Why do people feel ashamed of sex?
When was the first time you felt ashamed of sex?
I was about 7 years old. I was bouncing down a quiet back stairwell at P.S. 169 when there, on the wall of the final landing, I saw the word PUSSY scrawled in red marker. I froze. Just seeing the word made my face glow like Rudolph’s nose and my heart race like the galloping deer behind him. I’d heard the word “pussy” whispered by thuggish boys, and knew it referred to the place between my legs.
But nice people weren’t supposed to use such a word. Sex itself was a dirty word! Nobody spoke it at home. Nobody talked about it. There was no word allowed to describe genitals either. If you absolutely had to refer to them, it was “your privates” or “down there.” Seeing “pussy” scrawled on a wall made me want to die of shame right then and there, and I ran away as fast as I could, intolerably embarrassed.
But then came puberty. I learned that babies were made by a penis and vagina joining, which meant that for every child born, there had been a bunch of fuckery going on! Even my morally upright parents had done (whisper) it. The elders had lied to me! Everyone had lied. Everyone had sex. Every single person with a birth child had sex at least once. So how could it be dirty?
By early adolescence estrogen completed my first sexual evolution. When a boy kissed me I felt tingly all over. When I touched myself in the dark, it felt amazing. When I rubbed against something it felt better. I wanted to kiss more boys. Maybe girls too! I leaned towards friends who were a few years older than me. They showed me porn. They taught me about blow-jobs. Some of them had low-key orgies they let me attend.
That’s when I understood: sex was not a dirty word! It was a beautiful word. The act felt so good. Skin on skin, body against body, and oh the delight of that precious spot between your legs. How could something that felt so natural, so right, ever be dirty? The pussy was out of the bag!
What’s Your Story?
Were you one of the lucky children whose parents imbued you with sex-positive values? Did they let you know that your body was good as it was, that every part of you was acceptable, and that sex was a natural part of life?
Most of us missed out on the experience of being raised with a healthy sense of sexual self-esteem and self-acceptance. Most of us, indeed, received negative messaging about sex in different forms. From our faith, we may have learned to believe it is only ok if you’re hoping to have babies. From our parents, we likely learned that genitals were a shameful part of the body. At school, you probably didn’t learn any of the things that make kids feel secure or prepared for sex, but were, instead, warned about the risks and dangers. I learned more about ovipositors than I ever learned about my vagina. So fish sex was not dirty but people sex was? That confused me.
Think back to all the negative messaging. How did it effect you? Did it make you withdraw when you should have moved forward? Did it make you doubt yourself, hate your own lusts, feel ashamed of sex and of the person inside who craved sex?
How much of that are you still carrying with you? How much do your partners carry?
The price we pay
Shame is the leading cause of sex problems. Sexual shame of every kind — shame you need to get off, shame you can’t get off, shame you get off too much, shame about the smell or fluids of sex, shame about exploring another person’s body freely, shame about exploring your own. All this shame weighs us down. It can ruin our sex lives, our relationships, and our health.
Maybe you look and act “comfortable” on the outside. But how much sexual shame do you still carry deep down?
How Sexual Shame Fails and Hurts Us
In theory, sexual shame is a powerful tool to keep human life productive and forward-thinking. Left to our most primal nature, we might be like other primates, which is to say, obsessed with sex. Not very good for building tall buildings or living in human society. Many of our social taboos are actually really important — like outlawing non-consensual sex crimes.
However, culture takes sexual shame far past the boundaries of what’s good for people and what isn’t. It’s become a control measure. Governments punish people for consensual sex, like homosexual sex and BDSM. Religions often dictate the rules of pre-marital and marital sex. Corporations make you feel your body isn’t good enough so they can sell you chemicals to change the way you smell and “miracle pills” for sexual dysfunction — targeting all the sexually insecure people and telling them “yes, you are imperfect, smelly, limp and gross, so buy our products”. That’s how they all control us. With shame.
Let me tell you about sexual self-esteem. It’s a better antidote to sex problems than any pill you’ll buy on the Internet. It isn’t easy to build, but it isn’t nearly as hard as living with shame!
Good Sex is Beautiful
Bad sex — however you define it for yourself — is sad and unhealthy for your mind.
But good sex — again, however you define it for yourself — is a morale boost. It’s an all-over body hug that sinks deep into your mortal spirit.
It doesn’t matter if you like to dress in wild sexy outfits. It doesn’t matter if you jerk off five times a day or have a penchant for glory holes. Nor does it matter if you prefer a spanking to intercourse or fetish clothes to nudity. It all serves the same purpose: to fill your being with pleasure and bond with your partner(s).
Sex is not a sin, not shameful, not ugly, not even weird when it’s for the right reason: pleasure for the people having the sex. It doesn’t matter if it’s straight sex or the most bizarre sex you can think of. The only thing your brain wants to know is whether you’re having a good time. If you are, boom: you get rewarded. And if you don’t have a good time, you get nothing — or, worse, depressed.
All consenting adult sex that brings pleasure to the partners is good, clean, normal, and moral. People who are gripped by shame can’t see that. They still live in a childish state of mind where people go to hell for touching a natural, pleasurable part of their own body. And when they have an opportunity to change, to finally grasp the elusive (to them) ecstasy of great sex, they’re more likely to flee than to risk hating themselves for failing to abide by those unreasonable religious or familial rules.
Sex is a Beautiful Word
Sex is too short a word to encompass all the complexities of sex! The way our minds and bodies change when something turns us on. How we seemingly melt and merge into another person and enter a kind of sex trance. It deserves a more delicious name. Psycho-Biological Eroto-Rapture is probably too academic and Chocolate-Pecan Truffles are taken, so I’ll have to keep working on that. 😉
Until then, sex is the word we’ve got. And it’s BEAUTIFUL. It’s real, it’s raw, it’s who we are, it gives us the powerful gift of escape and reprieve from daily problems. Sex is not a dirty word. People who think it is, who would have us be ashamed of sex, have minds that have been dirtied by all the lies about it. Sex is beautiful.
