Shame Is: What We Were Never Taught

The most dangerous thing about shame is how quiet it is. You do not always know it is there until it shows up in your relationships, your body, and your bed.

Let us just go ahead and say the thing. Sex is not the problem. It has never been the problem. Sex is a natural, human, deeply personal experience that most of us were never given the tools to navigate well. What we were given instead was shame. Heaps of it. Wrapped up in scripture, whispered warnings, raised eyebrows, and a whole lot of silence that we were expected to interpret correctly on our own. We did not always interpret it correctly. And we're still living with the results of that.

I have been in enough conversations, held enough lives, and done enough of my own inner work to know that shame around sex is one of the most quietly destructive forces in people's intimate lives. And I mean quietly. That's the thing about shame. It does not announce itself. It just shows up in the way you freeze when your partner asks what you want. The way you go through the motions and call it a good time. The way you have never once, not even once, talked openly about sex with someone you trust without feeling like you needed a shower afterward.

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Here is where it comes from, at least some of it. Church taught many of us that desire was dangerous. That the body was something to manage, contain, and present modestly to the world. That sex before marriage was a sin serious enough to follow you, and that even within marriage it was something to tolerate or perform rather than genuinely enjoy. The message underneath it all, even when nobody said it plainly, was that wanting felt like wrong.

And here's the thing. It is still happening today...

Shame around sex has always had a sponsor. The faces change but the mission stays the same...keep people disconnected from their own desire and call it wisdom. ~ Velvet Lenae

Then there is the layer that sits specifically on Black communities. We are a people who have had to navigate hypersexualization from the outside while being handed shame from the inside. Black women have been sexualized without their consent by a culture that simultaneously told them to be respectable, modest, and above reproach. Black men have been handed a Performance of sexuality that leaves almost no room for tenderness, curiosity, or honest conversation about what they actually feel. And all of us grew up somewhere in the middle of that contradiction, trying to figure out who we were and what we wanted with very little guidance and a whole lot of judgment waiting in the wings.

And then there is rap music. The art form that raised a generation. My generation. I love hip hop. Genuinely, deeply, in my bones. The lyricism, the storytelling, the way a bar can make you feel seen or send you straight to the dance floor or both at the same time. I take it in as art and as a window into how people think, feel, and move through the world. And because I listen that closely, I also hear the complicated parts. The same music that gave us language, identity, and pride has also handed us some deeply complicated messages about sex. Women reduced to body parts. Men celebrated for conquest. Intimacy measured in performance rather than connection. and I want to be clear...I am not dismissing the fantasy or the fun. I love a dirty, taboo lyric as much as the next person, with full consent and full awareness of what it is. what I sit with is the line between that kind of pleasure and the messaging that quietly tells women that is all they are, all they are good for, all they should expect. That is the part worth paying attention to. Not to cancel the culture, but to take a deeper dive into what it is actually teaching us about how women are perceived, how men are expected to perform, and what we absorb without even realizing it. It is layered because we love the culture and the culture is also teaching us things worth questioning. Both can be true at the same time.

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Sexual shame does something specific to the body. It creates a kind of internal split where your desire exists on one side and your sense of self exists on the other, and they rarely get to be in the same room at the same time. You want things you feel you should not want. You have curiosities you keep buried becuase even thinking about them feels like evidence of something wrong with you. You perform in the bedroom because showing someone what you actually like feels too exposed, too vulnerable, too much like handing someone the exact thing they could use to judge you.

So you fake it. You stay quiet. You settle. You choose partners who do not ask too many questions because answering honestly feels terrifying. And over time, you get further and further from your own desire until you genuinely cannot remember the last time you felt fully present in your own body during an intimate moment.

That is shame doing its job. And it is very good at its job.

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So what do we do with it? We start talking. Out loud. To each other. In spaces like this one.

I severely struggled with this. For a long time. The disconnect, the performance, the quiet settling...I lived in all of it. And I want to be transparent about that because it matters. The person building this space is not someone who had it figured out from the beginning. I am someone who did the work, felt the shift, and cannot stop talking about it now because of how much it changed things. Ooooh, I am so glad to have moved past that. Genuinely. With my whole chest.

I built Sweet • Raw • Sticky because I needed a space where the conversation could be honest. Where we could talk about sex without it being scandalous, without it being clinical, and without it being filtered through someone else's discomfort. Where curiosity was welcome and questions did not come with a side of judgment. And while I may not be doing large events anymore., I am creating more intimate intentional experiences that deepen the conversation and protect the safe space that makes it possible. The setting gets smaller. The impact gets bigger.

Filling in the gaps that shame left behind is a radical act of self-care. Knowing your own body matters. Understanding sexual dynamics, exploring what you like through art or erotica or honest conversation, learning the language of desire so you can actually use it with the people you are intimate with. All of that is just being a full human being who takes their inner life seriously.

And for the fellas readding this, this one is for you too. Shame does not skip the men. It just shows up differently. The pressure to always know what you are doing, to never be uncertain, to perform confidence even when you have questions. That is shame with a different costume on. You deserve honest conversations about your desires and your curiosities just as much as anyone else in this space.

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Raw is speaking the thing nobody in your family ever said out loud. Sweet is the relief that moves through your body when you finally do. Sticky how that kind of honesty ripples forward, into your relationships, your intimacy, and the generation that comes after you.

You did not get the education you deserved. A lot of us did not. But we are adults now and we get to decide what we do with that. We get to ask the questions we were never allowed to ask. We get to explore what we were told to suppress. We get to have the conversations that should have happened years ago and let them actually change something. And if you feel like your are alone in this because of your age, whether you are in your forties, fifties, sixties, or beyond, you are not. This space holds all of it. It is never too late to start knowing yourself better. Ever.

That is the whole point of being here. That is the whole point of this space.

When you stop letting shame write the story, you finally get to find out what you actually wanted to say. ~Velvet Lenae

Shame kept us quiet long enough. Ask the questions. Have the conversations. Give yourself the permission that somebody should have given you a long time ago.

This space was built for exactly that. And you belong here.

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Sex Isn't the Problem. Shame Is: What We Were Never Taught

The most dangerous thing about shame is how quiet it is. You do not always know it is there until it shows up in your relationships, your body, and your bed.

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