Ms. Fessler convinced herself that her desire for monogamy was “antiquated.” Yet she couldn’t help longing for connection. “With time, inevitably, came attachment,” she writes. “And with attachment came shame, anxiety, and emptiness. My girlfriends and I were top students, scientists, artists, and leaders … but the men we were sleeping with wouldn’t even eat breakfast with us the next morning.”

The sex was lousy too. “In retrospect, it’s obvious that I was highly unlikely to have an orgasm with a guy who didn’t know me or care to,” she writes. Yet she blamed her sexual dissatisfaction on herself.

My first reaction to Ms. Fessler’s essay was, Well duh. Meaningless sex with guys who don’t care about you isn’t all that fun. Who knew? But she deserves a break. As I recall, I and many of my friends also learned the hard way. We learned that although women may be equal to men, we’re not the same – especially in matters of mating, sex and intimacy. Like it or not, our sexual feelings and behaviour are deeply gendered.

Feminist theory denies these differences exist, except as artifacts of the patriarchy. And so our smart young daughters grow up ignorant of the emotional facts of life – as ignorant in their way as their great-great-grandmothers were on their wedding nights.

I called Ms. Fessler (who graduated last year) to ask her about the sexual education of her generation. “Nobody ever talked to me about sexual pleasure or intimacy,” she said, “or about the asymmetry between men and women.” The sex ed she got in school was purely mechanical. No one ever told her that there’s a significant difference between sex and, say, sneezing. She never learned that sex and desire and jealousy and passion are among the most primal forces in nature, that they are powerful and dangerous, and that they will rock your world in ways you cannot possibly control or even imagine.