From Under the Covers Digital Cartoon

Are You Ashamed of  Your Body and Sex?

This couple is experiencing shame about their bodies and sex.

Why?

There are a few reasons.

Purity Culture has engrained in so many people that their bodies and sex is something to be ashamed of.

1. One of the very first stories in the Bible teaches us that being naked is shameful. When they were tempted and fell into sin, they became aware of their nakedness and were ashamed. I was always taught that being naked was a source of great embarrassment. How many of us have had dreams where we are naked in a room full of people. It’s humiliating, so we avoid it at all costs. At this point, it isn’t even necessarily about our bodies, but just the fact that we are naked. At this point it isn’t even our bodies that we are ashamed of, but just the fact that we are naked because nakedness is bad.

2. This is further complicated by our culture’s obsession with the shape of our bodies. We are constantly deluged with images of our culture’s idea of a perfect body. This ideal changes from culture to culture. But if my body doesn’t conform to my culture’s ideal of what a perfect body is, then I’m going to feel embarrassed by it. This dynamic has an enormous impact on our confidence when it comes to getting naked with the one we love and are having sex with. Even in the presence of someone who loves us and who wants to be sexually intimate with, we feel embarrassed that our bodies don’t fit with what we think they would desire. We hide, shield, and conceal ourselves and our bodies from the gaze of our lovers so as not to disappoint them and embarrass ourselves further.

3. Purity Culture has also taught us that sex is dirty, that it is a sinful manifestation of our carnal nature. I was taught that sex didn’t begin until after the Fall, meaning that it was inevitably an expression of our fallenness. We learn that to lose ourselves in sexual passion is an unfortunate fleshly act that we feel is a demonstration of just our body’s sinful urges, an indication of lust, and a lesser aspect of being human. Holiness and sex can’t be imagined together. Sex is an aberration. It’s something that we do to procreate, not something we do for pleasure, intimacy, and connection alone.

Doing it from under the covers and in the light would be a brazen flaunting of lasciviousness and a brazen rejection of our spiritual nature.

When in fact it is an embracing of our humanness and our healthy desire to connect with another in a most intimate way.