Most people remember when their folks tried to give them the “sex talk.” It was extremely uncomfortable, awkward and felt unnecessary. Maybe your parents split up the “talk,” one covering the hairy emotions associated with sex and the other talking straight up anatomy. Maybe your parents were like mine, who cracked open their physiology textbooks from their schooling years: “And here’s the ovum, which undergoes oogenesis. The corona radiata is the layer of cells surrounding …”

Sex is a tough subject to be open about, and as a result, it is usually hushed, its meaning lost in between the lines. But no matter how hard it is to be serious about sex, it’s even harder to hold an open dialogue about sexual health — and specifically, the human papilloma virus, otherwise known as HPV.

Last week, Gardasil, one of two vaccines protecting against many forms of HPV, was given the OK in a study conducted by the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center. The study followed about 200,000 subjects after having been administered the HPV vaccine and determined it is safe for use. At most, the vaccination could result in a skin infection or same-day fainting — a preferred alternative to cervical cancer.

This is a fantastic step forward for cancer prevention, and hopefully, it will drive down the death rate due to cervical cancer, which is one of the most fatal cancers observed in women. However, the study won’t dispel the controversial nature of the vaccine. In the six years since the Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine, Gardasil has undergone so much scrutiny for a vast number of reasons — but all of them come back to society’s discomfort with acknowledging the nature of sex.

I was with my roommates and their friends when we started talking about the vaccination. It seemed that several people we knew had received the first vaccination (out of three). But a few years after Gardasil was approved by the FDA, many began to worry that the newness of the drug meant there was still a possibility of a side effect that was yet to be discovered. It doesn’t make much sense because it’s a pre-emptive sort of worry. Nonetheless, it effectively stopped girls from receiving the rest of the vaccinations.

While I was in high school, I remember the administrators encouraging the student body to get vaccinated. But the girls I knew made fun of each other if they did end up receiving the vaccination because that must mean “she’s a whore.” Some parents even looked down on their friends for getting their girls vaccinated because she must have been somehow “tainted.”

And, even in the political arena, negative attention surrounded the HPV vaccine when, in 2007, former GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry issued an executive order to vaccinate every schoolgirl. He received a huge backlash from the Republican party and other candidates for having government meddle in an issue so personal as vaccinating one’s children.

I doubt those who took part in the backlash, both on the community and political levels, understood that cervical cancer is directly caused by HPV, and that the vaccine would prevent transmission of the virus. I also doubt they understood that the vaccination is most effective if administered prior to being sexually active.

It’s this lack of understanding about the vaccine that puts people off from promoting it. There may be a general understanding that Gardasil can lower your chances of developing cervical cancer, but people have still stigmatized the vaccine: Those who receive it must be sexually promiscuous — why else would they need to be vaccinated?

The medicine behind prevention has made great strides in progress within the past decade. We have the power to make cervical cancer virtually non-existent.

But we need to catch up psychologically. We need to put aside our fears for being considered socially tainted because risking a cancer diagnosis isn’t worth fitting into social standards.