Sex, Pleasure, And Consent After Purity Culture
The devastating consequences and what I wish I’d known sooner.
I left Catholic School to attend a public school for my junior high years. I already had some very clear parameters on what was “appropriate” behavior for “boys and girls.” I had attended several church camps, and the rules were clear.
Boys' cabins are blue, girls' cabins are pink, and there are NO purple cabins. Message received.
At the time, it just incited giggles from both sides of the spectrum. It didn’t feel that serious. It felt like the worst thing that could happen was kisses and cooties.
“No sex until marriage” was more than a rule. It was the cornerstone of my adolescence. It was so important that it became part of my personality. I learned that it was my responsibility to be chaste. I carried a purity ring and made promises to my parents and God that I would save myself for my future husband. I thought that was part of the requirement to be worthy of Jesus’s love.
If avoiding sex was good, that meant having it…wanting it…was terrible. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be worthy of love.
My dad and I were at the mall food court, grabbing a meal together one afternoon in those junior high days. A far cry from the strict rules of Divine Mercy Catholic School, where I was not allowed to wear nail polish, No hair ties on the wrist… Edgewood Jr. High was much more relaxed. You could dress how you wanted, wear your hair how you wanted… hell, you could even use your body as a notepad, and no one blinked an eye unless it contained profanity. I thought this was novel, and while I wasn’t the rebellious type, I certainly liked freedom from what felt like obscure rules. It made me feel like a “normal” kid. Finally.
So when my dad grabbed my wrist that day and stared at me disappointedly in the mall, I was shocked. He turned the underside of my arm upwards, exposing the harmless doodles of my friends. “What is this?!” His inquisition echoed through the food court, and disapproval radiated from him. I felt the shame burning on my cheeks. I mumbled something about my friends writing on me, saying it wasn’t a big deal. “If you can’t even tell your friends NO when they want to write on you, how do you ever expect to say NO to sex?”
Huh?? What?! How did he make that leap? This felt absurd to me. The shame was replaced by embarrassment and anger. Being yelled at in public…and about THAT. I was good! I knew to say no to sex. This wasn’t sex, and I didn’t care if my friends wrote on me. Far from impressing on me the importance of consent, this one-way conversation became a story I’d tell my friends about how strict and out of touch my parents were. They thought it was hilarious, and for a long time, so did I.
Now, as an adult, it’s hard to look back and not see a much darker undercurrent and the parallels to the church's message. Consent didn’t have anything to do with what I wanted, but it did imply a power structure. An external, hierarchical power structure: First God, then my Father. This power seemed to automatically transfer to my husband once I was married. It made it seem like consent was given once, to my spouse, and that was the end of the conversation. I was taught that my body was a vessel and that I should only use it to glorify God. My bodily autonomy wasn’t part of the equation.
This left some severe gaps in my understanding of consent and is the root of my religious trauma. Consent, to me, was limited to WHO I chose. Because once I made that choice, the where, why, and how of it all didn’t matter. Once I gave myself to my chosen partner, I thought I could trust that partner to take care of all the other details because they loved me. So, like a good girl, I promised to stay pure for my future partner.
When I met the man I would marry, I knew he was “The One.” He was clean-cut, charming, and charismatic. My family loved him. After we’d been dating a while, I gave him my purity ring, telling him that this was a promise for our future. It was my way of saying that I wanted to give him my body.
I chose him.
He was 22, and I was 18.
I was very much the pursuer in the relationship, which was uncharacteristic for me. I was usually shy and reserved, but this felt like the most significant decision of my life, and I had never met anyone like him. As forward as I was about pursuing him to date, sexually, I held back.
I was uncomfortable with desire. More than discomfort, I felt tremendous shame not just with intercourse but also around my body. I was conscious of how it looked, felt, and moved. Anything that revealed I might want sexual attention felt like my body was betraying me because it did feel good… of course it did. I did my best to suppress the desire I felt. I protested for a while and tried to uphold my boundaries.
We’d push a little further each time before I’d say we should stop. I wanted the things that were happening, but that was the problem. It made me feel so dirty and wrong. I remember being distraught about it and asking my more experienced friend what sex was because somehow I thought I had skirted the boundaries and was still being good. “A dick going in and out of a pussy” was her crass reply.
I kid you not… THAT was the moment I realized I’d been having sex.
I’d had orgasms. He’d been inside me, briefly, but still, I maintained denial because I wasn’t just letting it happen. There was never abandon, always careful, effortful restraint. We’d been dating for about a year and a half. I knew I wanted to marry the guy, so I finally stopped trying to resist. I rationalized that if we got married eventually anyway, what was the difference?
The problem was that the shame followed me. Not at first. Or at least not as much. But by the time we got married after six years of dating, there was already dissatisfaction in our sex life. I know this because every few years, my husband would bring up he wasn’t happy with the amount of sex we were having.
I tried. I really did. But making yourself want something that has been ingrained in you as dirty, nasty, and wrong is quite a challenge.
I didn’t have any awareness that what was happening was related to religious trauma until 15 years later. I just assumed I didn’t like sex and that I was broken.
I started noticing patterns in my spouse. He always initiated, and I mostly wasn’t in the mood. I would almost always rather be doing something else. Two weeks or so was about the length of time it took for the lack of sex to affect his mood. He’d be withdrawn. Sullen. I knew that if we had sex, I’d get my sweet, loving husband back, so once the guilt started to build up, eventually, I’d get to a tipping point and know that I should have sex with him. Reset the calendar. Give me a break from the tension I felt inside.
The problem was I think we both unknowingly bought into this narrative that, as his spouse, I owed him sex: that I’d consented through marriage.
I laid there so many nights, gritting my teeth and repeating to myself, “I’m not saying no, I’m not saying no.” I thought I was consenting as long as I didn’t say no. The first time I read about being able to violate your own consent, I was confused, but I understand now what it means. I wanted to say no, and yet I didn’t.
I didn’t say no because I was afraid of the ramifications to my relationship. I didn’t want my husband to be withdrawn, and I didn’t want to keep feeling broken. Not saying no is not the same as consent. I think that bears repeating, so I’ll indulge myself. Not saying no, especially in the face of relational consequences, is not the same as consent.
Every few years, when the sex conversation came up, I would cry and privately resolve to try to have sex more often. After this cycle was repeated many times, I started to feel more apathetic. I got numb to his feelings because I had tried willing myself to want sex, and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do about it. I didn’t feel less broken. I felt resigned to it. Eventually, the years between these talks stretched, and it felt like he had resigned himself, too.
This cycle ended when one night I opened my eyes in the dark to find him scrolling his phone, face illuminated by the glow. He looked dead inside. This was the end of 2020, so everything had been HARD for months. I reached out my hand and asked what was wrong, and he crumpled in front of me. “Our lack of intimacy is killing me,” he cried.
He used the word intimacy instead of sex. That I could relate to. I missed him dreadfully. He used to be happy and sweet and generous and caring. Now, he didn’t feel like any of those things. I missed the emotional intimacy we used to have. We both cried, and I resolved, yet again, to figure out what the hell was going on with my lack of a sex drive. I wanted to want sex. More than that, I wanted this to stop damaging my relationship.
This time, I took a different approach. After all, if something is wrong, maybe it’s something I can fix. I stumbled on research about how devastating the effects of hormonal birth control can be on the libido and decided to stop using it. I was making all kinds of efforts in a desperate attempt to get in touch with my body. I read books about trauma that explained the mind/body connection and the nervous system. I found incredible healing in an at-home yoga practice that is, to this day, one of the sweetest gifts I’ve ever given myself. All of this led me down a path of examining my relationship with pleasure and led to several revelations.
I was ashamed of my sexuality. I still didn’t feel comfortable with my pleasure. I would never initiate because that would be admitting desire, but more than that, even the sex I did have was inhibited by this shame. I couldn’t even move my body in ways that brought me pleasure. Sex had been reduced to something I did as an obligation for my spouse’s pleasure because that was the only context I had for it. The only thing I’d learned about my pleasure was that it led to sin. All these years, I’d been ashamed to want even my husband, whom I loved dearly. In the blink of an eye, I saw the problem. Religion had taught me not to trust myself with my own body.
I was pissed.
Did I mention I was never particularly rebellious? While enjoying sex with your husband is hardly a rebellion, it sure felt like one. For the first time in my life, I gave myself permission to enjoy sex. I was 38.
This is what it means to feel consent in your body. To say not just “yes” to pleasure but an enthusiastic “yes, please.” This led to daily play, bonding, and exploration, and for a while, everything was great. It was like falling in love again, only better. I felt good in my body and enjoyed being touched. I started paying attention to what I liked and wanted, and it felt like we had captured lightning in a bottle for a while.
Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for exploration was mismatched. He wanted to push the envelope a bit more to make up for lost time, and I had always been more of a planner and a worrier, so I had concerns about moving too fast and stumbling into territory where I wasn’t comfortable.
When we started bumping up against each other’s boundaries like this, I realized that while the sexual shame had been relatively easy to put aside once I recognized it, it was not as easy to reckon with the fact that I didn’t feel I was able to draw boundaries around my sexuality with my husband. I was still afraid of the emotional blowback and worried that my relationship would be at stake if I didn’t satisfy his desires. I didn’t feel safe saying no, which meant I no longer trusted my yes.
In the face of this dilemma, my body shut down almost overnight. Arousal was nowhere to be found. Our sex life went from consistent and exciting to awkward and fumbling. It was like making love to a stranger, but the stranger was ME. Neither of us knew what I wanted or needed.
Unfortunately, my attempts to clarify the murky waters of my sexuality made it very clear that what I needed was some time and space to sort through what the heck was going on in my head.
This was devastating to our relationship. I knew that, and yet I trusted what I felt in my body, and to compromise that connection in any way felt like that spark within myself might be smothered, and I would lose myself again. I knew what it felt like to prioritize my pleasure and, more than that, to feel worthy of it. I knew that the days of violating my own consent were over. Even though it was hard, even though it hurt, I had to trust myself. I pushed for taking sex off the table and for focusing on our relationship, for putting time and attention into our emotional connection and our physical affection outside of the bedroom.
I lost that relationship. It feels simple and yet so painfully complex. After two decades of life together, my husband needed to draw his own boundary. He didn’t want to be my romantic partner if we were not also sexual. While this is a very valid and fair boundary, it triggered the biggest fear instilled in me as an adolescent…that someone could want me for my body, and without it, I wasn’t worth loving. We tried counseling, but the damage was already done. Our needs were in direct conflict, and neither of us would budge. To feel safe and loved in a relationship, I needed to feel valued for more than my sexuality. After a lifetime of defaulting to the desires of those around me, I chose myself.
There are plenty of people who prefer to engage in sexual relationships only when they feel an emotional connection. For me, it is more than that. There are aspects of my sexuality that feel extremely limited based on how safe I feel exposing the vulnerable parts of my psyche to my partner. I need my consent respected, and I need patience as I find ways that shame is still inhibiting how I express my sexuality. In that way, it feels extremely tied to religious trauma. Outside of that, there is still sexual attraction to account for. I need to feel emotional safety to experience sexual attraction to someone. Being conventionally “hot” doesn’t do it for me… not even a little.
Enter Demisexuality. Demisexuals are on the spectrum of asexuality, somewhere between asexual and allosexual, with an emphasis on emotional connection. It is not a preference. It also doesn’t mean that you cannot engage in sex without an emotional connection or that you don’t experience arousal outside that context. Being demisexual simply explains the context under which you feel sexual attraction.
There’s a somewhat common joke in the ex-vangelical community… “Are you demisexual, or is it just religious trauma?” The answer for me, ultimately, is not one or the other. It’s both.
All of these factors jumbled together, making it extraordinarily difficult for me to tease out how I felt about sex, which made it impossible to give my consent in a way that was genuinely enthusiastic. Now, at 40, here’s what I wish I had known about sex, consent, and pleasure:
- There is no need to engage with a lover who settles for anything less than enthusiastic consent. This type of consent focuses on the presence of YES vs. the absence of NO. Click here for more detailed information on consent and what it looks like. Consent is not a one-time thing. You are allowed to revoke your consent at any time for any reason.
- Sex is a natural part of human development, and there is absolutely no need to be ashamed of your desire for sex and sexual relationships. Whether you engage in solo sex or sex with one or multiple partners, so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult (eh hem… an enthusiastically consenting adult), you are safe to enjoy and explore. There is no “wrong” way to have sex.
- Prioritizing your pleasure doesn’t make you selfish. In fact, there can be great pleasure in being a generous lover. You may find that your partner's pleasure is ALSO your pleasure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to advocate for what feels good to you.
- You will have needs around sex, and that is okay. Sex can be more than a physical act; it can also be mental and emotional. It affects everyone differently, and you should be prepared to be aware of and tend to all of those needs for yourself and your partner if you engage in sex. For some people, this is chocolate and cuddles after sex. For others, it may be a deep discussion about what came up for them. You and your partners deserve to be cared for in whatever way feels good.
- Check in with yourself. Check in with your lover. Communication is the key to tying all of this together. You cannot know what your partner finds pleasurable if you don’t talk about it, and vice versa. If there are hesitations or excitement around any particular aspect, it is vital to have open, sometimes ongoing discussions around that thing. If you can’t have the conversation, you’re bound to end up with misfires and disconnection. Remember it is just as important to talk about what you DO enjoy as what felt icky, and that just because the sex is over doesn’t mean you are done communicating. Keep the conversation going and acknowledge what comes up. This helps create an environment of safety that is essential to healthy, ongoing sexual relationships.
I feel late to the party with this knowledge. I also know that my experience with purity culture is not unique, and it is just as true that lousy sex is normalized in our culture. If you are still unraveling the ways purity culture has affected your life and relationships, you are not alone. I am just beginning to do this work, and it has already had a profound effect on my sense of self, my life, and my relationships. I urge you to reach out if you’re struggling to find your voice.
Finding a community that understands what you’re going through is so valuable, and there’s a list here of the resources here that helped me through this part of my journey.
I am SO proud of myself for doing this work and recognizing its importance. If you’re on this journey too, I’m proud of you for taking steps to reclaim your sexuality from the church. Because really, the truest truth is that you have a right to your own sovereignty, and you only ever need to belong to yourself.
Hi, I’m Jen. I’m here embracing change, living solo, and exploring the topics of religious trauma, neurodivergence, sexuality, and relationships, all while actively pursuing a more creative life.
You can read more of my writing here, or follow me on Instagram