Life & Wisdom Quote by Sue Johanson

Sue Johanson’s line lands like a quiet indictment of the culture she spent a career trying to deprogram. The sting is in “most glorious”: she elevates sexual pleasure to something vivid and legitimate, then immediately contrasts it with a checklist of emotional penalties. Guilty. Ashamed. Embarrassed. Abnormal. The cadence reads like a diagnosis, but the target isn’t sex itself; it’s the social machinery that teaches people to treat their own bodies as evidence of wrongdoing.

Her intent is both compassionate and confrontational. Compassionate, because she’s naming a private spiral many people think they’re alone in. Confrontational, because she refuses the euphemisms that usually soften sex talk into something “tasteful.” By pairing “glorious” with “abnormal,” she exposes the absurdity: how can an experience framed as natural, pleasurable, even bonding be processed as a deviation?

The subtext is that shame isn’t an accidental side effect; it’s a feature of moral policing. Johanson, as a sex educator and media figure, worked in an ecosystem where sex was everywhere as marketing but scarce as honest information. That contradiction breeds exactly the feelings she lists: we’re trained to perform sexiness while simultaneously fearing what desire implies about our worth.

Context matters: Johanson spoke to mainstream audiences, often in formats where callers were anxious, apologetic, convinced they were “broken.” This sentence functions like a permission slip and a critique at once: your reaction makes sense, but the system that taught it to you is what’s truly abnormal.