Sex Shamed: Recovering From Purity Culture & Reclaiming Pleasure

Could purity culture be ruining your sex life and keeping you from experiencing true pleasure?  Dr. Tina Shermer Sellers, a renowned sex and relationship therapist, Joins me to talk about the origins of purity culture and how it's worked its way into our bedrooms. By the end of this episode, you'll know how to identify any traces of shame in your your relationship with yourself and your partner or partners, and how to start healing and reclaiming pleasure.

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Chapters

• 1:07 Breaking Free From Purity Culture
• 6:03 Sociopolitical Shifts Impacting Purity Culture
• 21:38 Healing Sexual Shame Through Education
• 32:55 Reclaiming Sexual Health and Pleasure
• 49:47 Navigating Sexual Shame and Healing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:07

Do the sex Think fun, honest and feminist as fuck, and always with the goal of fighting the patriarchy. One female orgasm at a time. Welcome to the locker room. Today's locker Talk and Shots topic is Christianity, purity culture and sex Sexual shame folks. That is what we are going to be talking about. We are going to dive into the insidious nature of purity culture and the resulting sexual shame that so many people suffer from.

Speaker 1: 1:49

Look, I am a recovering Catholic schoolgirl myself. I know a little bit of cliche, but cliches are there for a reason. There's a truth behind them, and there are just so many people out there who are either coming out of sort of a religious community where there was a lot of purity culture and sexual shame, or who are still very religious people and struggling with sexual shame, and it can destroy and devastate their intimate lives and make connecting sexually and having fulfilling sexual relationships with people near impossible. So what is this purity culture for those of you who have not experienced it, and the sexual shame that results, and how do you start to recover from it? Well, we are going to find out today because my guest is an expert on the matter. So if you're someone who struggles with sexual shame at all, or you're someone who is devout in your religion but you don't know how to connect your sexual life with that or navigate that, or you're someone who is recovering, a recovering purity culture victim.

Speaker 1: 3:01

This episode is for you. My guest today is Dr Tina Shermer Sellers. She is a licensed sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, bestselling author and Emirati professor known for her work on sexual health, intimacy and social justice, and she has published influential books such as Sex, god and the Conservative Church, erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy and Shameless Parenting, and speaks globally on raising shame-free, confident children. In addition to founding the Northwest Institute on Intimacy in 2015, she established InannaRisingorg in 2023 to support psychedelic-assisted therapists and promote scholarships and indigenous reparations. Dr Tina, I would love to have you tell my listeners just a little bit more about you.

Speaker 2: 3:54

Well, goodness, I'm old, so that means that there's a circuitous long route. I started in academia and taught marriage and family therapy and medical family therapy, but also taught the graduate sexual human sexuality course which is required for licensure. And it was inside that course and I can certainly talk about it more later. But it was inside that course where I saw the first real effects of abstinence only education which we began unrolling in the eighties, which was religious education, and then also the effect on people who got an extra dose of that in their communities, in their youth groups, at their camps, at whatever, and it rocked my world. It made me so profoundly sad that I decided basically to devote much of the rest of my career on understanding our histories sexual shame, how it happened, how you heal and how you celebrate. Much like you said celebrate the gift of desire, longing, sexuality, touch our ability to use our bodies to love, how to celebrate that and to free ourselves from anything that would keep us from really loving well and receiving love well.

Speaker 1: 5:13

I love that and I'm so excited for this conversation because I think most people, especially at least in America, who have experienced some relationship with Christianity, struggle with sexual shame. On some it's just embedded especially especially women, but I imagine all genders, and I think this is going to be just an informative and healing conversation. So thank you so much for joining me. I am ready to talk about sex and sexual healing. Cheers, let's dive in folks. So I want to start this conversation with what is purity culture and how does it affect sexual shame?

Speaker 2: 6:02

Yeah, that's a great question. And beginning in the eighties, there were some significant sociopolitical shifts. That happened, actually, with the entree of Reagan and the formation of the religious right and the moral majority which was all around that time president we've ever had was Jimmy Carter, and they want they being the sort of corporate leaders that were really behind so much of what was happening. The political establishment wanted him out because he had too many values that he was trying to stand for and it was getting in their way. So they brought in Reagan, who used God language First time God language had been ever used like God bless America ever used in a political speech. He became their puppet and so we rolled out abstinence, only education. We created an environment across the United States that sex was dangerous. We had, of course, a frightened populace because we had a reaction to second wave feminism. We had an economic downturn in the early 80s and then we had AIDS at the West East Coast and the West Coast. So whenever you have and you can see this across history, thousands of years, hundreds and hundreds of years at least you can see that when you have a scared populace, those people who are in control will use that fear to pursue their agenda, and that's exactly what happened in the 80s. And so we rolled out things called family values. They were not family values. They did not care about families, they did not care about health and wellness of our people. They did not care about those who were under-resourced at all. It was all about advancing capitalism at the same time and I'm just giving you a fuller picture so that you can see that this was a big undertaking, and we're still in it today. We took away most of the regulations in the FCC, so the communications division. So where media? We took away what was protecting people and families in media. We made it about whatever you are making for your stockholders at the end of the quarter, that's what's most important. So the ends. Making money now justifies anything. The means justifies the mean. So this began to happen and but the front in front of it was family values. Sex is dangerous. Control people through controlling sex. Unrolled abstinence. Only education, which was religious education across the united states, put billions and billions of dollars into it. We now know that it was not only religious education, so it was emerging of church and state, which had not happened before. We now had that and it was 80% medically inaccurate. We now know that because we have done research on it. We still have only right now have 18 states in the whole United States that have passed legislation requiring that whatever sex ed they offer must be medically accurate 18. So we are very much still in this.

Speaker 2: 9:33

Purity culture was really this movement in the religious right to support capitalism, but the victims of it, if you will, were all the people that believed. This is what God said. Most people don't know that prior to 1980, the Southern Baptist Church, which was the biggest church in the United States, not denomination. In the United States largest voting bloc was pro-Roe v Wade Pro-Roe v Wade from before it passed in 74, all the way up through 79, 80,. When we began to push this and because they could no longer capture the voting base with segregation in their Christian schools, because it now was absolutely illegal, you would have all your funding pulled they needed to come up with another topic that would rally the base and say this is what God has always wanted, and of course, they chose abortion, right, right.

Speaker 2: 10:36

And so now we have politicians and religious leaders, many of which whose hands are very dirty, pushing that this is what God has always said, that it is somehow in the Bible. It's not, it's nowhere in scripture. But this has been the push, and the front has been that this is what God wants, that this is the religious thing, even so far as people becoming, as we see now, just incredible zealots, and they will tolerate anything in order to hold onto this tribe and this belief, even though there isn't anything in it that is fundamentally in alignment with Jesus' ministry, which is the sort of core of the Christian faith. So purity culture, as we call it now, really is the ways in which this touched people's lives. For some it was reinforced because they were involved in a youth group or in some church where it was absolutely, you know, sort of fire and brimstone. God can't forgive this. This is so important.

Speaker 2: 11:41

You will and the messages that were given to so many kids and I mean you've heard some of these stories when they were in youth groups or at camps. You know they would sit around and they would do things like pass around a flower and ask you to take a petal off of it, pass around a piece of pizza, ask you to take a bite of it, ask you to glue together two contrasting colors of paper while the pastor is talking, et cetera, et cetera, pass around a clean sheet of foil and then ask you to crumple it up while you're listening. And then after that, after the talk, they ask you to look at what's left. You are crumpled, you are ripped and torn, you are damaged goods. And not only can God not love you, no one else is going to love or want you either, because you are damaged.

Speaker 2: 12:32

And it wasn't just that you had had sex before marriage, because that had been a kind of a line for many years.

Speaker 2: 12:39

It was don't think about sex or sexual things, don't want sex or sexual things, don't touch yourself and explore this beautiful and amazing, miraculous body that you have Nothing about pleasure, and if you do, you are potentially ruining your future and your eternity. And they were telling this to 10 and 11 year olds who are still developmentally in the stage. They really wanted to believe everything an adult said and please their parents. So it went in hook, line and sinker and what I have come to know now from working with enough people over Jeepers I started this in the early 90s, so it's been quite a while now, 30 years is that the more earnest the child was, or more naturally anxious the child was or afraid because they were in an authoritarian home, perhaps the more these ideas went into their bodies and into their cells and into their tissues and, for many, manifest as sexual dysfunction issues by the time they're in their 20s. And that's what I had never seen before was seeing that then.

Speaker 1: 13:56

What kind of sexual dysfunction issues manifest from that cellular change.

Speaker 2: 14:03

Well, certainly out of fear. If you go up in your head while you are loving on yourself or loving with another. If you go up in your head while you are loving on yourself or loving with another, if you go up to your head and you start worrying about, well, what about this and what about that? Right, many times your body can't move through its arousal cycle, right? So you have erectile dysfunction, you have orgasmic dysfunctions, right? You have something interrupting your ability to give and receive pleasure, which is so heartbreaking. And then it manifests also in pelvic floor issues. So many, many, many, many, many many people with uteruses, you know, vaginal canals, all of the muscles in that area basically go into a full-blown kind of Charlie horse horse and stay in this locked down position. This is where they, in their mind, they might think well, I want to be open, I want to be sexual, but their tissues are like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is all too dangerous, this is all too scary.

Speaker 2: 15:02

When I first started speaking about this and writing about this, um, I would talk to pelvic floor people and they were certain anytime they saw that it was because of abuse. And really this is a time of abuse. We've got to understand that somebody's sexual and I can talk about this more later but their sexual unfolding was hurt at every turn right In this kind of way too. But they would think what it was the sort of more traditional form of childhood sexual abuse. Now I recently keynoted at the largest conference for pelvic floor professionals because now they recognize that this is what they're seeing. Originally, when I started talking about it, they didn't know and we just started talking about it and more people started talking about it and telling their story Right.

Speaker 1: 16:50

That really resonates for me because I was a highly sexualized young girl. I think the interesting thing about purity culture, like I said, my community growing up was a Catholic and super conservative and the funny thing was that, even though that was the case, especially by the men, older men in the community, I was super sexualized Before I, you know. I think about the flirting that my father's aged friends would do with me and young girls you know, saying the things like the boys are just going to love you when you this and that or and then, as as we actually started to bloom, our bodies started to become womanly, these men, would you know, joke about having crushes and even put their hands. You know, highly sexualized but still very conservative, very much the purity culture around. You know family value, family values were a big thing, which is just ironic looking back at it. Right, and throughout my sexual life I've just always been a very sexual being, but I have had so much shame and fear around it, especially with the push.

Speaker 1: 18:07

I remember sex education classes and just the focus on disease and like how it was going to wreck your life, you know. And so when I started having sex, I just I. When penetration I felt nothing like nothing, and that this is through most of my adult life, until the last, you know, last five to 10 years, when I've started to really do the work that I'm doing now. And I did this 365 days of orgasms challenge, where I masturbated every day different ways for a year and I woke up my G spot. I started really feeling stuff inside and I was like what the fuck I'm like? Is this just an aging thing? And I think what really had happened is what you're talking about.

Speaker 1: 18:58

Penetration would even be painful. I was just like why do women like this? How do women like this? Right, and I'd have to really touch my clit in order to enjoy sex, right, and I think what I've realized is that I was just so filled. My body was locked down. Fear of disease in the back of my head, shame, like oh, deep down, I really thought, oh, you're just, you know, a slutty, bad woman. And then, as I've gone through this process and I've started to shed things, my body has begun to and now, now I have like amazing orgasms and and I know that I'm only at the beginning of figuring out what I can experience, right, so does that resonate with what you're talking?

Speaker 2: 19:44

about? Oh, absolutely yeah. And and I just want to highlight one of the things that you talked about that you experienced, that you're hearing all these things about family values and all this kind of stuff, but what you're experiencing is inappropriate objectification, sexual objectification of a child by men, and that's because we allow that in this culture, right In the 80s, as we started rolling out all this fear and this abstinence education. At the same time, we're increasing our violence against women in movies, all across media, we have video games and now music videos that have come online, right, and then we have free, free, straight pornography that comes online Right. That is very violent, often against women, right, and it's it's as if the misogyny in our culture amplified, beginning in the 80s, and while it was there before that women were objectified, now men were, because we have this long history of not holding men accountable for what they say and do to women Long history, right, it goes all the way back to the fourth century, when Christianity became an empire religion and the men were vying for position through denying the body, as if that had anything to do with Christianity. It didn't. And when they couldn't deny the body, doesn't matter if we're talking about, you know, augustine or whoever any of those of that age, augustine, or whoever any of those of that age, they blamed the women. In Christianity, we've never held men accountable for what they say and do. We just hold women accountable for what men say and do and what they say and do.

Speaker 2: 21:39

So here you are in a position, as a young child, getting messages that don't make any sense to you. You're getting experiences that tell you one thing and words that are telling you another. It was part of that double bind. We put women in all the time. Right, they're the ones that are the seductresses. Men can't help themselves. They're the ones that are. But then, if you want power, you need to know how to use your sexual energy. It's crazy making so. I just want to punctuate that because you were experiencing that and it was and still is allowed in this culture.

Speaker 1: 22:17

Absolutely it still is, and sort of something I wanted to point out on top of what you were saying is about I would get the mixed messages right is about I would get the mixed messages right, and yet the men were clearly I mean, it was really quite overt. When I look back on it, I as a young girl didn't realize that I thought it was just me, like I thought I was wielding some sort of power and that I was bad, but at the same time I liked the way the attention felt, because I was a young woman. And here's the thing is. So these men were doing this thing. I was being raised with this message, but the women, their wives, knew, and how I know that is I'll never forget.

Speaker 1: 22:58

I was at a pool with the families and with you know, the men and their wives, my parents and their kids. I would babysit for them and I was playing with their kids in the pool and one of the dads, who, in particular, was fond of me, came up and got kind of in the pool with us to play with his kids and one of his kids started pulling him out of the pool and said Mom told me to keep you away from her meaning me Right, and that was a moment when I realized I just remember the shock and like reverberating through my body that, oh, she knows what, and it was so, not on a conscious level. But I'll never forget that moment because I liked her a lot, like I looked at this woman as sort of a pillar and then suddenly realizing that she won and felt that I was and here I was.

Speaker 1: 23:50

I mean I had to be maybe 14 at the time, maybe 15. But that's sort of all the experience of purity, culture and shame, just thinking, ultimately I was a bad person, a bad young girl and a bad young girl. And when we go back to that exercise of passing around the pizza or whatever and see what you look like at the end crumpled, there was a sense inside of me that, well, I'm already that destroyed thing. Now what do I do? How do I move forward? Who's going to want me?

Speaker 1: 25:25

Thus begins a cycle and I want to get to this for me and we'll talk about how it manifests in everybody of choosing partners who were not good people because I thought that's what I was worth accepting relationships and treatment sexually and intimately and relationship-wise that was below, being just even I mean just treated horribly in relationships and feeling like I need to stay here because this is the best I can get right, and staying in just very toxic, shameful relationships that reinforce this message you're not lovable, you're not good enough, you know.

Speaker 1: 26:07

And why would my body want to open up to a partner like that? Right? So that's a little bit of my story and it sounds like we're on the same track here, but can we start talking about the different ways that being raised in this purity culture is showing up for people, maybe a variety of ways that that's showing up, so people can start to identify it inside of themselves? Because some people might be like, yeah, I just I think that's dirty, but I don't think anything's wrong with me. They haven't been able to identify their sexual shame yet, so I want to give them some tools to identify it.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Yeah, I think one of the first things that I think would be important to share is we didn't have an operational definition of sexual shame until 2017. And when we did do the research and came with, got the operational definition, it is so stunning that I think reading it for you and for your readers, or for your listeners, will be really helpful, because you'll start to see how comprehensive the impact sexual shame has on your life and on your ability to do attached, intimate, safe relationships exactly what you're talking about here and I want to emphasize that this study was not people from a religious background. There were only a couple of people in the study that claimed that this is just how it is across the United States now again, because we've had this blending of sort of church and state ideas right that have been infiltrated through our culture. So this is the definition. Sexual shame is a visceral feeling. So it's in your body, okay, a visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being, and a belief of being abnormal, inferior and unworthy. Just like you said, this feeling can be internalized, but it also manifests in interpersonal relationships. That's where it begins. Children find their clitoris or their vulva or their penis or whatever you know at about what? 12 months, between 10 and 12 months, and they're getting shamed hundreds and hundreds of times until they remember getting in trouble for playing doctor. So this is it happens first in interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on trust, communication and physical and emotional intimacy and emotional intimacy.

Speaker 2: 28:50

Sexual shame develops across the lifespan, just like I said, in interactions with interpersonal relationship, but then continues with one's culture and society giving their messages and then creates a subsequent critical self-appraisal. So you've got this inner critic that just keeps it going through your adult life right. There is also fear and uncertainty related to one's power or right to make decisions, including safety decisions related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one's own sexual desire. So we saw in Peggy Ornstein's book Girls and Sex that you had these girls, 15 to 22, who were feeling competent in every area of their life until they got ready to go out, and then they were putting down three, four and five shots of hard liquor because they couldn't assure themselves that they could keep themselves safe or that they had the right to and again, that was a non-religious population that she studied so primarily. So we see how comprehensive this is.

Speaker 2: 30:05

So when you talk about how do I heal, you have to know that it is in your body. It is in your soul and psyche and it's impacting how you want to give and receive love, which, to me, is the core of our happiness. I worked in oncology for a decade. People are not talking about if they have a terminal illness. They're not talking about wishing they did more of their career. They're not talking about wishing they did more of their career. They're talking about the quality of their relationships in their life. This impacts that Right. Yeah, now let's go back and remember this. Also, if you've got people who are feeling pretty crappy about themselves and you tell them that their happiness is going to come by how much money they make and what school they go to and whatever, they're going to be much more apt to follow that like a lemming and believe that that's the case. Until it doesn't, until they're in their fifth, sixth, seventh decade and life is not been satisfying, we wonder why our suicide rates are up. So it has an incredible impact.

Speaker 2: 31:13

So when I talk about how you heal, first I want people to notice if this is in you, honey, you earned it. It came from your culture. This is not you, we set you up for this. The culture is responsible. The people we put in office are responsible. The people we look to and we want to believe that they're telling us the truth and we don't examine who they are and what they're doing right. The people who set up the purity culture none of them have taken any responsibility, and so I often say so.

Speaker 2: 31:46

I talk about in the Sex God and Conservative Church book. I talk about a model for how you heal, and this is one. It's a complex thing but I want people to see it as it's kind of like undoing a rubber band ball or peeling an onion kind of a thing, and I call it Healing the Mess, the model for erasing sexual shame. And it's four things frame, name, claim, a name. Frame is start with getting yourself a frame or a scaffolding of real sex education. Part of why I bought the shameless parenting book. That's real sex education and it points you to the top books for adults and children and I'm like, if you didn't get it growing up, if you didn't get good, solid sex education from loving safe people, read that book Even if you're not parenting, because you can walk yourself through your development by reading the kid books, reading how you ought to have been treated and then answering some of the questions about how you were impacted and how it might've been different if you had gotten this. And it's zero to two, two to four, four to six. It literally walks you through your development. So get yourself that frame, that scaffolding of sex education. That's frame Name is tell your story.

Speaker 2: 32:55

Tell your story to someone safe, loving, compassionate, empathic. It could be friends that you do a book group maybe. Read that book together and just talk and share. What was it like growing up in your home? Who did you learn about affection and touch from, and what were the messages about gender or about sexuality? And what were the messages you were getting from culture that might've been similar or different, that were confusing when they matched up to those Like, talk about it. Tell your story, because what you're going to find out is what I've learned 90 to 95% of people in the US grow up in homes that are silent or silent and shaming. You are not alone. You are not alone and shame thrives in secrecy. So when you find a loving other and others to tell your story with, you're going to find oh my gosh, there's a lot of us out here. Yeah, there's a lot, so that's, that's a name.

Speaker 2: 33:53

And then claim is claim your body is good, I don't, I don't care the shape of your body, your shape of your body, the age of your body, how it's aging, all of it is much more determined by your heredity, your DNA, than it is by your diet or exercise or whatever. Yes, those things matter to some degree, but not to the degree that the diet industry would want us to believe. There's a wonderful podcast called Maintenance Phase. If you want to listen to something that will undo all of the myths diet culture want you to believe, so that you keep again buying more things, right, buying more things and continuing to feel badly about yourself that's what drives our economy. So learn to see your body as good.

Speaker 2: 34:41

So that's a long process, that's hard to do, right, but if you get up in the morning and you are not in severe pain, you can move yourself out of bed and into your life. You can hug somebody, you can share love, you can listen, you can be curious, you can be wonder and wonderful, Then you have a good body, and I don't want anybody to end up on their deathbed only to look back and see how culture had taken that from them, that they had a good body, a wonderful body, a loving body, body that was the pen to write the poetry of their life Right. So work on that. Take that back when we frame, name and claim, do those things. And we stay on it and we continue to work it.

Speaker 2: 35:27

What will happen is we will aim for a brand new sexual health legacy for ourselves and anyone we know Like. We will be able to enter into conversations and say you know, I'm not sure I think that anymore. You know, we start to shape a new legacy. We can change this legacy in one generation right now. Change it and then whoever we influence gets the benefit of our hard work and we get the benefit of our hard work and we get the benefit of our hard work. So that's one idea. There's many ideas of healing shame out there, but that's a. I often think of that as the beginning, a beginning part place to play and and start developing practices around.

Speaker 1: 36:06

I think the thing that's interesting is that when we think about the family values piece and then, at the same time, especially focusing on women and telling them they need to be super skinny, there is just so, but you need to be super skinny to be sexy and attractive to men. But then there's the family values piece. You don't want to be a sexual woman because then you're a whore and you don't have family values and like, how do you navigate? How does that not completely fuck you up, right? So what I am curious about within like, especially within like religions, where purity you know, purity culture is so extreme, what are the sex acts, if you will, that are deemed acceptable within a relationship and non-acceptable in a relationship? What is even for people getting into it? They're like okay, we waited to marriage and now we're married and we're starting to have sex. What are the limitations that being involved in purity culture have on your ability, even in the optimal family value situation, to enjoy a sexual relationship with your?

Speaker 2: 37:27

partner. Yeah, we have to understand that people who grew up with that think that their thoughts and feelings and desires are bad, right. And then women feel responsible for what men feel Right Because they're told that Right, and so there is no switch. That goes off when you get married.

Speaker 1: 37:46

Right, all of a sudden it's all okay.

Speaker 2: 37:48

Everything in your body is screaming no, right. But you've also been told that men need it, it being sex, it being penetration and their ejaculation. Men need it, need sex quote unquote because otherwise they'll go get it somewhere else. They'll I don't know, they'll die right, something will happen. So women are seen as needing to provide that it's not about their pleasure. It becomes a transaction between the two of them. It becomes an obligation. When you make anything an obligation, you will kill your desire for it. So women begin to perform sex for men, for men, not for themselves, for men. And then they wonder why they're not enjoying it. And if she starts to get brave and say I don't feel like doing that, then his sense of expectation enters. Well, but I waited for this, I deserve this, I am due this thing, right. And so now you have conflict. That also is not breeding desire for connection and pleasure, right, because it's not about connection and pleasure. It's about penetration his penetrating her to move through his arousal cycle and her pretending to enjoy it. Right, it's just illogical. Yeah, it's absolutely illogical.

Speaker 2: 40:06

I'll often say to people and it's really kind of fun to have this conversation I'll say what do you think the purpose of sex is, like in a relationship. What's the purpose? Why do we do this If not to have like we're not trying to procreate? And they kind of are stumped and they're going to look at it. Or they'll say I'm not having enough sex. And I'll say what kind of sex aren't you having enough of, you know? And they kind of look at me and I'm like, listen, I'm going to open up this whole conversation and and so they'll.

Speaker 2: 40:36

They'll come fumble around, but usually they come down to something like well, I think it's about connection and pleasure, having pleasure or fun together or whatever. Okay, so good sex then. Sex worth having then is sex where you both feel maybe more connected to each other, maybe had fun together, definitely shared pleasure together. So that's our bar. Anything less than that is bad sex. We're taking that off the table right now and we're going to start putting on the table any behaviors that give you a sense of being connected, that give you a sense of having fun together. Both of you give you a sense of sharing pleasure together. And we're going to put everything on there, even things that you might think of as non-sexual, and we are going to write a menu so you're not having Cheerios for morning, lunch and dinner and hating it.

Speaker 1: 41:36

Right.

Speaker 2: 41:37

Because that's not the purpose, is it Right? And so we talk about it as a menu, as a banquet, as you're going to feel different every day. What if you got to decide every day, you know what connection and pleasure felt like to you? So it's having conversations that we should have been having as children were growing up. Like what do you like? What's a good friend? How do you be a good friend? How do you know what you like to do? How do you listen to what they like to? I mean cultivating these, these skillsets when they're young and then moving it into the arena of sharing sexual pleasure. What honoring another, honoring self, other? What respect is? What openness, curiosity? I mean all of it just opening that up when they're a little bit older. We're not doing any of that still to this day. Yeah, day.

Speaker 1: 42:26

Yeah, one thing I want to focus on, or make sure that the listener caught, is basically I feel like what you said is formative. Sex is transactional sex. When women feel like they have to perform sex, it's because they feel like they have to do that in order to maintain the relationship. Do their job in the relationship. Do their job in the relationship, and I hear this so often, especially in the comments of this podcast on YouTube.

Speaker 1: 43:00

I've done a couple of podcasts on why women want to have sex and why they don't want to have sex, and I always have the men that come on and they're like they use sex to control men. They use sex to control men. No, I mean, the problem is men feel like women owe them sex. Right, they feel like women owe them sex, and then what that is is transactional sex, and women feel like I give him sex and I don't get anything in return. He's not meeting me there, we're not both having pleasure, so I don't want to be there anymore. It's not about controlling the man. It's literally about not wanting him. It's literally about not desiring him and even becoming repulsed by the idea of being with him, because how repulsive is it to have a man crawl up on you, pump away and come, it's repulsive. It's repulsive Like we aren't.

Speaker 2: 44:00

I often yeah, I'll often say you know, because I I want to get underneath what's not working for men too, yeah. So I'll often say let's imagine you grew up in a world where you're told absolutely no penetration whatsoever, but when you get married she's going to want to penetrate you and you're going to need to be available for that whenever she wants it.

Speaker 1: 44:32

Whether it's a finger or a toy, or you get pegged, you're going to take it.

Speaker 2: 44:36

You know, can you ever imagine a time where you don't want to be penetrated? Now imagine you feel like your marriage or your relationship will be destroyed if you don't and you will be seen as somebody who cannot be a good partner, cannot be a loving partner. Let's try to help them, try on what that might be like, because to be penetrated is different than to penetrate Absolutely, and that's what we know from history. When pederasty right was illegal, right, when the scholars all had students, right, the students were penetrated period always, never the other way around, until they were a master teacher, right. So I want that.

Speaker 2: 45:19

But the other thing I want men to do is what's it like for you to have sex with a woman that you can tell is not behind her eyes, whose heart isn't open? What's that like for you? Nine times out of 10, nine and a half times out of 10, they will say I don't like it, it doesn't feel good, but I don't know what else to do, and I'm like. That's why we're stopping that, because what I think you want underneath it all is you want to feel like your touch opens her up to safety, desire, experience, and it's you and your touch that makes her want to be with you in that way, body, mind, soul, spirit with you. In that way. He goes yeah, but I have no idea she doesn't. Blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no one's ever taught you how to be a good lover, right? Because?

Speaker 1: 46:20

that's where the purity culture came in to play, because men are also conditioned that way, like they are conditioned to you're not supposed to touch, you're not supposed to do this stuff, and then, when you get to, they are taught to crawl up on us and pump away. That's what they've been taught?

Speaker 2: 46:36

Yeah, and straight porn has taught that too.

Speaker 1: 46:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:40

That women are your object for whatever you want, and she likes it. Even though your soul, your gut, is telling you a different story, you're not listening to it.

Speaker 1: 46:54

Right.

Speaker 2: 46:55

But let's imagine that you knew how to create a situation of desire and anticipation that was so right in line with her that she was practically chasing you around the house. Right, let's do that for you. You deserve that too. You deserve to feel wanted in that way. But you have to know how to cultivate that level of want in a woman. And you don't get a yes ever until she feels safe enough to give you a no without any repercussions. But until she feels that she'll never open up all the way, she has to know that I can say, eh, nah, I don't feel like that. I don't feel like that. I'm really overwhelmed with this, and you're right there with her. Well, what can I do to support you? What can I do to love you in the midst of this? You do that enough times and she's going to start feeling like he really does care and want me as a person, not just my parts.

Speaker 1: 48:01

I think a big key it sounds like here for both people of all genders is to a. You've got to recognize the influence of purity culture, regardless of if you were raised in a religion or not, because our society is based out of purity culture. You have to recognize where, how it's showing up in the way you look at the opposite sex or the person you want to have sex with, and how it's how it shows up in your own body as shame you got. You have to recognize it first, right, because otherwise you know you're just going to be moving through the world that way and you have to do the work to undo that shame. And that is work, because there it's hidden in places inside of you. I mean as much as, even as far as I've come, I am shocked at how I'm constantly finding shame in new areas of my being and how I move through the world.

Speaker 1: 48:58

I think for men that you know especially based on a lot of the comments I read and I get and questions I get from male listeners you have to change how you look at women too. Like your shame is really showing up and your purity culture upbringing is showing up in how you look about and speak about women when you talk about whores and hoes and this and that and body count. If she's been with more than one or two men, she's a whore. That's why you're not having good sex. That's why she doesn't want you to crawl up on her If we know that's inside of you.

Speaker 1: 49:39

Yeah, exactly you know, and likewise women have to see how it's showing up inside of them. A lot of times, men are like I want to spice up our sex life. I want to try this thing I heard about on Annette's podcast or wherever you saw it, and they bring it to their female partner and women because they've been told that doing something like that's dirty, and they will react in shock. They'll judge their male partner and of course then he, you know yanks.

Speaker 1: 50:15

Shame gets activated his and it becomes a big shame circle, instead of knowing that it's all okay, all of it. Kinky stuff, you know typical stuff, but stuff. But stuff is fine, everybody can be penetrated.

Speaker 2: 50:34

Yeah, and you get to say I mean, safety is the ability to be able to say to each other well, I'm not sure about that, but I would maybe be up for this, trying at once just to see what I think and feel and and then working with your own stuff on the inside right, your own, you know. If it's like I'm worried, if somebody knew that I did that, you know what they would think. That's shame, always shame, right. But if you're a consenting adult and you're with somebody that you're safe and they're consenting with you, you can try things and see what you think Be like. Oh, you know, yeah, I like that. Oh, no, I don't think I like that so much. I might like this, you know, and just like with anything, really like with anything that is pleasurable. Do you like this kind of pie? I don't know.

Speaker 1: 51:24

Give it a try and see what you think, Maybe you do maybe you don't, and that's all fine.

Speaker 1: 51:30

It's all fine. So, for people listening to this podcast right now who are saying, yeah, like I'm definitely navigating some sexual shame I know that I have a lot of listeners here who have kink things they want to try or new things they want to try and they're struggling with that. They're struggling with their own feelings around it. With that, they're struggling with their own feelings around it and that could include their identity. They're struggling with how to approach their partner about it. But they're listening to this and they're like, okay, yeah, I've got to deal with my sexual shame With this podcast, this episode. When they're done with this episode, what are some things you can tell them? Tonight? You can start doing this. These are going to be your steps towards identifying and healing your sexual shame. Let's launch you onto your journey of healing that. What's your advice?

Speaker 2: 52:21

Well, I will often say in order to get kind of clear about how it might be affecting you. I think the book Shameless Parenting is a really. It's going to walk you through noticing and asking questions about what happened in your own particular life so you can get clear about your story. I have on my website, on the Tina Schirmer Sellers website there is a. If you scroll down to the middle there's a thing called the sexual reclamation project. You can download that PDF. It also will walk you through your story so that you can know something about your story. It isn't like with the book. Your book is going to. The book is going to offer you actual what, what people deserve to have gotten at that age, and then what are the books you can get at the library or whatever that will help you continue to heal, right. So that's why I'm often recommending the book too.

Speaker 2: 53:15

But just start the process of being curious about your own story and where are sex's dangerous ideas and reactivity and amount of ignorance that people have around sexuality, how that has influenced you and how that maybe has begun to go, come into your adult life. Once you get clear then you can start to say I don't like that I'm going to let go of that. I'm going to work on that, I'm going to do that. Oh, like, oh, I should have gotten this, okay. And you start to claim yourself and claim pleasure, and claim your feelings and and and new beliefs. This then gets you to move into places where you're having, perhaps some new experiences. First you got to start with the new ideas and then that move into the new experiences.

Speaker 2: 54:08

But start a healing project like that, like doing shameless parenting and doing it by yourself or doing it with friends, you know, and just having the conversations about wow, yeah, I for sure did not get that when I was a toddler. I for sure did not get that when I was in grade school, I got these messages instead and they weren't helpful, you know. Or, or I learned this from porn, or I learned this from my friends and it wasn't helpful. Ultimately not helpful. You know, what did I want instead? And that's in there. You know, like there's just tons of books that are so fabulous and a lot of people are like I don't know where to begin and I'm like every two years, I release a new edition of that book and I put the leading books and websites for each age, including for the child and for the parent, you know, or what are the adult. And so you've got it all right there in your hands and you can you can do it yourself.

Speaker 1: 55:05

Right, I love that you say you've got to like, change your ideas and thoughts. First, it all starts with accepting that your thoughts are limiting, and they're limiting because of shame, and then figuring out where it stemmed from, and that's kind of the work piece. People are like, oh God, I don't want to go back and go. You have to go back, you have to walk through it. And I'm not saying you have to blame, you don't have to blame your parents and hold them whatever. But for yourself you need to understand where it came from. And then you have to start changing those thoughts. Right, and it's such a journey and it never ends, just so people know. I don't think. I think this is a lifelong journey for me and two years from now I'm still going to be discovering ways in which I carry shame around sex and trying to dismantle that. And you know, hopefully then, by the time I'm 90, I'll be having the best sex of my life. That's my goal, why not?

Speaker 2: 56:02

You bet Absolutely, and it's totally possible. Things might not be working as well, but you might be in so much luscious pleasure that you're sharing and you don't have anything holding you back because you've let go of all that over the years. It's like not a single thing. I know life is precious and short and I'm going for it. You know, and that's the beauty of getting older.

Speaker 1: 56:27

Yes, well, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell my listeners, give them where they can find you on social media, your website, all of that stuff, if they want to look into your, your books, your programs, um, or want to get in touch with you?

Speaker 2: 56:43

Yeah, so I'm on Instagram at Dr Dr Tina shameless, so you can DM me, reach out to me there. The books are on. Amazon is one place to find them. You can get them in other booksellers too. You might have to have them. Order it, I don't know, it depends.

Speaker 2: 56:59

But Sex, god and the Conservative Church, erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy or Shameless Parenting Everything you Need to Raise Shame-Free, confident Kids, kids and heal your shame too, which is really what it's about setting you free, liberating you. And my website is just my name, tinashirmorsellerscom. And if you happen to be exploring psychedelics or whatever, we have an onarisingorg is for practitioners, it's for prescribers and therapists that are helping people heal post-traumatic stress disorders or trauma, um, using psychedelics and um. That is the sort of next frontier, and America will do it in the sloppy way it does most things. Pharmaceuticals will get involved. It'll be too expensive, and so we're creating an organization so we can support providers in making sure that we're honoring our indigenous communities where these medicines have been held for years, and we're also honoring finding ways to make it equitable and affordable for those everyone who needs it. So eventually we're going to have a patient equity scholarship fund. So so, yeah, I just am all about healing and liberating people to live their best life, whatever that is they want.

Speaker 1: 58:20

I love that I'm going to say. A good life is one with a lot of pleasure and orgasms, pleasure, heals, pleasure, heals. To my listeners, if you haven't already ventured over to my YouTube channel, do that now. You will be able to catch all of my episodes and more there. You'll also be able to see our beautiful faces and who is speaking on the other side of this microphone. Also, if you have questions about this episode or you have topics you want me to address or you would like me to invite her back to address, please make sure to drop a comment in the YouTube episode or you can email me at Annette at TalkSexWithAnnettecom. Let me know what you want us to talk about. So until next time, thank you for joining me and I will see y'all in the locker room. Cheers.