Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. When it comes to sexual harassment, there are no excuses. Nothing makes it okay. Harassers need to be held accountable for their behavior. Many victims, both men and women, are using the current cultural moment to come forward and take their power back. This is a positive, heartening and necessary development.

And yet, the social conversation about sexual harrasment is mostly narrow and unhelpful. Why do people really do it? It’s not just because they’re sick, or jerks. We can’t simply proclaim that the time has finally come to end this scourge and then expect that it will just magically occur.

Sexual harassers are frustrated, confused, wounded individuals. They also happen to be in positions of power and prestige that allow them to get away with it. Remove that power and prestige, and they’re more like you and me. What we share with them is membership in a society that puffs up and perverts sexual energy for entertainment and profit. Our media feeds and fixates on sex – talking, singing, rapping, watching – while we’re simultaneously terrified of it.

And in some ways we should be. Sexual energy is one of the most powerful forces within us. It’s not now nor has ever been solely about procreation, or love. Sexual energy is messy, complicated, and so is our relationship to it.

When it comes to our less conventional desires, sometimes we’re thrilled, other times repulsed, and perhaps most often confounded. We have a tiger by the tail, for sure, and sometimes it threatens to devour us. Or does.

It may be easy to cast the first stone on those who transgress our norms of decency, but in a society rampant with infidelity and virtually every flavor of pornography conceivable, can we really afford to proclaim our own innocence? Can we endlessly stoke these wild desires and then shake our heads in disgust when people act them out?

This reminds me of how quickly people condemn football players who become violent in their personal lives while at the same time celebrating them for outrageous feats of aggression on the field. Compartmentalization of overwhelming drives is part of being a healthy human, but often we make it so much harder than it has to be.

The solution, in my view, won’t come solely from sending sexual offenders to jail, or even to intensive in-patient programs for a month or two. If anything, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In order to heal, and begin the path to responsibility and restitution, offenders need to embrace the incredibly demanding work of first recognizing and then healing their own broken places.

Because, let’s face it, no one who is whole and healthy when it comes to sexuality is even interested in sex without mutual attraction and consent.

But what can the rest of us do as members of the society in which such brokenness is all too common? First, we can start becoming conscious of all the ways we use sex to sell, or are seduced by such selling, and then become hypersexualized in the process. That’s not going to end, realistically, but we can still name it when we see it and opt out publicly when possible.

Even more important, we can begin to talk about sex in all its forms with genuine curiosity. We can stop judging and start learning, especially when it comes to ourselves.

Let’s acknowledge that most of us have sexual drives and fantasies that, at least sometimes, challenge us. Let’s admit that even if we haven’t actually acted them out hurtfully, we’ve likely been one overpowering moment, or one bad decision away.

If none of this applies to you, if sexual energy doesn’t ever pulse wildly within you, then please know that you’re unusual. For the rest of the people around you, sexuality often doesn’t obey the bright lines of morality.

With a self-proclaimed “pussy grabber” as the US head of state, we need to take some bold, unprecedented steps. What about a government office devoted to sexual well being? Or, thinking bigger, a whole Department of Sexual Affairs?

As the first secretary of such a department, I’d nominate Dan Savage. Who might you see in that position? Even if your own nominees would likely choose to steer clear of government, are there other ways we could elevate their point of view?