Love & Passion Quote by Sue Johanson

Sex ed, in Sue Johanson's telling, isn’t blocked by prudishness so much as by status anxiety. The line lands because it flips the usual moral narrative: people aren’t silent about sex because they think it’s dirty; they’re silent because they fear looking competent. Knowing becomes suspect. In a culture that treats sexual knowledge as evidence of activity, and activity as evidence of bad judgment (especially for women, parents, teachers, anyone expected to embody “respectability”), ignorance turns into a kind of social camouflage.

Johanson’s intent is characteristically practical and gently scolding. She’s not arguing for titillation; she’s diagnosing why adults sabotage the very conversations that would make sex safer and less traumatic for everyone. The subtext is that embarrassment is performative. People manage their reputations by acting naive, as if innocence were something you can demonstrate by refusing vocabulary. That’s a remarkably modern insight: stigma thrives less on what you do than on what you can be seen to know.

The context matters, too. Johanson built a public persona around plainspoken candor, taking sex out of the realm of euphemism and into consumer-safety territory: bodies, consent, contraception, pleasure. Her quip works like a pressure release valve, using humor to name the real obstacle. If the fear is “people will think I know,” the antidote isn’t just better information; it’s permission to be informed without being judged.