Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

Overall good health includes good sexual health. But shame and stigma continue to be the biggest barriers to seeking and receiving the care we need to protect ourselves and those we love.

Words by Kay Kudukis

In the early ’90s, American Grammy Award-winning hip hop duo Salt-N-Peppa released a slick groove with an earworm of a chorus. “Let’s Talk About Sex” was about communication, consent, and safer sex. It came with a cheeky warning:

Salt: Yo, I don’t think we should talk about this.

Peppa: Come on, why not?

Salt: People might misunderstand what we trying to say, you know?

Peppa: No, but that’s a part of life.

Conservatives responded by saying it promoted promiscuity. Radio stations banned the song.

Let’s talk about sex, baby.

Let’s talk about you and me.

Let’s talk about all the good things

And the bad things that may be.

Some 34 years later, many people still have no clue that our entire body is designed for pleasure. All the parts you can see, and many you can’t, are all factory-wired for your delight.

Points on the pleasure map

• Your skin: With millions of nerve endings, it’s your largest organ. Touch, kisses, hugs, and massage send feel-good messages to your brain.
• Your brain: It releases dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins — your body’s own MDMA.
• Second strings: Your neck, ears, lips, spine, hips, and lower back.
• Wild cards: Your scalp, wrists, inner arms, fingers, toes, and behind your knees.
• The O-Team: Your clitoris, vulva, vagina, penis, scrotum, perineum, anus, nipples, breasts, inner thighs, and groin.

Sexual MVPs

• Your penis: For millennia, men have made penis art, studied the appendage from every angle, and told tales of its glory. Stats: Averages 5 to 5.5 inches in length when erect, with a girth of about 4.6 inches. Main job? Liquid waste management. Shoots reproductive bazooka on the weekends. Biologically, it has a little more than 4,000 nerve endings in total — most in the glans (tip), some in the foreskin (if present), and a few in the shaft. About 25 to 30% is specialized for pleasure.
• Your clitoris: After a 200-year hiatus, it was “rediscovered” in 1998. Urologist Dr. Helen O’Connell completed mapping the clitoris in 2005, after eons of men not even trying. Her stats: About 3.5 to 4.5 inches from tip to internal roots. The glans alone contains 8,000 nerve endings, every single one devoted to pleasure. The clitoris has no other function.

The historical hall of shame

For thousands of years, sex wasn’t dirty — it was divine. Cultures built festivals and rituals around it. If it felt good, they did it. Then men in robes claimed pleasure was dangerous. They rewrote rules, and brought shame, humiliation, torture, and death to those who had sex for other reasons than to procreate. That created, as we will term here, the first worldwide Mentally Transmitted Infection (MTI).

Symptoms of MTIs include humiliation, shame, and fear for having had unsanctioned consensual sex. “Shame is sticky,” says DAP Health Nurse Practitioner of Sexual Wellness Anna Daymon. “It clings to families, communities, and even medical systems. God forbid we say we enjoy sex when it’s the most natural thing in the world. We’re animals. That’s what we were created for.”

Science, not stigma

You know what else is sticky? Bacteria. Some have existed longer than humans. When we showed up with our warm and wet genitalia, they said, “We’ll take it.” You may not notice you have company until bacteria leave the faucet dripping. By then, you may have passed it on.

“People shouldn’t be afraid to get tested,” Daymon emphasizes. “Most STIs are just bacteria — curable and no big deal.”

There are morning-after pills, too: One to prevent pregnancy. And another, known as DoxyPEP (or post-exposure prophylaxis) — two 100mg oral doses of doxycycline taken between 24 and 72 hours after unprotected sex to ward off STIs (especially syphilis and chlamydia). “What matters,” insists Damon, “is staying healthy and informed, getting tested, and taking PEP after a risky encounter.”

PEP also exists for HIV. “It’s our Plan B,” says DAP Health Director of Specialty Programs Dr. Jason Halperin. “If someone starts as soon as possible, but within 72 hours of exposure, the risk of transmission is almost zero. The medication is well tolerated, and it’s just a four-week regimen.”

And let’s not forget that pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for the prevention of HIV has transformed a terminal illness into a manageable condition. It’s available in daily oral form, and as two long-lasting injectables.

Like with STIs, the importance lies in getting tested to discover one’s status. If you’re negative, get on PrEP! And if you test positive, there’s no shame. Just get into antiretroviral treatment so you become undetectable and therefore untransmissible (U=U). 

Generation Z gets it

Daymon credits younger folks for breaking the cycle of shame. “The ones in their 20s and 30s have got this locked down,” she says. “They know their bodies. They know what feels good. And they don’t apologize for it.”

Daymon adds that she and her DAP Health sexual wellness colleagues have heard and seen it all. There is literally nothing that can shock them. Respectful, judgment-free care in the form of free HIV and STI testing, and free STI treatment, is assured at the nonprofit’s three dedicated sexual wellness clinics (in Palm Springs, Cathedral City, and Indio), and its Monday pop-up clinic for students at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. The same will be true at a new location coming to Oceanside on the San Diego Coast in early 2026.

“When sex stops being treated like something taboo,” Daymon concludes, “people get healthier and happier.”

To find out more about DAP Health’s sexual wellness locations and services, to make an appointment for testing and/or treatment, to inquire about PrEP and/or DoxyPEP, or to receive a free HIV self-test kit discreetly mailed to your home, please click here. You may also call 760.323.9255, extension 761.