(This is part 5—and the last part in a while—in the series, “What I Want My Teenage Daughters to Know about Sex.” Click here to read it from the beginning.)

We pick up this week with more myths about sex and relationships, especially that part about relationships.

(This is part 4 in my series, “What I Want My Teenage Daughters to Know about Sex.” Click here to read it from the beginning.)

In the words of psychologist David Ley, “many of our beliefs about sexuality have been based on myths and subjective fears.”

Indeed, numerous myths about sex and relationships persistently circulate in religion and pop culture, and you’ve been exposed to both.

Here are some of the more significant myths that I’ve culled from my research. Unfortunately, it’s a very long list. I apologize for that, but I didn’t make up these myths; I’m just answering them. I’ve divided this list up into two parts. Next week, I’ll run part 2. Today, I want to start with this interesting tidbit, which almost sounds plausible…

As if to balance my post earlier this week about indie author pains, Mary DeMuth writes about 7 publishing myths on Novel Journey.

She includes such myths as:

• You'll get rich. (Most published authors earn little from sale of their books.)

• Rejection stops with a book contract. (Actually, it gets worse.)

• The publisher will market your book. (These days, you have to market it yourself.)

• Book signings are wonderful. (No, they suck, especially if no one shows up to buy your book.)

I’d like to add a few from my list, some of the reasons why I decided to go indie:

Alan Baxter posted this list last week, and it’s still making the rounds.

“And before anyone accuses me,” Alan writes, “of being all jaded and defeatist, I prefer to look at it as arming myself with the truth in order to beat that f***er down and prove every point on this list wrong.”

He’s talking about superstar authors, who “prove every single one of these points wrong.” They’re the exceptions that prove the rule.

Or are they?

Can you guess which novel the following beginning comes from?

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

Some years ago, when I was a fledgling storyteller still puzzling through the basics of what makes a story work (or not), I frequented a certain writer’s forum, now defunct. One of the writers there made it very clear that when we critiqued his work, we should be positively nasty about it. He didn’t want to hear anything soft and fluffy about how well he wrote, because otherwise how could he grow as a writer? Rather, he wanted to hear about all the stuff he did wrong. That’s what we call “having a thick skin.”

This is a common enough view in critique groups, although I don’t share it. I think that positive criticism can be even more useful than negative, as long as it’s constructive. That is, if you tell the writer what she did that particularly worked (rather than what didn’t work), you’ll be supporting her in her strengths. That’s even more important than helping her overcome her weaknesses, because we all have areas in which we’re weak. But a writer makes her name on her strengths, not her weaknesses, because her fans read her work in order to experience those strengths.

That’s a writer’s critique group. But you really don’t know how criticism feels until you get your first unfair review— that reviewer who doesn’t just dislike your story, but dislikes you personally. He doesn’t just disagree with what you’ve written, but rather thinks you yourself are a charlatan. And he may not have even read your book. Every author has gotten such a review at least once, and as soon as you do, you can say you’ve arrived. That’s when a thick skin really comes in handy.

Despite the thick skin, it gets easier to be criticized as much as it gets easier to be turned down for a date. In other words, it doesn’t get easier. You just get used to it— maybe.

Or more likely, you don’t.