Sexuality is a normal part of life; it is your body’s way of telling you that it is ready to be involved in the process of having children and carrying on the human race.
Whether you like it or not (and most people do like it even if their parents do not!) your body is designed to have children, either providing the seed to initiate children (for men) or the egg and the nurturing womb (for women).
The fact that it is usually enjoyable just adds to the interest and excitement.
For most people, they start to become aware of their sexuality through their teen years as they pass through puberty.
They start to develop their own bodies in new ways, and they start to become aware of other people in a more sexual way, seeing them in a way they had not noticed them before.
However, just because your body is becoming sexually ready does not necessarily mean that you are either physically or emotionally ready to handle the consequences of that sexuality.
Young people experimenting with sex (without reasonable precautions) risk becoming parents at an age when they are usually too emotionally immature to handle a child, which is likely to affect the rest of their lives.
While this tends to have the greatest impact on girls (since they are the ones who end up pregnant, with all of the associated decisions and issues of that situation), it also tends to affect the boy concerned, both emotionally and financially.
The other main risk to either partner is the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as HIV/AIDS, herpes, syphilis, and gonorrhea.
On the other hand, the easiest and safest ways to avoid all of these problems (STDs as well as unplanned children) are either abstinence (avoiding sex completely) or using condoms.
The difficulty with abstinence is that, while very effective for as long as you can sustain it, our biological bodies are trying to drive us to have children, and fighting against those hormones and compulsions tends to be a long term losing battle after a while.
Those who choose a life of chastity, either short term (e.g. teen-abstinence) or long term (e.g. priests/monks/nuns), are constantly faced with the reality and temptation of what they are missing out on all around them, every day, and this generates ongoing stress in their life, that often gets harder to control as they get older.
The reality is that most teenagers (and anyone older) are likely to want to experiment with their sexuality, and in this case, should make sure that they take basic precautions (such as using condoms) if/when they do so.
Of course, sexuality does not disappear once you pass those teenage years. Most people are capable of remaining sexually active well into their old age, and there is no reason why they should not continue enjoying their sexual nature.
While they become physically unable to bear children in later life, the enjoyment of sexual contact still remains.
By the same token, sexuality is not confined to being just between men and women. The reality is that people can be sexually attracted to either sex, and there is nothing they can do about this except accept that facet of themselves and deal with it, even if society sometimes makes this difficult.
So whoever you are, whatever your gender and whatever your sexual preferences, accept your sexuality, embrace it, and enjoy it. Just take some basic precautions as well.
