16 Ways Shame Shows Up During Sex and How It Can Impact Your Relationship

Shameful messages about sex often stem from societal, cultural, religious, and familial beliefs that label certain sexual behaviors, desires, or identities as "wrong," "dirty," or "immoral." These messages can deeply affect how people perceive themselves and their sexuality. Here are some common shameful messages about sex:

1. Sex is Only for Reproduction

• Message: "Sex is only acceptable if it's for having children or in a committed marriage."

• Impact: This message shames people who engage in sex for pleasure or outside of traditional marriage, reinforcing the idea that sexuality is only valuable when linked to reproduction or procreation.

2. Sex is "Dirty" or "Wrong"

• Message: "Sex is inherently dirty or sinful, and people who enjoy it are morally flawed."

• Impact: This leads to feelings of guilt or shame about sexual desire or activity, even within consensual, healthy relationships. It may also foster a sense of "uncleanliness" after sex, making it harder to embrace sexual expression as a natural part of life.

3. Women's Sexuality is Shameful

• Message: "Women should not express desire or pleasure in sex; they should be passive, chaste, or only interested in sex for their partner's sake."

• Impact: This message can lead to women feeling ashamed of their sexual desires, fantasies, or pleasure, and might cause them to suppress or ignore their own needs. It can also reinforce the idea that women’s sexual pleasure isn’t as valid as men’s.

4. Sexual Fantasies are Wrong

• Message: "Having sexual fantasies, especially about taboo subjects, makes you a bad or immoral person."

• Impact: This message induces guilt about natural fantasies, which are a normal part of human sexuality. People may feel embarrassed or ashamed about their thoughts, even though fantasies are private and don't necessarily reflect real-life desires.

5. Sex Outside of Heterosexual Marriage is Bad

• Message: "Sex is only acceptable within a heterosexual, monogamous marriage."

• Impact: This message stigmatizes LGBTQ+ people, those who practice polyamory, or people who have casual sex. It can foster shame about one's sexual orientation, relationship structure, or sexual choices.

6. Sexual Repression is Virtuous

• Message: "People should remain sexually abstinent or 'pure' until marriage."

• Impact: This can create shame for anyone who has sex outside of marriage, leading to feelings of self-judgment, fear of rejection, or fear of being perceived as "loose" or immoral.

7. Sex is Only About Physical Performance

• Message: "Sex is all about physical performance and pleasing your partner; if you fail to meet certain standards, you’re a failure."

• Impact: This message pressures individuals to view sex solely through the lens of performance and appearance, which can lead to body shame, anxiety, and a fear of not measuring up in bed.

8. Pleasure for Women is Less Important

• Message: "It doesn’t matter if women orgasm or enjoy sex; their role is to satisfy the man."

• Impact: This creates shame for women who experience difficulty with orgasm or feel their pleasure isn't as important as their partner's. It can also lead to feelings of inadequacy and emotional disconnection in sexual relationships.

9. Men Should Always Want Sex

• Message: "Men are always sexually ready and should be the initiators of sex."

• Impact: This puts pressure on men to constantly desire sex, making it difficult for them to express discomfort, fatigue, or disinterest in sex without feeling inadequate or "less manly." It can also ignore the complexity of men’s emotional and physical needs.

10. Masturbation is Wrong

• Message: "Masturbating is sinful, shameful, or unnatural."

• Impact: This message creates guilt around self-pleasure, making it difficult for people to embrace their own bodies and sexual needs. It can also foster shame in exploring one's own sexual desires.

11. Sexual Abuse is the SURVIVOR’S Fault

• Message: "If you were sexually assaulted or harassed, you must have done something to provoke it."

• Impact: This harmful narrative places blame on survivors of sexual violence, leading to shame, guilt, and a reluctance to seek support or speak out. It can also discourage survivors from seeing themselves as worthy of respect, consent and pleasure.

12. Sexual Diversity is Unnatural

• Message: "Anything other than heterosexual sex between a man and a woman is unnatural, sinful, or perverted."

• Impact: This message stigmatizes LGBTQ+ individuals, making them feel that their sexual identity and orientation are wrong. It can cause significant emotional distress and contribute to feelings of isolation and shame.

13. Sex is Only for Young People

• Message: "Sex is for the young and desirable, and older people or those with disabilities shouldn’t have sex."

• Impact: This can create shame around aging or physical limitations, making people feel that they are no longer sexually valuable or worthy of intimacy once they get older or experience changes in their bodies.

14. Sex is Always Supposed to Be Spontaneous

• Message: "Sex should always feel spontaneous, passionate, and effortless."

• Impact: This can make people feel ashamed of their need to plan for sex or incorporate communication and effort into their sexual lives, as it assumes that sex should just "happen" naturally. It ignores the reality that sexual relationships often require communication, care, and intentionality.

15. Consent Doesn't Matter if You're in a Relationship

• Message: "If you're in a relationship, you don’t need to communicate or ask for consent because sex is an assumed part of the relationship."

• Impact: This can lead to the invalidation of a person's right to say "no" or set boundaries, fostering a sense of shame if they ever feel uncomfortable saying "no" to sex or questioning consent.

16. Shame Around "Virginity"

• Message: "Your worth or purity is tied to being a 'virgin.' Losing your virginity makes you less valuable or 'dirty.'"

• Impact: This creates intense shame for individuals who haven’t had sex, or for those who have lost their virginity in ways that don't align with cultural expectations, such as without love or in casual situations.

These messages often lead people to feel alienated, confused, or guilty about their sexuality. It can take time and effort to unlearn them and replace them with healthier, more open views of sex and sexuality. Cultivating sexual self-acceptance and seeking supportive, non-judgmental spaces for exploring sexuality can help challenge these shameful messages and promote a healthier relationship with one's sexual self.

What is Purity Culture and How Can It Affect Your Sex Life?

Purity culture is an American evangelical Christian ideology that encourages people, especially teenagers, to pledge sexual abstinence before marriage. Its core tenets revolve around abstinence, rigid gender roles, heteronormativity, and the strict regulation of perceived “sinful” behaviors. Purity culture entered the zeitgeist in the late 1990s, manifesting in events like father-daughter purity balls, products like purity pledges and purity rings, and government-funded abstinence education in schools. Purity culture perpetuates messaging that sex is shameful, queerness is wrong and sinful, and that our bodies cannot be trusted because they make us want things we should not want like premarital sex. Under purity culture, young women in particular are burdened with the expectation that they need to police their bodies and behaviors so as not to tempt young men. Though purity culture began as a religious movement, it has had a lasting negative impact on societal attitudes towards sex. The lack of comprehensive sex education paired with strict expectations surrounding sex can result in challenges related to sexual expression, communication, and sexual shame.

Is Purity Culture harmful?

Purity culture imposes strict boundaries on sexual expression, prescribing a narrow view of acceptable behaviors. According to purity culture, sex before marriage is a sin, expressing sexuality makes someone damaged, women must be submissive to men, women are responsible for the behavior of men, and porn is evil. These messages are more than incorrect, they are traumatizing. People raised within this framework may feel conflicted or guilty about exploring their sexuality which limits the ability to have a healthy and autonomous sex life. This ability is further limited by a lack of comprehensive sex education.

How does purity culture affect your sex life as an adult?

Since purity culture emphasizes abstinence-only education, many people lack the tools and knowledge to practice consensual safer sex. This is a disservice to women in particular, especially in conjunction with the messaging that a woman’s body belongs to her father and then her husband. When someone believes that they do not own their body and their sex education is lacking, it leaves them vulnerable to sexual assault. Beyond this though, insufficient sex education is a disservice to people of every gender. In addition to sexual assault, it can lead to heightened rates of STD transmission and accidental pregnancies. Abstinence-only education is both ineffective and actively harmful; everyone deserves the opportunity to make informed decisions about their body and sex life.

The emphasis on abstinence and avoidance of discussions about sex within purity culture creates communication barriers. Communication is a vital part of a healthy sexual dynamic so when people do not have the communication tools to express desires, concerns, and boundaries, it can only lead to trouble. A lack of communication can lead to misunderstandings, boundaries being violated, and unsatisfying sex. Overcoming these barriers involves dismantling ingrained stigmas and beliefs about sex. The resources below can help begin the unlearning and reeducating process required to reclaim your body and sex life.                               

Further reading

• Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein 

• #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing by Emily Joy Allison

• Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms by Matthias Roberts

• You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity by Jamie Lee Finch 

• Unlearning Shame and Healing from Purity Culture by Christina Tesoro 

Further viewing

• How We Get Over: Women, Religion & Shame - a Tedx Talk by Linda Kay Klein

• Purity Culture is Rad-ically Dangerous by Belief It or Not

• Unlearning Purity Culture and Shame | Sermon 5/23/21 by Forefront Church

Learning from others

• Purity Culture Dropout Sex Education Program by Erica Smith

• Sarah @deconstructingpurityculture  

• Linda Kay Klein @lindakayklein

Takeaway

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with voluntarily abstaining from premarital sex, but it should be an intentional choice, not something you are shamed into doing. Unlearning a lifetime of purity culture messaging is no small feat, but it is possible to reclaim your body and sex life. You deserve to trust your body and to feel at home in it. Through self-reflection and re-educating yourself, you can begin liberating yourself. If you need extra help doing so, consider seeking professional help from a sex therapist.

How to Ask for What You Want Sexually: A Guide to Being Sexually Assertive

Communicating what you want sexually is an integral part of a healthy and satisfying sex life. There are many potential reasons behind why it can feel awkward to communicate about sex including sexual shame, fear of rejection or vulnerability, and sexual trauma. Sexual communication is an important skill that requires practice. You can improve your sexual communication and start your journey to a more satisfying sex life by using these tips.        

Talk about your desires, curiosities, and boundaries before, during and after sex

Communication should happen before, during, and after sex. Talking about sex beforehand serves to establish your desires and what you want to try. Talking about what is and is not working during sex helps you course-correct if something does not feel the way you want it to feel. Talking about it afterwards allows you to give feedback about what did and did not work for you so you can improve upon it in the future. When giving feedback, try to reinforce what is working for you before discussing what needs to change.  

Experiment with different tools and forms of communication

Sometimes verbalizing your desires makes communicating them even more intimidating. Luckily, there are more ways to communicate than saying them out loud. You could try writing down what you want before sharing it with a partner either on paper or through sexting. Alternatively, you can utilize a sex compatibility quiz. Finally, try establishing non-verbal cues for communicating during sex such as a double tap on the shoulder to take a pause.

Take responsibility for your own pleasure

As much as you may wish your partner could read your mind, they cannot. You are ultimately responsible for your pleasure. Many people get caught up in anxiety about pleasing their partner and do not advocate for themselves, which negatively impacts everyone involved. Reframe your perspective on expressing what you want as a favor to your partner instead of thinking it is burdensome for them. No one wants to play guessing games when you are trying to be intimate, so being transparent about what you want helps your partner, it does not burden them.

TLDR

It is natural to be intimidated by the idea of communicating your sexual desires. Being vulnerable means that you are putting yourself out there at the risk of being hurt to gain the opportunity to be understood. Communication is an important part of enhancing your sexual relationships and openly communicating can help you become more sexually assertive over time and in turn, have more fulfilling sex. If you find sexual communication to be challenging, try speaking with a sex therapist who can help you unpack the source of the difficulty and learn new communication skills.