That evening, I had lied to my parents about where I would be staying, telling them that I was going to a friend’s house. I drove down country roads that split cornfields on the verge of being harvested all the way to my ex-boyfriend’s new apartment in downtown Indianapolis.

Even though we weren’t technically in a relationship at the time, having broken up sometime in the month prior, and he’d done things that hurt me over the course of our year long relationship, I loved him. He’d respected my desire to save myself for marriage enough that we’d spent almost the entire duration of our relationship making out and pressing our hips together through layers of clothes. I’d never felt pressured by him, despite the fact that he didn’t share my religious beliefs, and I didn’t feel pressured by him that night.

I wanted to have sex. I’d wanted to have sex for a very very very long time. I’d loved this person for what felt like to my little sixteen on the verge of being seventeen-year-old self as an eternity. As he put himself inside of me, the song Stellar by Incubus playing somewhere in the background, I felt like I was doing something that I had chosen.

But when it was over, I turned away from him and cried to the wall. Not because I hadn’t wanted to do what we’d done or I didn’t feel pleasure after the initial discomfort, but because even though we’d used a condom, I was scared about getting pregnant and everyone finding out that I’d had sex and then labeling me as a slut.

Because I thought that what we had just done would make me go to straight to hell, if my lesbian fantasies and masturbation habit hadn’t done that already.

Because I thought that if my parents found out about any of this, I would be grounded, which to me at the time, was almost as bad as going to hell.

Because I thought that having sex made me dirty and tainted that I’d committed some sort of sin that I would never be able to be forgiven for and that no one, and especially not my future husband, would ever love me.

I was supposed to keep myself pure for God and my future husband, and I had failed.

I grew up in the middle of several sects of Christianity. My mom’s side of the family was Catholic. My dad’s family was Lutheran, but sometime during my childhood, he converted to Catholicism. We went to a Catholic church in the nearest town until I was eleven or so, when several members of my parent’s friend group went through very messy affairs and divorces, thus fracturing the community that my parents had enjoyed. Soon after, my mom decided she was tired of the patriarchal bullshit of the Catholic church (not that she would actually call it that, but that’s what it was) and that she wanted to try something else.

From then on, we bounced around. We’d go to Catholic mass on the holidays. Baptist churches run by our neighbor’s husband on other weeks. Still others, Methodist churches. Even though Catholicism is the language my body comes back to as an adult, with all its metaphors and rituals, I spent many hours singing about how Jesus loves me while sitting in recently built midwest churches painted in ugly shades of white and tan thinking about how I was a fundamentally flawed human being.

Belonging to no church with any permanence in my adolescence, I always felt like an outsider.

My friends were going through the confirmation process in their Catholic churches, but I’d only received my first holy communion. People at my school belonged to their youth groups at various churches. Many of my homeschooled friends were deep into evangelical communities, and I was there, right on the edge, but never truly a part of any one of the groups. Speaking the language and feeling the feelings, but never one of them.

I wanted to belong though. As an adolescent harboring queer interests and fantasies that I knew were wrong, I wanted to be good. If I could be good, then I’d be welcomed into their circles.

I’d finally belong.

Subscribe now

What we now know describe as purity culture erupted in the 1990s in the United States.

Fueled by a combination of the AIDs crisis, the free love movement of the 60s and 70s, and the beginning of evangelical Christianity’s sudden obsession with regulating abortion and sexuality on a governmental level, purity culture emerged in the early 90s and continued to expand throughout the early 2000s. As writer and activist Emily Joy Allison writes in her book #ChurchToo, which explores the intersection of purity culture and sexual abuse in Christian communities, “Purity culture is the spiritual corollary of rape culture created in Christian environments by theologies that teach complete sexual abstinence until legal, monogamous marriage between a cisgender, heterosexual man and a cisgender, heterosexual woman for life – or else.”

Complete with purity balls and metaphors about chewed gum and scotch tape and famous books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, this white Protestant phenomenon taught a generation of young people, especially girls, that the key to salvation was sexual purity – and that sexual purity could only be achieved if you were heterosexual and waited to have any sort of sexual contact until you were married. It imposed strict rules around dating, sexual behaviors, and even what type of clothes you could wear. Girls were thought to be less sexual and were expected to dress modestly so that they wouldn’t inspire any lustful thoughts from the boys and men in their lives.

I never went to a purity ball or wore a purity ring, nor was I an ongoing member of a youth group that was establishing these norms. I didn’t sign the True Love Waits pledge, and I don’t remember my school having any of the rallies or assemblies featuring comedians and hip hop artists alongside religious leaders that other schools did.

But I did go to some Catholic youth retreats and have my parents telling me to close my eyes when people kissed on TV and my mom not letting me out of the house in anything that showed a hint of cleavage. My parents had strict rules around my boyfriends coming over, always checking on us to make sure nothing sexual was happening, and their expectation was that I would be dating boys my age (to be a normal teenager and not a lesbian) but that I wouldn’t have sex until marriage.

It would have been one thing if these were teachings that I only heard from my parents and in church, but it was also what I heard from celebrities such as Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears, who pledged abstinence until marriage, and in public school classes.

As a part of home economics during my freshman year, we had an organization come into our school and talk about abstinence and secondary abstinence. The people telling us about these choices were not adults and definitely weren’t trained in teaching sex education – they were our peers, many of whom went to our school. They would talk about their decision to stay abstinent until marriage or why they’d decided to choose to not have sex again until they got married, even though they’d already had it.

There was no discussion of other decisions that people could make or how to reduce risk of STIs or pregnancy if you did decide to have sex. There was definitely no discussion of consent or pleasure or gender or sexual orientation.

It was D.A.R.E., the program that the US government put into schools to teach kids to “just say no to drugs”, but for sex.

There was nothing to contradict the harmful messages that we were receiving, and we suffered for it. As my childhood friend describes it, the abstinence only sex ed that we received made her feel “shame, fear, disgust, and judgment for myself, my body, and my peers who made choices other than abstinence”.

We were taught to shame each other when we stepped out of line, and that is what we did, whispering about the girls who gave blow jobs and the girls — because it was always the girls and not the boys who we shamed for being sexually active — who had sex with so and so. We were vicious to ourselves and vicious to each other, all because of a set of outdated rules around morality and goodness that had been imposed on us.

This movement spread beyond churches and its white supremacist origins and even went international: it affected government policies and the cultural landscape in a significant way, effects that have continued to today.

There’s a reason why it’s still so hard to get comprehensive sexuality education into schools. There’s a reason why posts around sexuality are censored on social media and why your therapists haven’t received much education around sexuality and why your gynecologist is still telling you to “just have a glass of wine” before sex so that your pelvic floor muscles will relax. There’s a reason why so many women have difficulty advocating for their pleasure during sex and why men still ask their girlfriends what their “number” is even as they expect her to provide them with the best blow jobs. What began as white, evangelical Christianity’s code of morality has now impacted all of us, even those of us who don’t consent to being impacted by those ethics.

We live in a world that has been fundamentally shaped by purity culture, even if we never agreed to be a part of it. This world has controlled our bodies and stripped us of agency, denying us the knowledge and support we have needed to understand ourselves and feel comfortable in our own bodies and sexuality. For those of us who were raised in girlhood, we were taught that our bodies belonged not to ourselves — but to our fathers, God, and our future husbands.

For so many of us, these teachings did not bring the happiness or wholeness that was promised: they brought pain, a pain that so many of us are still trying to understand and reckon with.

Subscribe now

In my search for belonging, I looked everywhere but myself. Latching onto the teachings of purity culture gave me a false sense of hope. I believed that if I was pure enough, if I was good enough, that I wouldn’t be that unloveable, strange nerdy kid who was interested in sex and had queer fantasies. By putting my most authentic self and shameful desires somewhere in a box deep down and dedicating myself to God and my future husband, I would be worthy enough to belong.

It’s taken me a long time, but I no longer believe the messages that were forced upon me during my childhood and adolescence. I feel a sadness and a compassion for this girl, who so deeply wanted to belong.

What I used to describe as “losing my virginity” was not actually a loss. I did not become like a piece of used chewing gum, disgusting and unwanted. I didn’t become dirty or sullied like a piece of scotch tape, ruining my prospects for a happy future.

While the decade following the first time I had sex certainly came with a lot of pain, that pain was not due to the nature of sex itself, but from the harm that purity culture had imposed on my heart, mind, and body. It’s taken a lot of time to unlearn the shame and the falsehoods that growing up in purity culture had made me feel.

Virginity is a social construct rooted in patriarchy and male ownership that denied me agency over my own body, that made me feel like my worth was tied to being “untouched” and “pure”. It made me feel like I had to be the less sexual one, that I had to control the so-called “uncontrollable” desires of boys and men.

For many years, I carried the weight of my own failure to adhere to these rules, convinced that I was everything that purity culture told me I was: a sinner, a slut, unworthy, disgusting, and ultimately unloveable. I felt like the bad things that happened to me were my punishment for being such a failure.

I know that the shame and pain I felt because of purity culture is not fully gone. Even though I now have the tools and the knowledge to be able to counteract those lingering feelings when they arrive in my body, there are constant reminders of the culture in which I was raised and the expectations that I was given. During sex, when I want nothing more than to be completely in the moment and enjoying what is happening, I sometimes have to use the tools I’ve cultivated in mindfulness to witness the shame or guilt that I feel and then let it pass.

If I could go back in time, I would sit next to my younger self. I would tell her that she was so brave for making the drive that night and for following her heart. That she didn’t lose anything, not then and not in all the sexual experiences she had afterwards.

That instead, she gained many things. A new experience in her life. A step towards the adulthood that she craved. A new way to express the love and affection she felt for that person and for the people she would be with afterwards.

I would tell her that the first time she had sex was a gateway to embodied pleasure and to wholeness. To liberating herself from the control that the church and the purity culture movement had over her.

I’d let her know that having sex for the first time was something lush and abundant, the beginning of finding that sense of belonging that she so desperately sought. Not to a man, a church, or even a community – but to herself.

Share

Thank you for reading this post! It means a lot that you’re here. If you want to unpack some of the messaging that purity culture gave you and take steps towards reclaiming the safety and abundance of your body, I’m co-teaching a writing and embodiment workshop on March 15th with the amazing poet and social worker . Called Your Body is Your Own: Coming Home to Our Bodies After Purity Culture, it will be a chance to do this work in community and to break the silence around these types of experiences. No writing experience is necessary. You can find more information and the registration here.

I’d love to hear about your experience with purity culture in the comments below. What kind of sex ed did you get? Were you a part of any church groups that were spreading the purity culture messages? What kind of things did you hear in these spaces?

Leave a comment

Back in 2024, I was commenting on a post on Isabelle Correa’s Substack, and I came across the poet Annalise Parady, who would later start a writing circle about grief called Grief House. We were sharing our poems in the chat and leaving comments on each other’s work. She left a comment on one of my poems that I used to help edit the next draft, and I began following her work.

How could I have known that in just a few months, I would experience the death of someone who I had once considered my other half? How could I have known that like me, Annalise had been heavily impacted by purity culture and it was something that came out in her writing?

Luckily, the universe knew about these intersections of our lives, and Annalise and I have had the opportunity to connect further during our time as a part of a poetry group called Gather Poets. When Annalise asked me last fall whether I would be interested in co-teaching a workshop that brought together poetry and healing from purity culture, I knew I had to say yes.

It’s truly an honor to be able to share Annalise’s poem Under The Covers, You Unspool Me Like a Film Reel with you in this newsletter.

In this poem, Annalise travels back in time, exploring a self that she had once been. She invites us to witness this self who was immersed in a religion that sought to control the bodies of young people — especially those of women — through strict rules around bodies and sexuality. Rather than shaming this younger self for believing the messages she was given, the speaker offers her something else.

Interview with Annalise

1. What inspired you to write this poem?

In a workshop, we were prompted to write “reverse poems” where time moves backwards. It was powerful to imagine unraveling this particular thread. I started to explore what might happen if I unwound the impact purity culture had on my body. Who was I before? What might I see with an external view to the woman I was while I was contending with purity messaging? The backwards movement opened the story in a new way for me.

Writing this poem also unveiled how present the shame is in my body, even after so long. I did not have to dig deep to surface religious imagery or the physical experience of shame. It’s easy to diminish our own loss and grief surrounding purity culture, but part of re-embodiment is acknowledging the toll it took on our body and our personal agency. Even if you weren’t deeply immersed in purity culture at any point in your life, evangelical culture and messaging is pervasive. If you sense that there was some impact on you, you are right because you are the expert on your own body. That is something you can honor and explore. For me, this poem helped me to recognize the cost in my own life, grieve it, and continue to do the work of reclaiming my agency. Art can be a powerful metabolizer.

2. As someone who has struggled to heal from purity culture, I resonated so much with the lines, “I am discarding my wild, pulling layer after layer/of white cloth over my inviting skin. My voice crawls/ downward to live in my stomach, I hang the scarlet letter/ back around my own neck.” Can you share more about how purity culture can impact folks’ sense of wellbeing and embodiment?

I am not the only person I know who continues to contend with the impact of purity culture, even a decade later. I’ve seen purity culture impact our self-confidence, sexual agency, trust in our sexual identity, and even our physical bodies. I am still learning about the wake left behind.

One threat to well-being is for women in purity culture who were taught that their bodies presented a threat to the men around them. For example, for pool gatherings in Christian groups, bikinis are often explicitly banned so as not to “make your brothers stumble.” Not only is the responsibility of the men’s choices being placed on the women in that scenario, it also teaches women to mistrust their own bodies. If my body is a threat, how am I supposed to trust it?

Even further on the subject of self-trust, the message is to ignore your body’s natural impulses and urges. If you spend years silencing and fearing your sexuality, it is not possible to turn around and have a healthy relationship with it overnight. A fundamental mistrust of one’s own body is a serious thing. Even if you “play the game right” and wait to explore your sexuality until you are in a cis-normative heterosexual marriage, sexual safety will be hard-won.

Finally, the narrative of “damaged goods” is so harmful. Images of a body being dirty or “used up” are common in purity culture, and it is quite obvious that any person believing that about themselves is not going to easily feel present and confident in their body.

3. As the poem unravels, we see a tension between a younger self and the self that the narrator has become. The narrator seems to ultimately find compassion for her younger self, acknowledging that she was “like everyone around her, trying to be good”. What do you think can be so powerful about looking at our past selves with compassion rather than shame?

The ending happened organically as I wrote the poem, and that was powerful for me. As I recalled the events, I saw my past self standing in front of me. Naturally, I felt compassion for her - she was so young! That’s a trick I use sometimes, asking “how would I think about this if it happened to a loved one of mine, rather than myself?” I find I can easily access compassion that way, which loosens shame’s grip. I believe that approach to be particularly potent for purity culture recovery. If shame is the wolf, purity culture is the sheep’s clothing. We have to unmask the wolf and recognize its power to make peace with it. The best antidote to shame is compassion, so fostering compassion for any version of myself is healing.

4. What advice would you give to folks who are navigating sex and relationships after purity culture?

Exploring your story through writing and art can help. Therapy can help. Dancing and doing anything that makes you feel present in your body can help. Whatever path you choose, I think it is most important to acknowledge that your experience did matter, and your body deserves any investment you make in healing it. Moving to a position of fundamental trust in your body can be life-changing, and I want that for everyone.

Meet Annalise

Annalise Parady (she/her) is a poet and a social worker. She was born and rooted in Wyoming, but currently lives, writes, and grieves in Arizona. She and her friends like to make cult jokes about the high-demand religious group where they met in college. By day, Annalise can be found doing immigration policy advocacy. By evening, she turns to poetry and the desert for solace these days. Annalise also facilitates a peer writing group for grievers called Grief House.

You can find her on Instagram and here on Substack at Third Place Poetry.

Share

I am so honored to have the opportunity to have been able to share Annalise’’s work on here. A big part of why I’ve created this newsletter is to help us all feel a little less alone in the world when it comes to sexuality and recovering from trauma, and I think seeing and hearing stories that resonate with our own life experiences in some way can go a long way in relieving the shame we might feel about this part of ourselves.

If you want to go deeper into reclaiming your body after the harmful effects of purity culture, Annalise and I are teaching a workshop on March 15th at 4pm Pacific called Your Body is Your Own: Coming Home to Our Bodies After Purity Culture. We’ll be using poetry, guided written reflections, and gentle trauma-informed embodiment practices to unpack what purity culture is and how it has impacted our bodies, sense of agency, and our sexuality. We’d love to have you there.

A big thank you to everyone for reading! It means a lot that you’re here. If you liked this piece, please click the ❤️(it helps more readers find the work), leave a comment, or even share it/restack it here on Notes.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I’ve been calling my reps and submitting comments on local legislation here in Washington. I’ve been allowing myself to stay inside after dark instead of pushing myself to go to events, and I’ve been letting myself sleep in. I’ve had meaningful hangouts with friends at our homes.

Perhaps most impactfully, I’ve been staying off Instagram.

In this quietness, I’ve been finding more peace. I’m not waking up and immediately feeling dread. I’m not spending hours of my days in anxiety spirals about what has been happening in the US. I’m grieving and feeling so much anger about what is happening, but I feel like I can better show up for the people in my life and the causes I care about because I’m not as drained.

Seeing this change in my body has made me think about the Transcending Trauma Through Yoga affirmation card that reads, “I deserve larger margins in my day and space between things.” I used to think that for myself it would only be temporary, that after I “healed” I’d be able to go back to the way I used to be, that I’d be plunging full throttle into work and going to play parties and activism and doing all the social things.

But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s not true. Maybe I can’t live life the way that I used to. Maybe I’ll never be able to live that way again.

And maybe that’s okay.

You may or may not have noticed, but this newsletter has a new name.

I prepared my first pomegranate to eat two years ago, while I was spending a few months at a co-living in Bulgaria.

The town where the co-living was located had a wellness center that contained pools fed from mineral springs. On that site, there had once been a temple dedicated to the goddess Demeter. A lot of time had passed since the temple had stood, and there had been several roman baths that had been built on that site over the years, but the energy of vitality and renewal remained. The water that flowed at the mineral springs site was considered to have healing and wellness properties, so people would come fill up jugs of it at the spigots alongside the road by the entrance to the wellness center.

The pomegranate trees were everywhere in that area, and our co-living was gifted with some pomegranates from neighbors and family members of the folks who ran the place. I had no idea how to eat a pomegranate, so during a ritual I was doing around ancestors and grief, I chopped it in half and then attempted to scoop out the seeds with a spoon.

If you have ever eaten a pomegranate, you probably know that using a spoon doesn’t work too well. I splattered red all over my shirt and the table. Some juice even made its way into my eyes and onto the floor of my room.

I had this idea in my head that the seeds would be bitter, tough, but when I did finally get a few seeds to eat, I discovered that they were soft. Sweet even, with a tiny hint of the earthy crunch at the center.

Since that first pomegranate and those months spent on grounds deemed sacred, the story of Persephone has been on my mind.

There are many variations to this myth, but one of the main ones is this: the goddess Persephone is abducted by Hades and forced to be his bride in the underworld. In response, the goddess Demeter, her mother, rages and causes destruction by purposefully not tending to the harvest. Demeter is finally able to arrange Persephone’s return, but before it’s complete, Hades tricks Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, and so Persephone cannot fully leave the underworld because she has eaten food there. She can return to the world of the living in the spring, but come winter, she must return to the realm of the dead.

I used to think that healing would mean that I wouldn’t ever think about the traumatic things that have happened to me. That they would be more or less erased from my body and my heart.

What I’ve come to realize is that they will never be fully erased.

They might not be impacting me as strongly as they did before I started doing healing work, and I finally feel like I’m able to participate in the world again, but they will always be a part of me in some form. Having grown up in purity culture, feeling so much shame about my queerness and sexuality, and having experienced sexual violence, I have certain struggles, and I can’t take these things out of my identity. They’re a part of the way I navigate the world. They’re a part of the way I navigate sex and romantic relationships. Work. Friendships. Just getting myself out of the house and taking a silly little walk around the neighborhood. Sitting on the bus and going to the grocery store.

I think we all have experience with eating some form of these metaphorical pomegranate seeds. Whether it’s a specific experience, or just the day-to-day life of living within the systems of oppression that we do, there are devastating things that we have experienced that will always be a part of us, that will continue to impact our lives and our sexuality. But like Persephone, we don’t have to spend all our time in the underworld. The underworld might be a part of us, but it doesn’t have to be our whole existence. It doesn’t have to take everything from us.

Persephone becomes powerful and venerated in her role as queen of the underworld despite the brutality of her abduction. We too can choose what we want to do with our underworld experiences, how we want them to shape us.

As Amanda Yates Garcia says in her book Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, “I am not grateful for my wounds, but I am grateful for the power that has come seeping into my world through them.”

Maybe our lives after trauma can be more beautiful than we thought they ever could.

///

Pomegranates are difficult to eat. It takes time to take off the outer layer and get to the sweet seeds within. You can’t just peel and consume a pomegranate within a few minutes. The metaphors, as you might imagine, are endless. Given their role in Persephone’s myth, they have long been associated with fertility and abundance, with the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.

Once you’ve eaten the pomegranate seeds, you cannot go back, but you can create something new.

I think for me, this is what this newsletter has been leaning towards for a while and what I want it to be about: the complicated process of unpacking the trauma that we have and continue to experience while existing under systems of oppression, while also finding ways to return to safety, joy, and pleasure within our bodies and sexuality.

No matter what we’ve gone through, we deserve to live a full erotic life, one where we can feel safe, where we can find pleasure and meaning. This life can even have the possibility of being better, more abundant, than the one we had previously imagined for ourselves. Trauma takes so much from us, and at the same time, the process of healing can be so giving, bringing positive things into our lives that we might not have experienced otherwise.

Thecuriousclit will always have a place in my heart, but as I’ve changed and ultimately moved away from wanting this space to be an education platform, that name hasn’t been feeling aligned.

Moving forward, this newsletter and any podcast conversations I have will be under Pomegranate Seeds. It will contain personal essays, embodiment practices, works from other authors, and conversations that help nourish the connection we have with our bodies and sexuality.

I have some exciting things coming up that I am looking forward to sharing with you all, and I hope you’ll join me for this new era of my work.

With pleasure,

Kelsey

Subscribe now

It felt awful to change, and possibly lose, a connection that meant so much to me – and it also felt like what my body had been asking for. I loved this person, and I knew the romantic relationship with him was not right for me.

In the past, I’ve always found ways to heal from break ups by being with s…

Read more

My thesis advisor even made a comment about how much relief she felt reading the last story …

Read more

This spring I woke up with such severe neck and shoulder pain that I could barely sit myself up in bed. I felt nauseous every day. I had my repeating nightmare that I used to get on a regular basis. Hives erupted behind my ears and around my throat.

Despite all my dedicated stretching, hea…

Read more

Early in March, I looked …

Read more

The kind of grief that I so badly want to avoid, so much so that since the beginning of June, I’ve re-watched every season of Bridgerton, including the most recent one that I had just watched. The kind of grief that makes my muscles so tight that I’m constantly sore even though I haven’t worked o…

Read more

Both of us raised in conservative environments yet both of us finding ourselves drawn towards sex, we were trying to navigate relationships with cis men. We were both trying to find safety and our own agency within these relationships. We were attempting to access and reclaim pleasure in a world that didn’t fully support that.

Over the years, each of us has been on our own journeys of healing. I am very excited because in this essay, Darci shares some of that journey — including the surprising revelation she had about what kind of sex she actually likes.

This piece grapples with so many questions: how do we know what we like in bed? What happens when we realize that the things that we have been doing sexually have been influenced by the trauma that we’ve experienced? How do we know whether the sex we are having is helping us navigate that trauma or whether it is something that is further deepening it? How can we have the courage to not only see what we are deeply wanting in our sex lives, but also to ask for it — especially when the trauma living in our bodies tells us that it’s not safe to do so? What role can our sexual partners play in our healing journey?

So excited to share this piece and the conversation we had about it with you all!

Subscribe now

Share thecuriousclit

Vanilla

an essay by Darci Flatley

TW: Abuse, Assault, Sex

The best sex of my life wasn’t what I’d imagined it to be. It was soft, gentle, sensual, and very, very vanilla. There was not a single moment that I didn’t feel Enzo’s hands running up and down my body, searching for new places to hold onto. If he wasn’t kissing my mouth, he was kissing my neck, tracing his tongue up to my ear. I shivered. “Wrap your legs around me,” he directed. I immediately obeyed, drawing him closer to me, deeper inside of me. It felt like the entire world disappeared. It was just us, desperately entwined, gasping for more air, shaking with pleasure. 

I grew up in a sex positive household. My mother talked openly with me about sex and pleasure, the biggest emphasis being on sexual health and consent. When I decided it was time to lose my virginity at 19, I began to research. I like to know what to expect with new things I’ve never done before. It makes me feel more prepared and that makes me feel more confident. So, I not only researched the best kinds of protection, but how to ensure it would be pleasurable for me too and not only my boyfriend. I’d heard horror stories of girls bleeding, painful friction, and wanting it to just be over. I wanted candles, R&B music, and slow, gentle, love-making for my first time. I visited my OBGYN to start taking birth control and instructed my boyfriend to not only buy condoms, but to get lube as well. I learned that most girls are so nervous, they don’t self-lubricate enough. 

My boyfriend took me out to dinner and when we came home, he set up candles and put on R&B. We were both nervous. It was both of our first times. My mom was the first person I talked to about it. “Are you okay?” she asked me. “Did it feel good?” I spared her the details, revealing only that it had been exactly how I hoped I’d lose my virginity. 

When I returned to undergrad for the fall semester, I was relentlessly slut-shamed. I spent my summer in Florida with my boyfriend, and when I returned in the fall for my sophomore year, I revealed that I had lost my virginity to two people. I’m not sure how the word got around so quickly. I attended a Bible College in small-town Arkansas. Premarital sex was a sin and I was a sinner. I could feel eyes on me when I walked past, hearing the groups of students whisper to each other. “Yea, I heard she’ll give head to whoever asks,” one girl said.

“What a whore,” another guy replied.

In order to cope with the shame I was feeling, I joked with friends that I was the campus Jezebel, despite only having slept with two people by that time. 

After graduating and moving to San Francisco, I felt liberated. Tinder was no longer a taboo app. I merrily swiped left and right throughout the day. The men I fucked after moving to San Francisco were referred to by nicknames because they were out of my life as quickly as they were allowed inside. I’d spill all the details to my friends:

Big Dick Sam had the biggest cock I’d ever seen. My hand couldn’t completely close around it.

Butt plug Chad would send me videos of him stroking himself, lifting his package up so I could see the red crystal base of the sex toy in his ass.

Jewish Jordan liked to wear a vibrating cock ring which when riding him, would make me squirt.

I had convinced myself that the more people I slept with, and the kinkier the sex was, the less ashamed of being sexually active I felt. These ideas piqued an interest into the BDSM community. The idea of kinky sex excited me because it somehow felt like even more of a rebellion against the shame I internalized.

But the BDSM community was new to me and I wanted to know what to expect. Pornography showed that men were dominant and women were subservient. Women were told what to do, punished by a slap to the face, or pull of the hair. Doms in porn would choke their subs as punishment until they said yes.

 The men I fucked were definitely more dominant. They liked to pull my hair, choke me, slap me while pounding into me. They would do it and then ask me if I liked that. I would nod my head and wait to hear them call me a whore. 

I would tell my friends about how I had been treated with pride, believing that the kinkier the sex I was having, the more sexually liberated I was. 

A friend later invited me to a BDSM event. “You were talking earlier about doms and sex and I was wondering if you’d maybe like to go with me to a sex dungeon this weekend?” 

“I’ll try anything once!” I was nervous. This was something new so I’d read their website online and learned that the dungeon we were attending would include both exhibitionism and voyeurism. 

“What should I wear?” I asked the night of.

“You don’t have to participate,” my friend assured me. “I just like to walk around and look hot.”

We got there early for the safety demos as this was my first time and it gave me insight into what to expect. I was a bit surprised at the rules. You weren’t allowed alcohol or drugs. They would ask patrons to leave, no questions asked, if you felt uncomfortable in any way. I learned about aftercare. Ensuring that your partner continually consents to each act you are about to inflict on them by checking in first. Respecting that no means no and anyone who does not adhere to that will be immediately kicked out.

But everything made so much sense as I thought about it. You couldn’t enthusiastically consent if you were under the influence. Sex should never make you feel uncomfortable. Your partner should ensure you are okay afterward. 

Despite this, I hadn’t really dealt with the internalized misogyny I had for myself. So instead of having safe kinky sex, I just asked for more degrading sex from men. I was ashamed of having sex with multiple people although I would never admit it. I believed that I was rebelling against slut-shaming. 

I met my ex on tinder during this time. While we were dating, he blamed every problem in our relationship on me and would gaslight me into agreeing with him. He would call me lazy and continually point out all the parts of my body he felt needed to be smaller. I needed to apologize when I was too loud or too much. 

Hearing this emotional abuse daily over the first few months of our relationship made me believe he was right. I needed to be more agreeable, palatable, quieter, smaller, less. He made me believe that because I was too loud, too fat, and too much, I was lucky to even be with him. He made me believe that if we broke up, I wouldn’t find anyone else to love me.

After he found out that I had previously been to a sex dungeon, he had insisted I bring him to the next event there. I agreed on the conditions that we go early for the rules and boundaries, and that we would only watch. Before heading over, he insisted that we drink a bit to ease our nerves. I reminded him that we needed to arrive early, but he assured me that I could give him the rundown of rules on the way there. We missed the introduction session and I had missed that he had been drinking before me. He was a bit tipsy. 

I led him over to an open spot to watch a scene that was happening on a bed. I glanced over to see how he was enjoying it and he had his phone out. I grabbed it from him and reminded him that he shouldn’t have it out for any reason to protect others’ safety and identities. I left to put the phone in the lockers at the front.

When I came back, he began telling me how much he wanted to play. 

“I told you I didn’t feel comfortable with that yet,” I reminded him.

He walked away. 

I tried to talk to him about disrespecting the boundaries of the dungeon, but reflecting on this now, I was trying to make him understand how badly he had been disrespecting my boundaries. 

“You need to lighten up, no one cares,” he said. 

“You were lucky no one saw you with your phone out. You would’ve had us kicked out,” I reminded him.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said.

“I also felt really pressured by you to have sex and I told you before that I wasn’t comfortable doing that yet,” I said.

“I didn’t pressure you to do anything. I just told you I wanted to play, not that we should play,” he retorted. 

I know now that he was gaslighting me, making me feel like I was the problem. This sort of behavior at the beginning of our relationship made it easier for him to continue overstepping my boundaries later on. 

 After about four months into our relationship, he suggested we move in together. I wasn’t ready to live together, but he said that meant I didn’t love him enough. 

I didn’t want him to leave me, so I agreed. The abuse became physical a few times after we moved in together. After it happened, he would cry and apologize to me. He would tell me it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t pushed him. I believed that if I was more agreeable with him, he wouldn’t have been mad enough to put his hands on me.

A few months after we eventually broke up, I began therapy to try to move on. I told my therapist of my fears about dating again. I was worried I would be too much. I was worried if something went wrong, it was because of me. It was hard to admit I had been abused emotionally. It was even harder to admit I had been abused physically.

“Were his hands around your neck?” my therapist asked me.

“Yes.”

“Were you scared for your safety at that moment?”

“Yes, but we were arguing.”

“Do you pin people to the wall and put your hands around their neck when you argue?”

“No.”

“There is never a reason for someone to strangle you.”

My therapist frequently told me that I didn’t realize how abused I had been. I would tell her about the trauma inflicted onto me, and she would re-read the list of types of abuse and give specific examples of those abuses that I had told her had happened to me. We discussed safety–how it isn’t just physical safety that can be harmed, but emotional and mental safety as well. How once the feeling of safety is taken, it is extremely difficult to recover it. My friend called it the point of no return and encouraged me to ask my therapist about it.

“Sometimes I would say yes to sex with him because it was easier than the fighting that would’ve happened if I’d said no. My friend said that’s assault, but I consented,” I admitted.

“You wanted to say no?” she clarified.

“Yea, but if I did, he would get mad at me and I didn’t want to cause a fight.”

“So, you didn’t feel safe saying no?”

“I guess not.”

“So you couldn’t say no?” she asked slowly.

It was difficult to start dating again. I’d agree to a date and cancel it last minute out of fear and insecurity. I somehow mustered up the courage to go on a date and he ended up being such a nice guy. He didn’t kiss me until the third date. I was reminded that gentle and kind men exist. My confidence was slowly growing, and I was more attuned with my body and feelings than I had been in years. It took a few dates for me to realize I wasn’t nervous to have sex with someone new, but that I simply did not want to have sex with him. It felt liberating to end the relationship and more importantly, I felt safe to do so.

As I dated more people and continued to heal from the abusive relationship, I found it easier and more natural to listen to what my body was telling me. What I was originally mistaking for feeling nervous after a date, was my body’s way of telling me they didn’t make me feel secure. Because I promised myself I would never allow someone to hurt me the way my abuser had, it was easy to listen to my body and end relationships simply because I hadn’t felt safe. 

“Can I kiss you?” Enzo asked me after our first date.

We were back in my bedroom after having a few drinks together. I giggled from the butterflies fluttering around my stomach. “Yes, please.” 

“Do you have a condom?” I asked him in between kisses. We couldn’t keep our hands from wandering over each other’s body, exploring the new terrain. 

“I do. Do you want to have sex?” he asked.

He kissed me and I kissed him back. He took off my shirt, dragged his fingers down the length of my back, and took a second to take my body in before he began kissing my chest. 

“Is this okay?” he asked.

I nodded, and pulled his shirt off. He moved on top of me. His fingertips felt electric as they moved down to my hips. He pulled my nipple into his mouth, sucking on it as his hand moved in between my legs, stroking me slowly. I struggled to take his belt off and we laughed while he took his pants off. I moved my hand down his torso until I could feel his cock throbbing in my hand. He moved his mouth down my body, licking my stomach, kissing the inside of my thigh, his thumb rubbing my clit. 

“Can I take your underwear off?” Enzo asked.

I couldn’t get them off fast enough. He came up to kiss me one more time, hard, his tongue desperately moving with mine. He slowly pushed his fingers inside of me while moving his face back in between my legs and lapping me up with his tongue. His hands grasped my hips and he didn’t take his mouth off of me until I begged him to please fuck me.

Enzo grinned. “Is that okay with you?” he asked me, waiting for me to say yes before sliding his dick inside of me. I gasped. He continued to hold me as he thrust in and out. I rolled over onto my stomach and he entered me again, slowly so I felt every inch. His hands groped at my chest. He buried his face into my neck, the sound of his heavy breathing and panting making me wetter. 

“Spank me,” I whispered.

Enzo stopped for a moment. “No, I won’t do that to you,” he said before turning me back over to face him. His arms were wrapped around my torso, his nails digging into my back, his cock moving slowly in and back out. Our breathing was heavy, our bodies slick with sweat. “Wrap your legs around me,” he directed. I moved my hips in time with his. My face felt hot, my legs began to tremble, I could feel my pussy tightening around his dick, begging for it to go deeper. 

Once we were fully dressed again, Enzo apologized for not spanking me. “I’m pretty vanilla,” he said.

“That’s okay,” I said, pulling my shirt on over my head. “I liked it.”

Over the next few days, I couldn’t stop fantasizing about sex with Enzo. Just the thought of his hands on my body turned me on. I’d find goosebumps on my arms thinking about his tongue moving up my neck to my ear. But it was so much more than the physical.

Enzo was gentle with me. He treated my body like it mattered simply because it does. He not only looked for and listened to verbal signs of consent, but physical ones too. I kept hearing him say, “no, I won’t do that to you.” I began to understand the weight of those words. Of course someone who respects me isn’t going to want to physically harm me. 

The slut-shaming I experienced throughout undergrad undid the sex positivity my mother had instilled in me. The messaging I was receiving from outside sources became so loud, it was all I was able to hear. 

Unable to recognize the change in my perspective and understanding of sex led me to treating my body without respect. The roughness from men and the abuse from my ex didn't feel disrespectful at the time because I believed myself to be a whore, a slut, a dirty girl. Instead of reflecting on why that was, I leaned into it. I thought more about what I looked like performing for men than I did about my own body and pleasure. I thought that by allowing men to have their way with me–choking me, slapping my face, pushing my head down until I couldn’t breathe was what BDSM sex should look like and I thought I preferred that because it meant I wasn’t ashamed of the harmful sex I was having.

It began to sink in the amount of power my abuser had held over me. I had been in a vulnerable place when I met him. I was having reckless sex as a way of coping with the internalized misogyny I was dealing with as a result of the slut-shaming. It was easy for him to reinforce that hatred through abusing me.

The next time Enzo and I hooked up, he hesitantly moved his hand just below my neck. I appreciated him trying to be a bit rougher after I asked for it, but I moved his hand away. I kissed him, closed my eyes, and enjoyed the feeling of his body moving in time with mine.

For the first time since losing my virginity, I felt like someone was having sex with me as a person, not just with my body. I felt safe.

Share

1. Something that stuck out to me about this piece is how you highlight that for those of us who are socialized as women, we often equate sexual liberation with having wild, rough sex. Why do you think that we have defined liberated sex in this way?

I think the easy answer here is pornography, but I think it goes so much deeper than that. I had been exploring pornography before being slut shamed, and never really paid much attention to the more rough sex. It wasn’t until I was receiving messaging from an Evangelical source that I started to equate sex with shame. After that, it was an easy downhill fall into filling that role. Almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was supposed to be ashamed for being a sexual person, so I sought out sex that involved shame, which was easy to find in BDSM. Alongside this, our media is full of that sort of liberated sex. We don’t really see a lot of slow, soft sex in movies or tv shows or in music because media is built on being exciting and enthralling. Wild, rough sex is more sensationalized and attention-grabbing, much in the same way that we can’t seem to look away from a car wreck. 

2. In the piece, you write about how difficult it was to recognize that you had been abused in your previous relationship and how the conversation with your therapist helped you to be able to recognize what had been happening. Were there any other things that supported you during this recognition and healing process?

I give so much credit to my healing to my support system. I kept so much of what was happening to me hidden from people around me because I was ashamed. I also felt like I was failing in my relationship and didn’t want others to think the same thing (even though they definitely already were). Having people to listen as I verbalized the abuse and to reassure me that it was abuse was so helpful. In the moment, I knew I was being mistreated, but I was also being gaslighted to the point that I couldn’t tell if I made up what had happened or if it had actually happened. 

3. If you could share anything to help folks who have experienced slut shaming, what would it be?

This is such a hard question because slut shaming is so personally tailored to an individual’s experience. Personally, I like to remind myself that if a slut is someone who has and enjoys sex, then absolutely I am a slut. There is something so powerful about reclaiming language that is used against you. I’d also just like to say that as cliche as it is, it gets better. Find a supportive community and like-minded people to reinforce sex positivity. Drown out the noise. 

Subscribe now

Meet Darci (she/her)

Darci is an essayist and editor. Originally from Florida, now living in California, her work considers how place affects identity, navigating feminism in the modern world, mother/daughter relationships, and sex and pleasure. Her work can be found in Broke Ass Stuart magazine and Signs of Life Anthology.

You can find more of her work at https://www.darciflatley.com

Share

I am so honored to have the opportunity to have been able to share Darci'’s work on here. A big part of why I’ve created this newsletter is to help us all feel a little less alone in the world when it comes to sexuality, and I think seeing and hearing stories that resonate with our own life experiences in some way can go a long way in relieving the shame we might feel about this part of ourselves.

Some newsletter housekeeping: June was really difficult for me, and I didn’t have the time or emotional energy to create these newsletters — hence the only posting once! Because of that, I’ll be continuing June’s exploration of performativity into this month. Thank you to my paid subscribers for hanging in there — I’ve extended your subscription until October, which means that you’ll still be getting access to the paid posts, but won’t be billed during that time. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

A big thank you to everyone for reading! It means a lot that you’re here. If you liked this piece, please click the ❤️(it helps more readers find the work), leave a comment, or even share it/restack it here on Notes.

Leave a comment

There in the dimmed lighting, surrou…

Read more

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

-Natalie Diaz, “These Hands, If Not Gods”  

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking a lot about solo sex…and doing a lot more of it.

Even though I fell off the orgasm a day band wagon earlier in the spring, I’ve sort of inadvertently put myself back on it. Perhaps because starting to see someone has sparked a flood of desire in my body, and sometimes the only thing that has allowed me to shut off my fantasies and get some sleep has been to let myself have an orgasm, perhaps because all the masturbation education content I’m getting on Instagram for National Masturbation Month has put it more at the forefront of my subconscious, perhaps because of that carriage scene in Season 3 of Bridgerton or how Andrew Scott aka the Hot Priest in Fleabag voiced an erotic audio for Quinn, perhaps just because my body is feeling more sexual lately…regardless, I’ve been enjoying it, and as I wrote about last week, I’ve been having some profound experiences with my body and pleasure. 

Something I’ve struggled with, however, is to see solo sex as a form of sex. For most of my life, it’s been something shameful, something I only do when I’m single or away from my partner. Until these past few years, I didn’t even count it as a form of sex — unless I was doing it to put on a show for my partner, of course.

Over these past few years as I’ve been traveling and healing, my relationship to it has certainly shifted. I’ve spent a lot of time alone and in digital nomad communities and have been largely celibate. This was something that for a while I felt shame about because I felt like I should have been having sex while I was going on all those adventures, especially as someone who was teaching and writing about sex.

But at some point over the past year, I realized that I was still indeed having sex – but that it was just with myself.

While it didn’t fulfill exactly the same needs that partnered sex did, being my own sex partner did fulfill many other needs, such as pleasure, creativity, power, love, acceptance, authenticity, and growth. Like partnered sex, it wasn’t always mind blowing, but there were times where it absolutely was.

Since having this realization, I’ve been trying to shift the way that I conceptualize solo sex. I’ve been thinking about solo sex being just what its name suggests — a form of sex.

I know it seems odd to think of it that way. We’re so conditioned to think that sex with a partner is the only real form of sex. That sex with ourselves is only done when we don’t have a partner, that we only do it because it’s our only option for sexual release, that it’s a less valid way to access pleasure.

But what if it’s not?

While writing this newsletter, I re-read one of my favorite poems, “These Hands, If Not Gods” by poet Natalie Diaz. I’ve always read it as being about the sex that someone is having with another person, but this time, I read it as if the speaker is talking about herself and her own hands, and I don’t know, there was something really beautiful about that. Seeing ourselves with reverence, seeing our pleasure as transformative, seeing our bodies as divine – what an extraordinary state to embody.  

So what if we could be our own lovers? What if we treated solo sex the way that we treated our lovers in the midst of new relationship energy – with passion, care, and adoration? What if we spent time touching and exploring our bodies and cultivated that relationship with tenderness and awe? While that is certainly not the standard we could meet every time, given the rest of our lives and our capacity, what if it was something we brought more frequently to our solo pleasure practices?

What if we could, as Diaz describes in her poem, slip a thumb into our own mouths and taste it all, learn how to take both the apple and the rib?

Share

Without further ado, here is a ritual and meditation I’ve created to explore this idea of being your own lover:

Read more

A few days after witnessing the aurora borealis from the outskirts of Seattle, I led myself through a yin yoga practice, allowing myself to simmer in what I knew would be happening after I finished.  

Before I went into savasana, I got out my lube and the small, lavender dildo that has become my favorite. I spread myself back onto my mat, and I touched myself to orgasm. Having spent the past hour in various shapes, connecting to my whole body, my mind was already still, my body ready for this release. The orgasm happened within a few minutes, a natural continuation of the feelings I had been building.

After I came, I lay on my mat, waiting for the familiar feelings to rush in, the ones that have been a part of my solo sex experiences for as long as I can remember.

But instead, I felt something else.  

///

Nearly every Sunday morning, I sat for an hour in the basement of the Catholic church my family went to when I was in elementary school. As we listened to some adult rattle on about the stories of Adam and Eve, I could not move the chair. Attached to the desk, with the metal book rack underneath, there were only so many ways I should shift my body.

Because all I could think about during these lessons were the donuts waiting upstairs and the book I had waiting for me in the car, I knew the stories in the Bible were true: as a daughter of Eve, I could never truly be pure.

///

In my pre-teen and teenage years, I would often choose to masturbate in my closet. Lying belly down on the carpet, tucked away in the quietest and most private part of the house, where I hoped neither God nor my family would know what I was doing, I would fantasize about scenes I read about in books and images I had seen in movies. Things that I didn’t yet understand, but for which I felt an innate desire.

I never touched my skin directly. This touch was always done over layers of my clothes or blankets.

The only time I ever came close to touching my vulva with my own bare hand was in the shower. Underneath the hot water, I would scrub myself with a washcloth and soap, hoping to rinse the dirty away.

///

I first learned that I had a vagina during the puberty talk in elementary school. The nurse had us in our small auditorium, girls separated from the boys, and she told us about periods.

When I learned that I had this part of my body and that it would bleed every month, I thought back to music class in second grade, when a boy in my class had laughed at me because I was sitting in a chair with my legs spread open. As he had laughed, I had squeezed my legs together, not understanding what was wrong, what he knew that I did not.

///

At fifteen, I joined the swim team. I didn’t understand how everyone else kept their bikini lines pristine. I felt like every time I shaved, it grew back almost immediately. I lived in fear of this stubble, what it signified about my body.

So I went and got a Brazilian. As the esthetician spread apart my butt cheeks, she told me that next time I came in, I really needed to remember to shave this part too.

///

For an entire year before the first and only time we had sex, I kissed and dry humped with the first boy I ever loved on his bed for hours. I still don’t know why we call it dry humping because for me, it was anything but dry. I never came, but I would get so wet that my underwear would be entirely soaked by the time I snuck back home.  

It was something I couldn’t quite make sense in my mind: why was something that felt so good considered a sin? Did this wetness of mine, something that happened without any effort on my part, make me a slut? If I felt this way, could I ever be pure?

Like Eve, I knew that I was biting the apple that I should have left on the tree.

///

When my next boyfriend would finger me and touch my clitoris, it would be extremely painful, so much so that my legs would shake and that I would often bleed afterwards. Since he was a boy, and I’d been told my whole life that boys were the sexual ones, that it was okay for them to hold knowledge about sexuality, I would tell him that it was all from pleasure.

That the only reason I couldn’t come was because I was broken.

What I couldn’t tell him was that I already knew how to come, that I’d been doing it for years.

///

In college, I finally took a good look at my vulva. During one of the human sexuality classes I was in, we were learning about the anatomy of our genitals. I went home one day and looked at my body at different angles, comparing it to the drawings in the textbook. I examined my labia, trying to decide if my body was “normal”, and by normal, I meant whether I had the type of pussy they would show in porn. The type of pussy that a man would find sexy.

///

It was during this time that I also discovered vibrators. I bought myself a cheap plastic one, and it was like all my prayers had been answered: I could lay on my back with my legs open, just like I was “supposed” to masturbate, and come just as easily as I could on my stomach. I could use it with my partner and come without him having to go down on me. I didn’t even have to touch myself. My hand and my vulva separated by the pink plastic, I could come and come and come.

Unfortunately, due to my own lack of knowledge around how to clean vibrators and the porousness of the cheap material, I ended up with not only one, but two, UTIs that progressed so fast that within several hours of first noticing symptoms I was peeing blood.

///

A few years after being sexually assaulted, I went in for a wellness visit, including a pap smear and routine STI testing. I didn’t have any symptoms, and I’d only had one new partner since my last test, but I wanted to be up to date. I’d always hated pap smears, with the vulnerability of showing a complete stranger the part of my body that I’d been told my entire life was “private” and sinful – but after being raped, pap smears took on a different level of pain and vulnerability.

As I sat in the stirrups, trying to keep my knees from tenting in, the doctor searched around for my tilted cervix. Looking at the ceiling, I attempted to calm my heartrate and to not to clamp down on the metal thing that I very much wanted out of my vagina. All I could think about was how awful it would be if I squeezed it so hard that it would shoot right out of me and towards the doctor.  

Her body still in between my legs, the doctor announced that she was going to be doing some additional testing for yeast infections and BV because she felt like I had an unusual amount of discharge.

When the results came in, I learned that I didn’t have a yeast infection, BV, or a STI – but that visit felt like a confirmation of what I had long suspected, what had been created by religion and then expanded upon by the violence I had experienced.

///

There were the years where I discovered ethical porn and the way it helped me tune out some of the guilt and shame for the duration of the video and have orgasms effortlessly. Where I discovered that the reason I liked pressure on other side of my glans clitoris was because most of the clitoris is actually under the surface of the skin. Where I discovered the glories of the metal Njoy wand, the way I could come over and over again with its weight against my G-spot as I caressed my clitoris. Where I discovered how to have a hands-free orgasm just by using my pelvic floor muscles and grinding on a partner during penis in vagina sex.

Where I became okay with the fact that my orgasms were almost always stronger when I was by myself because this was the time where I felt most comfortable, where I didn’t have to worry about someone else being tired or what they thought about my body or whether my stomach was expanding as I tried to come.

///

These were also the years that I cannot fully write about on here. These were the years where I experienced intense sexual expansion and pleasure, where I learned all those ways to orgasm and to be myself – but they were also the years in which I had an irregular pap and found out I had HPV, the years in which men touched my body in ways that I did not want, the years of starting to see blood on the toilet paper and not being able to sit comfortably on most surfaces because of the pain from what I later learned was a chronic anal fissure.

These were the years where I was so disconnected from my body that masturbating and having sex with my partner were really the only times that I felt like I could be present.

Pleasure and pain, goodness and sin, cleanness and dirtiness, all too entwined to untangle.

///

In Los Angeles, with the light streaming through the trees, a drought on the verge of being quenched, I held my body in different shapes. Folding, stretching, and opening. There were some poses where I felt heat flood into my pelvis.

At first, I felt ashamed of this. With the focus on hyper flexibility and tight yoga clothes, the way that feminine bodies look as they open, white supremacy has sexualized yoga, taking it away from its roots.

But then I thought, yoga helps me feel my body, so why can’t it help me feel into this part of my body? Of course, opening this body would allow more blood flow, more heat. Of course, experiencing pleasure could be the most natural, the most normal of things. Does my sexuality have to be so separate from myself? Could the two be merged so that me in my baggy clothes and puffy-from-crying face, trying to find presence in my bones and muscles, could be a sexual being without being sexualized?

Why punish a part of my body that was just doing what it was designed to do?

///

In the months before I turned thirty, I started having a relationship with a man who loved going down on vulvas. He was different than my other partners because it wasn’t just something he was doing to give me pleasure and be a good lover – having his mouth on my body was something that genuinely gave him pleasure too.

There was something about being with someone who loved going down on me. The enthusiasm, the adoration. The lack of rush or any certain goal, the comfort with being there for more than ten minutes if needed.

In my head, I thought – why can’t I give that same level of love and adoration to my own body?

///

The following years, with the ending of a seven-and-a-half-year friendship and the beginning of travel, were filled with a lot of time by myself. A lot of time eating at restaurants alone. A lot of days hiking alone and a lot of nights alone in bed, not having to worry about how I looked or whether I snored or how much of the bedsheets I pulled over to my side.

They were also spent with a lot of time touching my vulva and repeating to myself, This is my vulva. This is my body, and mine alone. I get to decide how it is touched.

They were spent with sitting in the salt water, thirty minutes at a time, twice a day, hoping that my body would heal. Allowing myself to be present with the entirety of my pelvic floor, letting all these places of my body know that they were a part of me, that I would never abandon them again. Feeling ridiculous for all this talking I was doing to my body, and yet still, feeling something in me release each time I do it, the internal structures of my pelvis lessening their grip ever so slightly.

///

At some point during those years of traveling and alone time, I had an orgasm just from the sensations I was experiencing. In that moment, safely by myself, there was the way it felt to have my fingers glide across the folds of my labia, the rise of my clitoris. The powerful hum of pleasure as it built inside of me. Staying present right there, with what was happening in my body, instead of escaping into fantasy.

With each caress and exploration of my curves, I could feel it: the way I was telling myself that I am worthy of being safe.

That not only does my pleasure matter, but that I matter.

///

His fingers were inside me, and once more, it hurt. I panicked. There was a piece of me that wanted to leave my body, the pattern I knew best. But then I thought, it doesn’t have to be that way. He doesn’t know my body better than I do. I took his hands away, and he did not try to put them back. Can I show you what I like? I asked.

During my trauma-informed yoga training, Zabie Yamasaki, the yoga teacher leading the training, said the words, You are the expert of your own body.

There are those times where someone says something so simple and it clicks, and you can’t help but sob no matter how much you try to keep it together.

///

On that evening, just days after I’d witnessed the flickering green and pink lights merge into the night sky, my body careened towards its own release. I felt connected to the sensations happening in my entire body, yes, but I also felt connected to my surroundings.

My room, the tree branches swaying just outside my window, the sunlight streaming in. It felt like the boundaries between myself and everything else were disappearing, even though there wasn’t any one else in the room with whom to merge — no man, no God, no group of peers, telling me what was and wasn’t okay to do with my body. It was just me there, shimmering and expanding into the world around me.

Afterwards, as I was coming out of the savasana I’d taken after the orgasm, something hit me: I didn’t feel any guilt or shame, the emotions that had so frequently filled my body after coming. There was no regret about the apple that I had just bitten into, no desire to change it or erase the search history of my mind. I didn’t want to take a shower or wipe myself down.

Instead, my hands covered in a combination of my own wetness and my favorite lube, I felt pure and whole.

Share

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading! I am so grateful to the subscribers who have been with me for a whole and those who have just joined. It means a lot to have you here.

Some final thoughts:

Since reading Annie Hunt’s recent piece here, I’ve been thinking a lot about Eve and the impact her story has had on myself and those of us who have been socialized as women. You can find Annie’s piece here.

If this post resonated with you, feel free to tap the heart button, share the post on social media or in Notes, or leave a comment with your thoughts down below. I love hearing from readers about what comes up for you :)

Leave a comment

Since the only sex education that my school offered was abstinence only sex education, I didn’t really have anything to counter that information that was given to me by my parents and by my peers. I felt pretty alone and pretty afraid that I would be ostracized if I ever talked to anyone about the things that I thought about.

That all started to change when I became friends with .

Cat was comfortable searching for information about sex on the Internet, and she was comfortable talking about all the sex things that no one had ever talked to me about before. Being able to talk more openly (or as openly as I allowed myself at the time) with her was the first glimpse I got into a different world, one where it was okay to be curious about sex and it was okay to explore.

I am deeply grateful for the impact that Cat had on my life during this period of my life, and I know that being this person for myself and others wasn’t easy.

Cat Hoggard Wagley is now a writer and an individual and relationship therapist with an emphasis on human sexuality. On her socials, she is known for analyzing media around various mental health topics, including sexuality. In this conversation we talk not only about her experience learning about sexuality, but also about navigating shame, how sex negativity impacts the mental health field, and how writing, reading, and watching stories can help us heal.

As someone who stayed away from therapy for a long time after a session with a sex negative therapist, and also as someone whose healing journey has been greatly impacted by engaging with story, this conversation resonated deeply with me, and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you on here.

We Talk About:

• How the media that was available during her childhood & adolescence impacted the way she thought about sex

• How she was the person to whom other teens came to talk about sex

• Being naturally curious about sex from a young age & her experience healing the shame she felt about that curiosity

• How a scene from Pen15 helped her heal some of that shame around masturbation

• Her therapy practice & what she specializes in

• Investigating her own biases & how that has improved her own ability to be a therapist

• How sex negativity impacts the therapy field (spoiler: a lot of therapists aren’t trained around sexuality) & why it is important to investigate potential therapists to find one who is comfortable & knowledgeable about sexuality

• How sex therapy can help folks investigate the shame and trauma that could be holding them back from being able to fully enjoy & experience pleasure in sex

• The impact of shame on people’s lives & how separating our own values from the ones in which we were raised can help

• Her experience with writing & how stories can help us heal

• Her book that she is co-authoring with another counselor about exploring the right & wrong reasons to have kids

• Where to find her social media, info about her therapy services, and links to articles

About Cat:

Cat Hoggard Wagley (she/her) is an individual and relationship therapist with an emphasis on human sexuality. She believes therapy has a role in reducing shame, and hopes to help her clients' lives of safety and authenticity which affirm their needs and identities.

She is currently writing a book with a coauthor and will be on submission to major publishers this spring. The book, THE RIGHT REASON, will help you discover whether or not you want to have children with an emphasis on affirming the child's autonomy as well as identifying your own values and reasons to have children.

Find more about her & her work at: https://bio.site/saymoretherapy

Share

Thank you so much to Cat for sharing her story and her wisdom with us! I hope that this episode helps you all feel a little bit less alone in your experience with sexuality and mental health.

If this episode resonated with you, feel free to tap the heart button, share the post, or leave a comment with your thoughts down below. I love hearing from readers about what comes up for them :)

In practice with you,

Kelsey

Leave a comment

P.S. For folks in the US who might be searching for a sex positive therapist, the directory for American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists is an excellent resource.

Thank you for reading the thecuriousclit, my newsletter + podcast where I hope to spark curiosity and conversations about sex and our bodies! Many of the posts in this publication are free, but to support my work and the de-stigmatization of sexuality, you can like, comment, and/or share my posts, visit my website, follow my Instagram, or become a paid subscriber to access monthly guides and practices <3

Subscribe now

That’s right, May is National Masturbation Month.  

Solo sex (the term I use interchangeably with masturbation) is near and dear to my heart: it is the way that I have experienced some of the most intense erotic pleasure, how I learned how to orgasm, and it’s also one of the things that I’ve used to heal from the trauma of sexual violence.

It’s something that I love so much that if I had to choose one sex tip to give to people who have been socialized as women, it would be to develop a regular solo practice, whether or not you have a partner.

As the badass artist and pioneering sex educator Betty Dodson wrote in her book Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving, “Masturbation is a way for all of us to learn about sexual response. It’s an opportunity for us to explore our bodies and minds for all those sexual secrets we’ve been taught to hide, even from ourselves. What better way to learn about pleasure and being sexually creative? We don’t have to perform or meet anyone else’s standards, to satisfy the needs of a partner, or to fear criticism or rejection for failure. Sexual skills are like any other skills; they’re not magically inherited, they have to be learned.”

I believe that solo sex is especially important for those of us who have been socialized as women. I know that people who have been socialized as men have their own hang-ups around solo sex, especially when it comes to their porn use, but at least they were expected to touch themselves, and it was something that was joked about between them.

For those of us who have vulvas, masturbation wasn’t even joked about. When I was growing up, it felt like it didn’t even exist.

While masturbation has not been studied as much as it should (and the language is incredibly binary), the data suggests that there is a masturbation gap between men and women. For example, a 2011 study of adolescents ages 14-17 found that across age groups more males (73.8%) reported masturbation than females (48.1%). A 2023 study of adults found that approximately 60% of men reported engaging in masturbation in the prior month compared to only 36.5% of women. A 2017 study of adults found that 8.2% of men and 21.8% of women reported having never masturbated in their lifetime.

This gap has long term consequences for those of us who have been socialized as women.

As Betty Dodson says, “The way women are made to conform to this double standard is through the deprivation of sexual self-knowledge. Deprived of their own bodies, they have no way of discovering or developing sexual responses. At an early age, women are prohibited from touching their genitals with the threat of supernatural or real punishment. Information about the clitoris and life affirming orgasm is withheld, and women are installed with the idea that female genitals are inferior, that a woman’s main value lies in procreation and giving a man sexual pleasure. Without any sexual pleasure of her own, I woman may come to think of her genitals as being repulsive and a constant source of discomfort and shame. This kind of sexual repression is a vital aspect of keeping women in their ‘proper role’.”

So many of us feel or have felt shame about this sexual activity — but having a solo sex where we give ourselves pleasure is an opportunity to develop a better relationship with our bodies. It is a way to discover what we look like and what we feel like. It is an opportunity to give ourselves the knowledge about our bodies that we often relegate to our partners.

It’s a way to understand what gives our bodies pleasure, rather than relying on what our partners think might give us pleasure. It’s a way to go at our own time, our own pace, and to learn how to listen to the messages that our body is telling us – all of which can be extremely important as we heal from sexual violence or just from growing up in a sex negative society.

Masturbation is hugely liberatory. It is, as rupi kaur writes, an act of preservation. When we know that we can give ourselves pleasure, that we have an intimate knowledge of our bodies, we’re empowering ourselves to step outside the framework of what has been given to us and claim the pleasure that is innately ours.

This month in thecuriousclit, we’re doing a deep dive into masturbation! Here’s what I’ll be covering in this guide:

• an oracle card for the collective

• an everyday pleasure practice to include in your routine

• adult sex ed: my top tips for expansive pleasure during solo sex

• poetry & fiction writing prompts

• a tarot spread

• suggestions for a book, poem, music, and podcast around this month’s theme

While these practices cannot completely cover all of our different experiences, my hope is that these can be an invitation to explore, to unlearn, and to expand our felt sense of safety and delight in our bodies so that when we are having sex by ourselves or with a partner we can more easily let pleasure emerge. 

I invite you to take your time in moving through this guide. Feel free to follow the activities in order, jump around, or skip whatever activities you would like! 

It’s your body, your practice, and your choices are always welcomed and celebrated in this space.

To begin, a card for the collective:

Read more

I first met Annie back in the fall of 2010. Navigating intense social anxiety and scared out my mind to be starting undergrad, one morning I walked into a breakfast for English majors, and Annie and I ended up standing in line together. We bonded over writing, So You Think You Can Dance, and the fact that both of us were grappling with our newfound freedom from our parents and strict upbringings.

“Eve”, her piece that is shared down below, is centered on that fateful day where Adam and Eve must leave the Garden of Eden. It takes us right into Eve’s thoughts and into her hands, places that Christianity has never wanted us to see.

This piece feels close to my heart, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to share “Eve” and our conversation about it.

Since the eclipses in October of 2023, I’ve been writing poetry and delving into the childhood shit that I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to stay away from with a hundred-foot pole.

Surprise, surprise, in the words that have been pouring out, Catholicism and the evangelical churches that my parents carted me through have been making quite the appearance. For many years I’ve had an intellectual knowledge that religion was something that affected me, but I don’t think I fully understood *how much* it impacted me until I started writing more poetry.

As I’ve been sifting through my memories and experiences over these past few months, Annie’s piece and the conversation we had about it has impacted the way I’ve been integrating my own history.

What I’ve been discovering is that if I had to put an origin to much of the shame that I feel about sexuality, food, pleasure, my body image, and my gender, I would say that much of it has its origins in the experiences I had within religion and the way that religion impacts so much of US culture.

I know that I’m not alone with this. Christianity and its moral code has had such a massive impact on US culture and politics that even those who didn’t grow up within it are often affected by its messages and policies on sex, bodies, sexual orientation, and gender.

You can read the full poem and check out Annie’s answers to some questions I asked her down below.

Subscribe now

“Eve” by Annie Hunt

Packing was easy. There was nothing to take. Still, Eve looked around her home and wanted it all. She was procrastinating—consciously, deliberately—pacing inside the shade of a large willow, playing its leaves like harp strings. With her eyes closed, she pretended to feel a breeze and held onto the faint taste of tangerine in her mouth.

He had left her alone that day like she’d asked. In the darkness of the morning, she walked alone by the lily beds, stopping now and then to dig her hands into the warm earth. The sun rose slowly, revealing scattered black rabbits that had been watching her. Two rainbow macaws laughed in the trees above.

She had eaten everything she could think to remember—carrot stalks and sour grapes, plums and pears and ginger root, mint and honeysuckle. A pomegranate sat at the root of the tree where she’d left it an hour ago. Eve sat down and pulled it onto her lap, delicate as a kitten and ominous as a crystal ball. She could hear him coming. It was time to go, but she felt a distinct panic that she couldn’t let go of the pomegranate. Her legs had become extensions of the tree's root system. It would be worse though for him to enter in this last memory, she decided, so she rose to meet Adam in the sun outside the willow.

They walked next to each other past a winding creek crawling with blue and purple forget-me-nots. She looked away—Eve hated poetry. Before they passed through the two wide elms at the edge of the garden, Adam reached out his hand, and Eve took it. In her other hand, she pressed the pomegranate firmly to her thigh.

Suddenly, in the space between the elms, God swiveled around one of the trunks to reveal himself. Eve felt the sun suddenly concentrating on her solar plexus, aiming somewhere near her heart. God removed his Ray Bans and when he looked at Adam, she could feel his hand go limp in hers. She held the pomegranate tighter and stared at God’s eyes for the first time, hoping in vain it would be the last. God held a vacant stare against his beloved Adam, whose palm was now damp against hers. No words. God kept staring until the lifeless bones in Adam’s hand started to tremble like a death rattle. Then God turned to Eve.

She knew those eyes—deep set and dark with the faintest hint of green—serpentine eyes that played and provoked. She did not blink or breathe for a moment. She held onto his stare until God and Eve suddenly, simultaneously tilted their heads just an inch to the side. There was a squint, a smile, a sneer in the corner of his right eye. He put his sunglasses back on and held his arm out and away from the garden. Still no words. Eve held onto the pomegranate with five finger-shaped bruises as they walked out.

After a few paces, Eve dropped Adam’s hand, and they turned to look back at the garden for the last time, but it was gone. God and the garden had evaporated into a sudden night—cold and dry, their home blinked away. All that was left were the two elms, now leafless, their branches twisting together like solid tongues of fire, reaching and burning for each other.

Eve and Adam looked down at their bodies. After a long pause and a shaky breath, Adam looked up and out over the jagged wasteland, but Even kept searching herself. She dropped the pomegranate at her feet as her hands reached across her body, feeling empty and responsible. There were trees in the distance, preceded by a dirt path between two patchy endless fields. At the same time—Eve looking at her body, Adam staring into the distance—they both spoke for the first time: We can do better.

Share

1. What inspired this poem?

I remember getting the idea for the story a few years ago from a giant weeping elm tree. At the time, I was working in a public garden where I spent most of my days wandering or weeding. There was the most beautiful weeping elm by the edge of the woods where I could sit on the bottom branches and hide from people. It was easy to let my mind go to the garden of Eden and imagine what it would have been like for Eve to feel lonely there. To wonder why she would be hiding. The rest unfolded from that question.

In a broader sense, this story is part of a larger project exploring the narratives of seven women in the Bible. I’ve always wanted to write a collection that gives real personality to the women who typically fade into the biblical background. Eve is so central to the image of women in Christianity, so I knew she would be included.

2. In the beginning, there’s this depiction of a sensual, desiring, and embodied Eve: digging her hands into the earth, eating all the fruit, being unable to let go of the pomegranate half. Yet at the same time, it feels like it’s something shameful, something that she has to hide from both Adam and from God. What role do you think Christianity (and the mythology around Adam and Eve) plays in women’s relationship towards opening themselves up towards the things that their bodies desire?

I love that you picked up on the sensuality Eve feels in the garden at the beginning. I wanted it to feel like a real loss—not just of the flowers and fruit, but of herself. In stepping into the reality of the world, she was effectively stepping into subjugation.

Christianity is something I have to actively grapple with in terms of how I view and inhabit my body. The Christian narrative can play out a thousand different ways, but for me, it functioned to keep me small and afraid, especially as a woman.

I grew up in a very strict, Southern fundamentalist Christian. Imagine John Lithgow in Footloose, and you’re not far off. We went to church three times a week where we were taught to essentially fear and judge the world. Women were not allowed to pray in public or lead any form of worship. Women couldn’t even teach boys who were over the age of 14, implying that a teenage boy has more wisdom than a fully-grown woman.

As women in the church, we were taught that our bodies were dangerous responsibilities. Things to repress and hide until marriage. For some people, I know these rules bring a sense of safety. But for me and most of the women I grew up with, it was an impossible standard that ran contradictory to basic human needs.

In my case, Christianity very explicitly functioned to suppress sexuality. It takes a long time to unravel that kind of belief system, especially because such extreme versions of Christianity operate on a good vs. evil binary. This is why I find it so interesting that Eve is cast as the villain from the very start. Men have always been afraid of women and their power. It’s evident in the stories they tell, which is why it’s important that women tell their own.

3. I was really struck by the imagery at the ending, with Eve continuing to turn down to look at her body even as Adam looked up and away. Can you share more about what this moment represents?

I see this scene as pretty ominous for both Eve and Adam. It’s the moment when they are first struck with the reality of the world outside of Eden—the world of suffering. I’m very interested in the differences between masculine and feminine energies (not necessarily bound by gender). Within the context of the six other stories, this is when we see the key narrative split between women and men in the Bible—men were made to conquer the world, and women were made to conquer themselves. To support men, women had to learn how to become contortionists, and this tension still very much lives in our bodies.

I know I have to fight against conformity on a very real and regular basis, whether it means feeling like I should be quieter or more attractive or less successful to make the men around me feel more comfortable. It’s a conflicting way to live—how do you fully inhabit the world when you don't feel you can fully inhabit your body? This was the question and realization that rose to the surface in that shared moment between Eve and Adam.

Meet Annie

Annie Hunt (she/her) is a writer and business analyst based in Chicago. She is the author of the young adult novella, Hooked, and the novel, Daughters of American Serial Killers. She currently lives in the city with her husband and two cats.

A big part of why I’ve created this newsletter is to help us all feel a little less alone in the world when it comes to sexuality, and I think seeing and hearing stories that resonate with our own life experiences in some way can go a long way in relieving the shame we might feel about this part of ourselves. I am so honored to have the opportunity to have been able to share Annie’s work on here.

Thank you all for being here! If you liked this piece, please click the ❤️(it helps more readers find the work), leave a comment, or even share it/restack it on Notes.

Leave a comment

Today is the full moon in Scorpio.

Like so many of us, I’ve been sifting through a lot internally. To navigate the stress, I’ve been taking a lot of walks around parts of Seattle and just pausing to admire various trees and flowers along the way. The tulips, the magnolias, the cherry blossoms, all with the backdrop of the snowcapped mountains and impossible green of the moss and the tree leaves – I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place that has such a gorgeous spring.

There’s a piece of me that still longs for the darkness and the rain and the long, cozy evenings because that feels safe, but there’s a piece of me that is so incredibly enamored with how green and gorgeous and full of life it is here now that spring has arrived. That wants to step into this joy, this sense of warmth and hope.

In some ways, I feel like this mirrors the way that we can get stuck in shame, especially when it comes to sexuality.

Shame keeps us small. As my friend Alejandra speaks about in the conversation I had with her for thecuriousclit podcast, it keeps us stuck in cycle of self-doubt and low self-worth. It makes us feel like we’re not worthy or lovable.

It can keep us from experiencing the joy and fullness of what it would be like to show up as our authentic, messy selves and also makes it so we have to mask parts of ourselves from those with whom we are close to. While we think we are protecting these connections that we have been hiding ourselves from, sometimes we are actually hurting them.

But even though shame can be so painful, we often choose to stay in it. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s also…safe. Dare I say even cozy. It keeps us from having to confront the sides of ourselves we might be scared to see, and it can help us distance ourselves from a large rupture in connection that we often fear will come with sharing the things we are ashamed about.

Sometimes though, whether we’re ready or not, spring arrives, and we are confronted with a choice. We can either stay stuck in the shame — or we can do the work to integrate it.

This process certainly isn’t easy. In her post about this full moon, astrologist and writer Jeanna Kadlec says, “Transformation is not pretty, and the process of confronting our most tender, vulnerable hungers is not a pretty one.”

Even though it’s not pretty, it’s sometimes necessary. We might reach that point where, as Nin pointed out, staying tight in the bud feels more painful than the risks we must take in order to blossom.

With the April 8^th solar eclipse, the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction that happened over the weekend, and today’s full moon in Scorpio, I think we’re getting a lot of support from the universe to step into our power and to break the cycles of shame that might be holding us back from feeling safe in our bodies and embodying our radiant sexual selves.

For this full moon practice, I’ve included some journal prompts around sexual shame, a thirty-minute grounded, trauma-informed yoga class, and some ideas for making this into a ritual. If you’re into astrology, you might explore doing this ritual sometime over the next few days to tap into the planetary energies, but if you find this in the future or just aren’t into astrology, you can do it at any time.

As always, everything in this practice is optional - take what works for you and leave the rest <3

*Please note that this work can be quite heavy. I am not a therapist, nor does this work replace the work that you might do in therapy. If you need extra support, I encourage you to find a sex positive therapist that can help you navigate what comes up.

Journal Prompts

Read more

Luckily enough, one of those people happened to be Alejandra Viejo Lopez de Roda.

Alejandra is an amazing human. She brings so much energy and light to each conversation, while also being someone that you can sit with and discuss the heavier parts of the world. I loved the conversations we had about gender and sexuality, and I also learned a lot from her about being able to show ourselves love while also lifting up other people (especially other women!).

Alejandra has also taught me a lot about passion and resilience: being a woman in the film industry, she’s had to navigate a whole lotta shit in order to do the work that she loves.

I am so inspired by Alejandra and by this conversation, and I’m so grateful to be able to share it with you on here.

We talk about:

• how religion impacted her ideas around sex

• what sex toys have done to her sex life

• what type of sex education she received in Spain

• how her experience on beaches in Spain has impacted her idea about bodies and physical affection

• how feeling good in our bodies can positively impact our sex lives and why this can be difficult for people who have been socialized as women

• how her definition of sex has changed over time

• how the way she has been treated in her professional life as a woman in a male-dominated industry has impacted her sex life

• releasing self doubt and redefining our body and pleasure - including with masturbation

• her thoughts on masturbating while having a partner

• what she’s done to let go of the shame and guilt she felt as a result of the messages she received from religion

Subscribe now

Meet Alejandra

Alejandra (she/her) is a creative, enthusiastic and passionate traveller with a background in film, photography and visual effects. She grew up by the ocean in Spain while her parents were searching for dinosaur teeth in the depths of the Sahara Desert. She loves riding motorbikes, scuba diving, BJJ and making meaningful connections with other humans. She is constantly trying to find new ways to help unleash her inner voice with as much authenticity as possible.

You can find more about her and her work on Instagram and IMDB.

Share

Thank you so much to Alejandra for sharing her story and her wisdom with us! I hope that this episode helps you feel a little bit less alone in your experience with sexuality and gender.

If this episode resonated with you, feel free to tap the heart button, share the post, or leave a comment with your thoughts down below. I love hearing from readers about what comes up for them :)

In practice with you,

Kelsey

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading the thecuriousclit, my newsletter + podcast where I hope to spark curiosity and conversations about sex and our bodies! Many of the posts in this publication are free, but to support my work and the de-stigmatization of sexuality, you can like, comment, and/or share my posts, follow my Instagram, or become a paid subscriber <3

Share

I’ve felt ashamed of not being able to orgasm with a partner. I’ve felt ashamed of the way in which I had to touch myself in order to reach orgasm. I’ve felt ashamed of my attraction to people who aren’t cis men. I’ve felt sh…

Read more

How do we present ourselves on the app in a way that is enticing but is also true to who we are? How do we then communicate our authentic selves in person with a complete stranger we’ve only met on the rectangle devices that we cart around everywhere? How do we open ourselves to intimacy in a manageable way after experiencing heartbreak?

I am so excited because this week I am featuring a flash fiction piece called First/Last Date written by my friend Emily Hoang.

Emily and I were in the fiction program together in grad school, and along with our shared love of the band Odesza and all the San Francisco adventures we got to have outside of class, we also got to spend a lot of time reading and responding to each other’s work.

I love the way that so much of Emily’s work incorporates food. In her stories, food is never just about food — she always uses food to highlight the tensions and intimacies of her characters and to get right into the root of the human experience.

First/Last Date is no different. In this piece, we get to be inside of the head of a narrator as she goes on a first date at a restaurant.

As someone who is taking small steps into the dating world after healing from heartbreak, and also as someone who struggles with being my authentic self in various social situations, this piece really resonated with me, and I hope it does for you too.

You can read and listen to the full piece and check out Emily’s answers to some questions I asked her down below.

Subscribe now

First/Last Date by Emily Hoang

He looks exactly like his picture, that is to say—ordinary. His head symmetrical. His hair just settled in from a cut. His ears on the verge of being too big. He is waiting for you outside, leaning by the entrance of your restaurant of choice, Pete’s Diner.1 You both give each other an awkward hug, then he opens the door for you. You get a booth that overlooks the parking lot with the restaurant’s neon sign, a bright sigil for cupid to cast his spell. You take it as a good sign when he leads the conversation, asking the right follow-up questions and avoiding any talk of work.2 But it’s all just small talk. The restaurant is an eclectic place, with decorations from all over world3, disjointed from its menu that is supposedly Asian-fusion. He is especially enchanted by a wall stacked with masks. Which one would you wear? he asks. You take a long moment to decide. All the masks have similar expressions with slightly different exaggerations. You pick one off the right. It is a depiction of a devil, with a long nose, overarched eyebrows, and a sinister grin. When the food arrives, your conversation shifts to the taste and rating of the place’s overall ambience. He gives a slightly more generous score. You’re used to exploring fusion restaurants, blurring the line between authenticity and not. Toward the end of the meal, the waitress asks about dessert. He agrees to take a look at the menu, but your mind4 was already made before the waitress came over. He glances over. You say you don’t want anything. When the waitress comes back, you are surprised to hear him order their crème brûlée. It is a noble attempt to prolong your time together because how could you leave now without looking rude? Or without pretending to offer to pay for your portion of the meal? So, for another five minutes, you both talk about your favorite desserts until the waitress comes out with a ramekin of custard and two spoons. You want some? he asks. When you decline, he pulls the dish closer to his side5 of the table. You fill the silences with funny stories. He laughs, and you do too, out of embarrassment. When the check comes, he grabs it first. You offer to split it, but he says to get the next meal. You both exit the restaurant and say goodbye with a pause brimming with the promise of another date6. Until next time. As he walks to his car, the neon lights flash his shadow in and out, walking further and further away until all that’s left is the essence of a warmth you thought once lost.

6

You’re not sure the date. But you knew the time because it was right before sunset. You and X met at a burger joint on campus that sat between his dorm and your old one. You try to pretend like you both are still in a relationship, straining to keep your voice from breaking, which it did only an hour ago. When the meal is done, X waves before skating down a slope, the bright orange hues juxtaposing his clothes. In all black, he’s a shadow fading out of view from a sun setting to welcome back the darkness. All you can do, is say hello.

Share

1.     What inspired this story?

The form of this piece definitely came to me first. When I found out you were going to have communication as one of your themes, I thought about forms that could show the limits of communication and centered the plot around that. I love exploring the boundaries of form and have always wanted to write a piece that included footnotes. I started thinking about how past experiences haunt us and tried to encapsulate that tension between past and present in this piece.

2.     One of the many things I loved about this piece was the way it captures the complexities of the dating world: the weirdness of meeting someone for the first time after only talking to them online, going to restaurants that you’ve gone to with past dates, the significance of each person’s food choices and the restaurant itself, memories of past significant others and dates popping up, the question of who pays, not knowing of what comes next, and the ways that the intersectionality of our identities can impact all of these things. What do you think are some of the unique challenges that folks face in the modern dating world?

Thank you, that means so much. Technology has definitely made it a challenge to date. Creating an online profile was so hard for me. Choosing the right pictures, trying to write short, witty responses to prompts, and even considering the order of these things—all that matters—and thank god for friends who can help. How much of your profile reflects your authentic self? On top of this, trying to sus out people online is a whole other challenge. How much of their selves is reflected in their profile and in your chat? The only way to really know is by meeting up with them in person, which can be such a vulnerable space. In my piece, you don’t really know anything about the narrator until she starts expressing her thoughts and within the footnotes, all of which would have been inaccessible to the other person. Dating has always been a challenge, and it’s even more complicated with technology. Hopefully this doesn’t sound too cynical. There have been success stories, so there’s hope!

3.     As this narrator shows us, one of the challenges that comes with dating is this potential of heartbreak. We can fall for someone, and then they can choose to leave – which then can put us in a place of having to pursue intimacy even with those memories, the grief and hurt, and the fear of it happening all over again. How can we navigate the dating world after experiencing heartbreak?

I love this question. Picking up all the pieces and putting yourself out there again takes time, and you have to really mentally prepare yourself to go back into the dating world again. In the piece, there are a lot of things that remind the narrator of her past relationship, and it creeps into this first date. I don’t think those reminders ever go away, but its effects on us lessen over time.

Heartbreak can be one of the most painful experiences. For me, I need time to grieve and time to find myself again outside the relationship. This usually means listening to sad songs on repeat and crying my heart out first, then going back to all the hobbies and things I find enjoyable, like going to my favorite coffee shops and bookstore, staying physically active (kickboxing and running have done wonders in helping my mood), and hanging out with friends and family to feel love in other spaces. I’ve been blessed with an amazing support system that’s helped me through heartbreak so many times. I frequently did these things when I was single and still have a routine now, but through heartbreak, it’s even more important to hold on to the things we find enjoyable.

The potential of heartbreak is always close, but whether this first date works out or not, the narrator feels hopeful. What matters is that she put herself out there. Whether it’s to be in a relationship or to meet new people, I think we’re just trying to find connections to feel a little less alone in the world.

4.     Something that this piece made me think about is how with relationships and even just on dates, each person changes as a result of being together/interacting (for the better or worse), and maybe there's some sense of our "before" selves that can potentially be lost or altered during the conversation itself or in the aftermath of the relationship. How do you think we can balance the process of forming connection with being able to bringour authentic selves into different spaces?

This is such a great question, and I’m still trying to navigate this. There are so many layers of myself that got peeled back during the dating process, which I tried showing in this piece through two extremes. A first date and a past relationship. We don’t really know too much about this narrator but can see that part of dating is performing. During the first date, she feels like she can’t leave because of how she’ll look if she doesn’t offer to pay for her portion of the meal. In her previous relationship, she had to stifle her grief to appear ok enough to meet with X. In the first, she’s performing based on certain dating expectations around who pays for the first date. In the latter, she performs to hold a certain image of herself and as a way to protect herself.

It takes time being your authentic self around your partner(s). I definitely agree with the point about how our authentic self is always changing based on the interactions we have.  There has to be a lot of communication involved. I think our authentic selves naturally come out when we feel safe in the relationship to do so. Hopefully with the right partner(s), we can learn how to bring our authentic selves out in the relationship together.

Meet Emily

Emily Hoang is a Chinese Vietnamese American writer from San Francisco and attained an MFA from USF. Her work can be found in Ice Queen Magazine, GASHER, among others. When she's not working on her short story collection or novel, you can find her roaming around the city looking for good eats.

You can find more of her work at: https://emily-hoang.com

Share

I am so honored to have the opportunity to have been able to share Emily’s work on here. A big part of why I’ve created this newsletter is to help us all feel a little less alone in the world when it comes to sexuality, and I think seeing and hearing stories that resonate with our own life experiences in some way can go a long way in relieving the shame we might feel about this part of ourselves.

A big thank you all for reading! If you liked this piece, please click the ❤️(it helps more readers find the work), leave a comment, or even share it/restack it on Notes.

Leave a comment

When it comes to our experiences in sex, what is authentic to us and our bodies and what is something that we’re doing because we think it is sexy or we think it will please our partners? While thinking about our partner’s pleasure and enjoyment is important, at what point does it disrupt our own ability to be present in our own bodies and our own pleasure? How can we create a space safe enough to let our authentic sensual & erotic selves flourish while still maintaining the connection with our partners?

There are so many ways that this appears in my own sex life, but one of those ways is moaning.

Often, during sex with a partner, I have to remind myself to moan. When I do remember to make a sound, I sometimes find myself critiquing the moan: is it sufficiently sexy sounding or do I just sound like some sort of dying animal (lol)? Did I moan at just the right moment? What is my partner’s reaction to the moan – did they get turned on by it? Did it make this person get closer to coming? Am I moaning too much?

Over the years, I’ve wondered why exactly I am moaning…especially because I don’t usually make any sounds when I’m by myself, and it is rare for the moan to occur naturally during partnered sex.

Am I moaning because what is happening is actually making me moan? Am I moaning because it’s what I have picked up on TV and in porn as being sexy and I want to be sexy, so as to maintain my connection with this person? Am I moaning to let my partner know that what they’re doing feels good or to make them feel like they’re doing things “right”? Am I moaning to get them to come faster? And do I only not moan during solo sex because I grew up feeling a whole lotta shame around sexuality and had to try to not let it be known that this was something I was doing?

What I’ve come to is that it’s perhaps a little bit of everything.

I think that I sometimes do it with my partner and what is considered “sexy” in my mind, and I certainly have been socialized to hide my sex life — but I have noticed that there is a pleasurable aspect of it for me. Moaning sometimes makes things feel better and helps me orgasm, which I imagine is probably part psychological (seeing my partner get turned on and feeling sexually desired makes me feel like I matter) and also, part anatomy (our jaw muscles are connected to our pelvic floor muscles through a fascial line connections, so releasing your jaw muscles can help release your pelvic floor muscles).

Subscribe now

For those of us who have been socialized as women, I think it’s often very easy for us to think and care about attachment, but less easy to take steps towards our own authenticity. Attachment is important and necessary, but I think we overvalue it, as nurturing our attachments is one of the ways we’ve survived within the patriarchy and other systems of oppression.

But what would happen if our choices to do certain things in our sex life came from an authentic place — wanting to increase our own pleasure (and yes, to turn our partner on, because we do often find that enjoyable), rather than something we feel obligated to do in order to liked or loved?

Some accompaniments for this exploration :

• this poem + an interview with artist Rebeca Abidaíl Flores that drops us right into a conversation between galaxies & explores desire

• this poem + an interview with poet Isabelle Correa on desire, shame, and integrating our past selves

Mindful Movement Meditation

For this full moon, we’re going to do something a little different: instead of a yoga practice, I’m offering a dance meditation. I’ll be sharing an optional playlist plus suggestions for how to cultivate your own erotic authenticity through a mindful dance practice.

You do not have to be a “good” or “sexy” dancer (what even are those anyway?!) to enjoy this practice — it’s all about feeling into your body and the present moment experience and practicing acting from your own authenticity in a less vulnerable, lower stakes environment than when we’re in the middle of sex with our partners.

Read more