A few years ago, I watched Robin Buckley’s TED Talk, Why I Gave My Teenage Daughter a Vibrator, and what struck me wasn’t the vibrator. It was the collective discomfort that title tends to provoke. Because we can dress it up in concern, morality, or “age-appropriateness,” but underneath all of that is a much simpler truth: we are still deeply uncomfortable with women knowing their own bodies.

Most women were never taught how their bodies work.

When people hear the phrase trauma and sexuality, they often assume the conversation is limited to sexual abuse or sexual assault. While those experiences can have profound and lasting effects on intimacy, they are far from the only forms of trauma that shape our relationship with sex, sensuality, and pleasure.

There is a kind of grief people rarely talk about. Not the grief of losing a person or even just death. But the grief of losing YOURSELF. The grief of no longer feeling connected to your body, to desire, to softness, to pleasure, to intimacy…to your sensuality.

For many women, sexual shamed does not begin with a single experience. It beings with inheritance. It is passed down through language, silence, warnings, jokes, punishments, and unspoken rules about what a “good woman” is allowed to be. Over time, these messages become internalized as personal beliefs, even when they originated as cultural conditioning. Sexual shame is not new, it is generational.

For generations, many women were taught that their bodies were dangerous before they were ever taught that their body belongs to them.

Let’s start with something many women were never clearly told:

Reclaiming a Word We’re Told to Fear

Recently, CNN exposed a global “online rape academy” after months long investigation into a website and chat group centered around “sleep content”. “Sleep content” is based on the concept of sexually assaulting a woman while she is unconscious. This website was a mixture of pornography videos and chatrooms which hit 62 million visits in one month and whose core audience was nonetheless, in the United States. *