Shame: Guest Post by "Vagina"

RTSV loves when you guys submit guest posts. This latest one was submitted by a woman who wishes to be known as "Vagina." She is from Huron Ohio.

Shame is something I personally know a lot about. Not because I feel shameful but because others view me as shameful. I was attacked this weekend by a man who felt that because I am a strong, confident, and independent woman that I should be ashamed of myself because of my job. That shame he was talking about is informed to him by the moral teachings of culture. Through our inherited cultures and religions, we are taught rules of female sexual conduct. Our learned morals act as a regulator upon our sexual behavior, and some people in our society believe it is their duty to regulate it.  It’s a script that every culture and religion has - especially around women, sex, and feminine sexual power.

Divinely inspired religions are the backbone of America, and nearly all of them deny female sexual access and unbridled female sexual pleasure in some form or another. Many exert an extreme control over female sexual conduct. It is inevitable however, that the pursuit of sexual liberation will eventually lead us to question our beliefs, and I assert that is exactly the reason why religion is obsessed with thwarting our pleasure, and suppressing female sexuality. When we realize that religion is wrong about female pleasure, feminine power, and sex, then it could be wrong about a lot of other things as well.

It seems to me that culture and religion are the origins of sexual shame. All cultures, religious or otherwise, are made up of behaviors, symbols, and ideals that, when fully wired into our brains, are taken to be universal truths - things we believe in absolutely. When it comes to female sexuality, we believe in absolutes. Everyday, around the world, people fight, live, and die for the symbols and ideals they believe in. Simply put, a symbol is something that stands for something else, condensing emotion and meaning into a very potent form. Female sexuality is potently symbolic - representing far more than genitalia, orientation, or sex. On one hand, female sexuality represents the continuation of life, maternal certainty, the passing on of specific genes, and possibility of controlled blood lines. On the other hand, it represents the call to life, power, passion, and total freedom.

Our culture, regarding female sexual conduct, continues to grab a fierce hold onto the female mind - in the form of sexual shame. For most people, a woman who is in touch with her feminine sexual self  is alarming and people tend to be afraid of her. In our culture it seems to me that whenever a woman expresses herself in a confident sexual way she is then labeled a whore. What that sexual shame, guilt, and ignorance actually creates is tremendous amounts of cultural, ritualized sexual abuse, and depression. The more we shame and repress our own and others sexuality, the more bizarre the acting out of sexuality that occurs in real life. Growing up in a home where religion played a huge role in my sexuality and how I was raised it occurred to me that body shame began at birth. I exited the womb out of “the dirty, place, down there.” It was literally a shame to be born. (At least my mother viewed it that way.) In my household these religious beliefs can be boiled down to this; women are evil, sex is bad, and the body is naturally dirty. I was able to break free from the hold religion played on my sexuality. My sisters however were not able to.

Personally, I find that sexuality brings us closer to our mortality and nature than anything else. I think religion keeps people from accepting the fact that humans are not really as exalted and above nature as we've been led to believe by religion. Sexuality, if allowed to run freely, has the power to challenge that. This is also the reason why it's so dangerous for those that believe in the idea that religion is what defines you sexually.

Sex, science, and the Internet are continuing to dramatically change and challenge our cultural landscape. In spite of the best attempts by fanatics to constrict culture and move it back to “the good old days” - the reality is that culture is in a constant state of flux, and so is female sexuality.


Though our brains are slow to adapt to the sweeping cultural changes occurring right now, I assert it is our duty to update our own beliefs around female sexual conduct. We have to free ourselves of cultural and religious sexual shame - and stop the suppression of female sexuality within our own psychology, and bring that change into our society at large.