Love & Passion Quote by Sue Johanson

Sue Johanson’s voice lands like a polite scandal: frank, unsentimental, and oddly comforting. “Kids and adults have sex for many, many reasons...” reads at first like a clinical shrug, but it’s a deliberate cultural move. She’s refusing the easiest story we tell about sex - that it’s either romance, pathology, or moral failure. By flattening the motive hierarchy (“many, many reasons”), she makes room for curiosity, awkwardness, loneliness, pleasure, status-seeking, experimentation, coercion, affection - all the messy human stuff that usually gets edited out of public conversation.

Then comes the pivot: “Put out a question box.” That’s not just a classroom tip; it’s a philosophy of power. A question box is anonymity weaponized for honesty. It acknowledges what adults prefer to deny: young people already have questions, and shame doesn’t stop behavior, it just drives it underground where misinformation thrives. Johanson’s subtext is that sex education fails when it performs certainty. The box is a concession that the real curriculum is what people are too embarrassed to say out loud.

Context matters: Johanson became a cultural fixture by making explicit talk sound ordinary, even neighborly. Her intent wasn’t to titillate; it was to de-dramatize. The quote works because it sidesteps ideology and goes straight to logistics: if you want safer, healthier outcomes, you build a system that can absorb real questions without punishing the asker. That’s radical precisely because it’s practical.