shame

Sex positivity should have given me the courage to ask for what I wanted. Instead, I thought it meant accepting what I got.

Despite the initial shame, guilt, name-calling, jokes, and fear related to disclosure, my STI presented me with a chance to love myself more deeply. It gave me a chance to sit with myself, who I thought myself to be, who I thought I was going to become, and who I really was.

We've all been influenced and impacted by white supremacy for longer than anyone alive can recall. Throughout history, white supremacy has idealized and normalized dominant identities and behaviors, and has shamed and oppressed those outside of them. Here's some ways this has manifested in our bodies and some ways you can start to dismantle that impact and reconnect.

Maybe you grew up in purity culture. Even if you didn’t, you’ve probably encountered and have to live with its ideas about virginity. I want to unpack some of those things, and consider what’s true and what isn’t.

What is sexual sin anyway? Impurity Culture's Hannah Boning offers her unique perspective on the bible, sin, and sexuality.

This is a great question, and it's great that you're asking it. Stopping these comments altogether might not be possible, but there are things you can say in response and ways you can help change the tone of the conversation. First off, I want to talk a little about why your friends may be...

Before I say anything else (and I've got a lot, so go on and put your feet up: this is big stuff, so you deserve big responses), I want to make a couple things super-clear. One: you get to have whatever kind of mutually consensual sexual life it turns out feels right for you, even if that turned out...

Before I say anything else, I want to address about those feelings of shame and inadequacy you had -- from the sounds of it, are still having -- when your partner told you his feelings about your sex life. Someone feeling like their sexual life or interactions with someone else aren't satisfying, or...

Casual sex is one of those things that, so far as we know from the study of people and sex in history, people have always done. Given that for most of human history, basic survival was seriously tough, people's lives and interactions often were more brief than either are now, and many people or...

When it comes to sex, women are often portrayed as nothing but warm vessels there to validate male partners' egos. The widespread cultural acceptance of a woman pursuing pleasure for her own sake is a relatively new one (at least in West's modern history), and we've still got a long way to go. It's no small wonder that many women have a difficult time asking for what they want in general, let alone when it comes to sex.