For Goodness Sex: Changing the Way We Talk to Teens About Sexuality, Values, and Health

Let's talk about sex.

We do it all the time, don't we? We talk about our sex lives with friends; we gossip about celebrity hookups; we watch reality dating shows. Yet when it comes to talking to our kids—many of whom are in sexually intimate relationships—we are strangely silent.

But our kids are talking—and seeing and listening and learning—about sex every day. Unfortunately the messages they receive are often problematic: boys are studs, girls are sluts; real sex should be like porn; hookups are better than relationships. Your kids know more about sex than you think they do. But your kids don't know as much about sex as they think they do.

To make matters worse, most sexuality education in schools is either abstinence-only or abstinence-based—and both models tend to leave young people ill equipped to make fully informed decisions. Sexuality educator Al Vernacchio, a high school teacher for more than twenty years, has been an advocate of a new category: sex-positive education.

In For Goodness Sex, Vernacchio refutes the "disaster prevention" model of sex ed, offering instead a progressive and realistic approach. Without a broader understanding to offset the damaging perceptions of sex that pervade much of our culture, adolescents and teens are dangerously unprepared intellectually and emotionally to develop as sexual beings, let alone cope with today's world of sex via smartphone, cyberbullying, and the precipitous rise of high school and college sexual assault.

For Goodness Sex offers the tools and information adults and young people need in order to have important conversations about sexuality and to develop healthy values and safe habits.