MY niece is nine and she’s changing, as girls of nine are wont to do. Every now and again, she’ll ask me something vaguely related to her body or mine and it’s become apparent that it’s time someone had “The Talk” with her.

Like me, she’s a bit of a bookworm, so it makes sense to offer her literature to turn to if the uncomfortable conversations become a bit too much.

It’s been quite some time since I perused a book about puberty but within ten minutes of attempting to find an appropriate tome, I found myself wishing I’d left it another three decades to bother – if only to allow the genre to catch up with the latest in feminist thinking.

What I wanted was a sensible big sister of a narrator, clear of voice and able to balance the importance of having a wash every now and again with the intricacies of periods and the sudden influx of body hair.

One of the first I picked up was The Little Book of Growing Up, Victoria Parker’s luridly pink take on puberty, dubbed “the perfect first book about periods for girls of primary school age”.

In that, I got an excitable big sister who loves partying, looking good in jeans and going on fun shopping trips for pretty bras and matching knickers. In Parker’s world, puberty’s little more than an excuse to become “a babe with a fantastic figure”.

The process apparently bestows boys with confidence while turning “the plainest girl into an attractive young woman”.

Within a paragraph or two, the puberty genie leaves the boys with useful personality traits, while the girls are granted the looks card and the ability to “look even better in your jeans than you do now”.

It’s a familiar scenario, this one. Doing the rounds on social media at the moment is a side-by-side image featuring two magazines, Girls’ Life and Boys’ Life.

A girl’s life, according to the front page, is Fall Fashion You’ll Love, how to Wake Up Pretty!, Dream Hair and first kiss confessionals.

A boy’s life, though, is all about how to Explore Your Future – astronaut? Artist? Firefighter? Chef? Here’s how to be what you want to be…

From baby toys to teen magazines, society is working hard to gender girls into the shallower end of life, to align them with a brand of femininity that favours style over substance.

Right now, my niece is too busy climbing trees, geeking off about Harry Potter and reading about the history of the Titanic to consider her appearance and what it will come to mean to her, for her. The boys have a future while the girls have a body.

As a kid who will avoid at all costs a trip to town, how could she ever relate to a sentence that suggests buying your first bra is “a great opportunity to talk your mum into serious shopping”?

If she falls for the rhetoric presented by authors like Parker, she’ll start her adult life already feeling as though she doesn’t quite fit, isn’t quite a woman like other women, isn’t normal.

And it’s in that way that the confidence Parker so easily attributes to men ebbs away from our teenage girls, forever consigned to sparkly boxes of restrictive and overwhelming girliness that they’ll never quite be good enough to fit into.