Religious Sexual Shame: Unlearning Purity Culture
Sylvie Barak

Sylvie Barak

Somatic sex educator, certified sexological bodyworker and former professional dominatrix with a decade of experience in sexology and power dynamics. She works with individuals and couples who still feel guilty about sex, helping them heal from shame and reconnect with their bodies and desire.

She works with clients in person in California and online worldwide. Learn more about Sylvie

Shame is a bit like glitter.

It is so hard to get rid of it completely.

Imagine you got covered in it once at age fourteen, in your church youth group or your classroom or your gran’s kitchen, and here you are at forty-one, married, with a mortgage, living a sensible life… still finding it in your knickers.

You may have already changed your mind about most of what you were told about sex growing up. Maybe you even left religion years ago. Or maybe you’re still there every week and you love it, it adds to your life.

Either way, your head has moved on, but your body may not have.

Often I counsel people and couples who still feel guilty about sex, and can’t work out why.

Purity culture leaves behind few beliefs and many reflexes.

Woman sitting on her bed blowing gold glitter from her palm toward the camera, a metaphor for letting go of religious sexual shame and purity culture

Your body likely learned rules before you could argue with them

Picture a girl who hears, from about the age of eleven, that her body is a danger to boys and to her own soul. She’s taught to cover it, guard it, and above all not to enjoy it. Desire is the thing that happens right before disaster.

So she learns to be very good at squashing desire. And to say no, and keep her legs closed and her hands away from her genitals.

Then she gets married, and somewhere between the reception and the hotel room she’s supposed to turn into an enthusiastic sexual being. As if desire and self-knowledge were a light switch somebody had finally handed her permission to flick on.

But bodies don’t really work like that. Sexual knowledge and ability is not a switch one can simply flick on without any practice.

Bodies run on repetition, and no permission slip changes that.

Ten years of swatting away any desire, clenching, sitting on your hands and looking away from things that tempt you becomes a physical habit, the same as biting your nails, and a ring doesn’t undo it.

It can be stubborn. Women who soak all this up as teenagers are more likely to find sex painful years later, vaginismus and all, even the ones who’ve long since stopped believing it. Even if you left religion, your pelvic floor is still sitting in the pew.

(Boys get their own version of this by the way. They’re told that every stray thought makes them guilty, impure, close to the devil, that they’re animals who can’t be trusted. Sometimes they give in to those instincts and beliefs, acting like that. Other times, they too feel sex is dirty and impure, leading them to either shut down or treat their wives with what’s known as the “Madonna/Whore complex”. This is when their wife loses all or most of her sexual appeal so she can be seen as “good”, while the man turns to porn, massage parlors, affairs or prostitution to get their “base” urges met from a woman they can think less of. Because desire always has a way of getting out… it just depends how you let it.

Pain is only one way the body keeps saying no.

Here are some others you may have experienced:

  • you go blank halfway through sex, as if you’ve left the room and your body stayed behind
  • you can get close to orgasm but never arrive
  • you’ve never masturbated, or you do it fast and feel ill afterwards
  • you can’t say what you like because you were never allowed to find out
  • you’re well into your thirties and only now working out who you fancy or what turns you on.

This is all fixable. And there’s nothing wrong with YOU. Your body has simply learned a shut down pattern around desire and needs a little coaching and reprogramming to get it back on track again.

When it hits you years later

A lot of people ask some version of “but I left the church TEN YEARS ago. Why now?”

Because shame keeps quiet when nothing’s testing it. Then you get married, or you fall for someone you really like, or you have a baby, or life finally calms down enough for you to notice what you feel. Sex starts to matter, and the old reflex wakes up as if it never left.

A late reaction is still a normal reaction. You’ve reached the part you couldn’t get to before.

Guilt is useful. Shame is useless.

People use guilt and shame as if they were the same word. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of my favorite rabbis of all time (some people have favorite singers, I have favorite rabbis), often talked about the difference.

Shame comes after the whole of you. “YOU are bad, YOU are the stain, and the stain doesn’t come out.” So you hide it, you deny it, or you collapse into a heap of “I’m the worst.”

Guilt goes after the DEED. You are a good person, but you did a bad thing, and a bad thing can be repaired and put down.

Purity culture pulled a very neat trick. It took things that hurt nobody (wanting, being curious, touching yourself, having a body at all) and filed them under sin. Then it pinned them to your identity: you were used goods, chewed gum, a rose with the petals pulled off. So you end up ashamed of desire itself, which is a bit like being ashamed of getting hungry.

When the bad feeling turns up, ask yourself: did I hurt someone? Did I break a promise I made?

If yes, that’s guilt. Go and fix it.

If no, that’s glitter.

Back in my late twenties, I had a year I can only describe as a bit of a bender. As Yom Kippur rolled around, I went to my rabbi, fully braced (and maybe even hoping) for a stern telling-off.

Instead, he asked me one question. “Are you still doing the things you feel bad about?”

“Some of them,” I admitted.

“Then step one is you stop doing them. And if you catch yourself doing them again… you stop, you drop it, and you move on.”

No big lecture. Just a plan: stop, drop, and move on. I use my rabbi’s line with clients to this day, because beating yourself up is a useless, resource-sucking endeavor.

You don't have to choose between God and orgasms

The internet’s favourite advice is to deconstruct everything, leave, and treat your entire tradition as the villain.

Some people do need to leave. Plenty don’t want to. And you can keep your faith, your Friday night candles or your Sunday service, and still decide that whoever told you at thirteen that your vulva was a liability was simply wrong.

One bad teacher is not the whole tradition. Most traditions have rather more to say in favour of pleasure than your youth leader let on. Jewish law lists a wife’s sexual satisfaction among her husband’s obligations. The Song of Songs is in the Bible, and somebody put it there on purpose.

The other popular idea is that you have to get rid of the shame FIRST, and then you’ll be free to enjoy sex.

Bollocks, babe. Nobody is shameless. If you wait for the shame to pack its bags, you’ll be waiting at seventy. All you need is to be one degree braver than your shame, for one short moment at a time.

Unlearning it on an ordinary Tuesday

Shame lives in the body too. I see it in jaws, in collapsed shoulders, in breath that doesn’t drop all the way down. So the way out goes through the body as well, in small and slightly awkward steps.

  • Write down the rules. Every sex rule you were handed, who said it, and how old you were. Next to each one: “Do I, a grown adult, believe this?” Cross out with relish.
  • Use the proper words. Vulva. Clitoris. Penis. Out loud, in the bathroom if you must, until they stop making you flinch. It’s hard to enjoy something you can’t name.
  • Look. Hand mirror, good light, five minutes. A lot of women raised this way have never seen their own vulva. It’s yours. You’re allowed.
  • Touch with no destination. Not to get anywhere, just to find out what feels like what. Notice where the clench arrives (jaw, belly, pelvic floor, breath) and breathe out slower than you breathed in.
  • Say one true thing. “I like that.” “Slower.” “Don’t stop.” One sentence.
  • Expect the morning after. Something lovely happens, and the next day shame turns up with the bill. That’s normal. Stop, drop, move on.

Every small thing that goes fine is evidence, and bodies believe evidence far more than they believe pep talks. Collect enough of it and your body stops treating your own desire like a threat.

If penetration hurts, please don’t grit your teeth through it. See a pelvic floor physiotherapist. Pain is a medical problem with medical answers. It has nothing to do with your character.

If you're married and you both grew up with this

Then you were both promised the same switch, and you’ve both been wondering which of you broke it. Neither of you did.

Tell each other. “I think what we were taught is still running the show” is a far better conversation than another year of one person feeling rejected and the other feeling defective.

After that, treat yourselves as two beginners, because that’s what you are. You wouldn’t expect to play the piano well just because someone finally let you into the room with it. Slow down. Take intercourse off the table for a while if it’s become the test you keep failing. Find out what each of you likes with the same curiosity you’d have had at nineteen, if anyone had let you.

And please, call it sex, out loud, instead of “being intimate” or “marital relations.” It helps more than you’d think.

So... does it ever go away?

Mostly.

The glitter never fully hoovers out. You’ll be sixty, and a hymn or a look from your mother will set it off, and there it’ll be again, a single speck catching the light.

The difference is that you’ll know what it is. You’ll brush it off your sleeve and carry on, instead of rearranging your whole sex life around it.

Plenty of people are still finding the odd speck. They’re also having rather good sex.

If you’d like some company while you unlearn all this, book a call and we’ll start wherever you are.

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