The Silence They Taught Us: How Black Culture Learned to Hush Pleasure

Let me introduce you to someone you may recognize. She sat in the front pew every Sunday. Made Straights A's. Smiled at the right times. Kept her skirt below the knee. Laughed at the appropriate volume. Did not, under any circumstances, give anybody the impression that she was fast.

That was me. Velvet Lenae. Self-proclaimed sexual prude, certified good girl, and future sex educator. I know. The irony is not lost on me.

Growing up, the message was clear even when nobody said it out loud. Keep your head up. Keep your legs shut. Do not do anything that would make people think you were that kind of girl. I absorbed it the way you absorb everything as a child: completely, quietly, and without question. And for a long time, I wore it like a badge. While my friends were exploring and figuring things out, I was on the sidelines judging them for it. And I say that with full accountability because it is the truth.

The innocent good girl was not a performance, at least not entirely. I genuinely did not interact sexually for a long time. And somewhere in that silence, I thought I was doing the right thing. What nobody told me was that all that restraint was not actually protecting me. It was just keeping me in the dark.

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Here is the thing about the silence that gets passed down in Black households around sex. It does not come from nowhere. It comes from church pews and survival strategies. It comes from generations of Black women whose bodies were not their own, who learned that visibility could be dangerous, that being seen as sexual was a liability. Respectability politics dressed itself up as wisdom, and we passed it down like a family recipe, except this one left everybody a little hungry.

Add religion into the mix and you have got a full cultural cocktail of shame with a sanctified garnish. Sex before marriage was sin. Talking about your body was inappropriate. Asking questions meant you were already thinking about doing something wrong. The message was not just wait. The message was wanting is wrong.

And when you spend years being told that desire is something to manage, suppress, or hide, you do not just become sexually cautious. You become sexually illiterate. You grow up not knowing your own body. You enter relationships not knowing what you like or how to ask for it. You fake it because you were never given the words to say otherwise. You stay in situations longer than you should because you never learned that your pleasure was supposed to be part of the equation at all.