The weekend, while enlightening, also decidedly startled me. I realized what is completely missing from our conversations about sexual health: passion and pleasure.

We are lucky enough to be among the few species that can actually enjoy sex because it feels good, and perhaps take for granted that we don’t have to fight for survival when making love with a partner. And yet, we continue to omit from the sex education conversation our innate, normal and healthy drive to be sexual, and rarely celebrate our ability to bask in the pleasure in the first place.

The result? Teens don’t realize that their feelings of love, lust, arousal and perhaps even mind-blowing passion are normal, and they aren’t equipped with the tools to navigate their developing emotional intelligence. Instead, the current education models are telling them they’re broken, weird and shouldn’t be feeling that way about sex, let alone be having it. And they’re reaching out for answers in all the wrong places.

We can be sex positive without being sluts, and yet that message gets completely lost, or ignored, in nearly all forms of sex education.

To foster positive sexuality in younger generations, we need to talk to kids comprehensively and openly about sex and provide them with resources that allow them to make informed decisions about their sexual encounters.

Full disclosure about contraception, STIs and testing, how you get pregnant (and what your options are if you do) and even information not typically covered in sex education, like anal sex and definitions of slang terms, are imperative to creating this open dialogue. But what about education that goes beyond intercourse and the protection of your parts from disease and babies?

Currently, sex education in the states evokes feelings of fear and risk, whether it’s abstinence-only or liberals’ attempt to be all-encompassing. We emphasize all the bad and scary things that can happen from sex, without discussing the facts that:

1. Most often, you have sex because it feels good — not just to procreate — and that masturbation is an important form of learning what turns you on, especially for women. And,

2. The deliciously out-of-control feelings of sex can sometimes rise to a climax that overwhelms our rationality, our good sense, and even our values. Feelings by which teens may be more surprised and unsure how to navigate than the physical p-in-v (…or p-to-p or v-to-v) action itself. Feelings that make it difficult to understand what you need to do to remain in charge of your own sex life until you’ve been there and done that.

The second point is often one of the sides abstinence-only education fights — the idea that sex is too powerful, thus you should only ever have it with one person … your spouse. And while it ignores the physical mechanics all together (because, you’re not having it anyway, right?! [face palm]), it’s at least giving the emotional side a chance (mind you, with overwhelmingly huge blinders on) most “liberal” sex education (that focuses prominently on condoms! birth control! penises! vaginas! and the like) doesn’t.

Both sides, however, are still missing the mark.

Instead of being judgmental, unapproachable, assuming extremes and emphasizing dangers, we need to validate the normalcy in the way teens are feeling, help them sort through their levels of sexual readiness and acknowledge that developing sexual autonomy is just another way in which teens mature.

Part of developing a healthy sexuality is knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, knowing what feelings are normal and age-appropriate and how to deal with and talk about them, and knowing your insides — your personal values, what physically makes you feel good and how to speak up for both. The healthier our sexuality, the more conscious our choices will be.

Of course, we need to continue educating our younger generations (as well as ourselves!) about the potential risks of sexual behaviors and how to avoid them, but in an ongoing conversation that doesn’t just stop there.

Youth are sexual beings just like the rest of us. Let’s help them celebrate and accept who they are without judgment, without alienation and without secrets.

Also published on BitchBuzz.com, a refreshing lifestyle website for women that spotlights the best in style, food, sex, technology and everything in between.

Main image via Tom Kemp Starley’s Flickr

That’s how some parents down in Menifee, California think, anyway. So passionately that a complaint about “oral sex” being in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionaries purchased for advanced readers at the local elementary school caused the books to be banned.

Banned! It’s a dictionary. At an elementary school.

How else are kids expected to develop a vocabulary? How are we empowering children to learn things on their own if we’re keeping from them one of the most useful writing, reading, grammatical and researching tools out there? Slapping their hands with rulers, so to speak, for using a school-provided resource to find the answers to their own questions. This is … bad? Shouldn’t we be encouraging kids to learn, to explore their sense of curiosity, especially on their own?

My mom’s a therapist and sex educator. And even though my sex education started before I could even pronounce the names of anatomical parts correctly, my elementary school sex education happened in fourth grade. (Yes, my mother was one of two parents who actually accepted the invitation to sit in on the “lecture” and painfully bad video.) It’s wasn’t all that comprehensive, and it sure as hell didn’t cover why adults have sex for pleasure and not just for procreation. But if we’re teaching kids about “how babies are made” in elementary school, it makes no sense to ban books — especially dictionaries! — that mention the topic.

Kids and pre-teens aren’t stupid. I can almost guarantee that they know more than their parents and teachers think they do. And if they’re looking up the term “oral sex,” it’s not because Mrs. Smith in Room 19 went off-key with her sex ed curriculum. It’s because that’s what the kids are talking about at recess, on the playground. Perhaps someone thinks they’re cool because they overheard their older sibling talking about “oral sex” on the phone, heard it on t.v., or most likely on the Internet, and decides spreads the “wisdom” (i.e. I know something you don’t know!) on to friends, or wannabe friends.

Instead of hiding from them the answers and taking away their right to curiosity, why aren’t we teaching them the truth?

The more they know and the less afraid they are to ask when they’re curious, the more they’re likely to make the right decisions when faced with them, and the more likely they’d be to approach an adult if faced a serious problem. Rumors about how babies are and are not made (“If you have oral sex with a guy, and swallow, you’ll grow a baby in your stomach!” … NO. Fail.) spread less like fire.

Way to put your town on the map, Menifee. What’s next? No Internet?