There are reasons sex is still not spoken about openly and frankly in most societies, but I have to tell you, they’re not very good reasons. The silence on sexuality, some cultures more silent than others, may come across as respect for privacy and a commitment to morality, but too often this silence breeds stigma, shame, and guilt, and quite unnecessarily so.

Nothing blocks pleasure and destroys sexual well-being like shame, and shame comes from the most harmless (or so we think) of words: “normal”. Sexual shame is learned under the guise of “normal” through the implication that what is not “normal” is “abnormal”. How we learn what is “normal” sexuality usually happens during childhood, when our brains are sponges for everything we perceive and hear around us, and once it is learned, we accept it as indisputable truth in our adulthood.

Sexuality is loaded with arbitrary cultural and social meanings that decide the parameters of “normal” sexuality. If human sexuality was free to exist exactly as it is, with no cultural meanings attached to it, sexual pleasure would be encouraged, even taught, masturbation would be commonly remarked upon, sexual orientation would not determine whether someone had access to healthcare and other basic human rights, and kink would be publicly praised as a creative way to experience pleasure.

Now if you think about the most socially acceptable (“normal”) parameters of sexuality, the most “moral” and superior sexual encounters, we likely think of a monogamous heterosexual couple within a certain age window, having ‘vanilla’ sex that concludes with a particular kind of orgasm that was achieved through penetration. Depending on the culture, these parameters can be even narrower. The further outside these parameters we sit, the less “normal” we feel. From where do we get these ideas about what “normal” sexuality looks like?

Religious narratives and purity culture

For many people, their religious faith provides them with guidance in life. Many of the stories we are told about what it means to be a good person are drawn from religious principles about morality. To a large degree, these moral principles serve to prevent people from causing harm to themselves and others, to encourage more love and connection between people. However, religious narratives, particularly in fundamentalist traditions, also create moral sensibilities around human nature and behaviour that causes no harm in and of itself, usually with the overarching purpose of establishing control over said behaviour. This is true of religious narratives about human sexuality.

The purity narrative dictates that certain sexual behaviours are “good” and others are “bad”. The story of virginity as the purest and most innocent human state immediately constructs sexuality as tainted, dirty, or sinful. Having completely natural sexual feelings, like attraction, desire, arousal, and pleasure, become shameful because we are told they are dirty in nature, and we are doing something “bad”.

While purity culture certainly affects all people, it is especially detrimental for people with female bodies because it is compounded with gendered power dynamics. For example, the sadly commonplace act of slut-shaming (condemning women for having many sexual partners) does not even obviously lend itself to religious purity narratives, but it is quite clearly premised on the idea that a woman who is too sexual is impure or dirty. Religious narratives about sex condemn so many harmless, in fact wonderful, sexual experiences, equating sexual normality with a distorted view of sexual morality.

Risk-focused sex education

I am a huge advocate for comprehensive sexuality education. I believe that communication about sexuality should begin as early as possible, informally and formally, in a way that is age- and development-appropriate. Unfortunately, most of us learned many of the harmful narratives about “normal” sexuality from the sex education we received (if we received any). The problem with a lot of formal sex education is that it is heavily focused on the risks of sex—my own experience of sex ed included a series of talks on how sex could lead to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections—leading to a stigmatised understanding that sex is inherently dangerous and bad.

No one educated me about pleasure, desire, communicating sexual needs, asserting my bodily autonomy, not even very much about my sexual anatomy. This is my personal experience, but an abundance of research shows that this is the norm across countries and cultures. Once again, these omissions from sex education are compounded with gendered expectations around sexuality. Formal sex ed teaches about ejaculation and male orgasm but does not touch upon female orgasm. Female sexuality is reduced to risk and danger and is placed in a supporting or host role to male pleasure. Women are indirectly taught that sex is not for us and that engaging in sex is poor decision-making on our part. This alienation from our own wholeness as sexual beings is the crack where shame can creep in.

The incomplete information about how our sexual bodies and minds work, and the reductive, biased information about how they “should” work, leaves a very narrow definition of “normal” for us to work with and can easily leave you feeling abnormal. But you are normal, I promise you. Just as you are.