It was Thanksgiving up in Canada this past weekend. I spent turkey day with my extended family, eating the most delicious of dinners (though, in all honesty, almost anything is a step-up from nightly KD), devouring pumpkin pie, and feeling a bit like an outcast.

You see, while my entire family is aware that I’m an up-and-coming journalist, I always find it interesting that no one brings up exactly what I write about or what kind of publications I’m aiming to write for after graduation. Even my successes – the fact that I just got to interview my sex-columnist hero, Dan Savage, and that I’m running my very own sex advice column in my school paper – were tiptoed around like a landmine. God forbid I say the “sex” word, I suppose.

Maybe I’m too wrapped up in this world of college where finding a condom wrapper in the kitchen garbage is just another thing to laugh at, and not used to being around people who blush at the word “vagina”. I can’t help but wonder, though, why sex is such an utterly taboo topic — why being a nearly-twenty-year-old sex columnist comes with this huge stigma, even when it’s approached in the most sex-positive and family-appropriate of ways (really, it’s not like I was going to get into the intimacies of my sex life around the dinner table).

And the thing is, this isn’t just an issue that surrounds my (apparently conservative) family. This is something that affects everyone – from the girls who refuse to masturbate because they believe their vulvas are “gross”, to the married couples who let their sex lives suffer horribly because they’re too embarrassed to put into words what exactly it is that they want in bed – we’re all being affected by sex-negativity, but where exactly does it come from?

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