildings, and still be happier as one person than she would have been as half of a couple.
Oh, and now before you leave her bedroom and shut the door and leave her alone with her thoughts, tell her one last thing: this may not be the perfect universe that you two live in, and there may be some meteors or asteroids that hit along the way, but that should never stop her from reaching for the stars.