"If you don't know about it, you can't get it"
About this Quote
Sue Johanson’s line lands with the blunt practicality of someone who spent a career translating taboo into plain language. “If you don’t know about it, you can’t get it” is, on the surface, a commonsense rule: ignorance blocks access. But in Johanson’s world - sex education, health, consent, pleasure - “it” isn’t just information. It’s agency.
The sentence works because it’s deliberately vague. That pronoun is a trapdoor: “it” can be an orgasm, an STI prevention strategy, a healthy relationship, a vocabulary for boundaries, a diagnosis, even the confidence to ask a doctor the right questions. By refusing to specify, Johanson makes the listener supply their own stakes. The line becomes portable across scenarios, which is exactly how good public education messaging survives outside the classroom.
Subtext: the culture benefits when you stay uninformed. Sexual ignorance doesn’t happen by accident; it’s often engineered by squeamish institutions, moral panic, and the idea that silence equals safety. Johanson flips that logic. Silence doesn’t protect anyone; it just shifts power to whoever already “knows.”
Context matters. Johanson built a mainstream platform by being unshockable on purpose - making frankness feel normal, even neighborly. This quote carries that same ethos: no euphemisms, no shame, no mystical aura around the body. It’s an argument for literacy as liberation, delivered in one clean, almost parental sentence: you can’t claim what you haven’t been taught exists.
The sentence works because it’s deliberately vague. That pronoun is a trapdoor: “it” can be an orgasm, an STI prevention strategy, a healthy relationship, a vocabulary for boundaries, a diagnosis, even the confidence to ask a doctor the right questions. By refusing to specify, Johanson makes the listener supply their own stakes. The line becomes portable across scenarios, which is exactly how good public education messaging survives outside the classroom.
Subtext: the culture benefits when you stay uninformed. Sexual ignorance doesn’t happen by accident; it’s often engineered by squeamish institutions, moral panic, and the idea that silence equals safety. Johanson flips that logic. Silence doesn’t protect anyone; it just shifts power to whoever already “knows.”
Context matters. Johanson built a mainstream platform by being unshockable on purpose - making frankness feel normal, even neighborly. This quote carries that same ethos: no euphemisms, no shame, no mystical aura around the body. It’s an argument for literacy as liberation, delivered in one clean, almost parental sentence: you can’t claim what you haven’t been taught exists.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|
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