the whore, the saint, and the woman in between

from purity culture to porn culture: different costumes, same control

we live in a culture that sells sex everywhere but panics the moment a woman says what she actually wants. we’re raised on a cocktail of pop feminism, porn algorithms, religious guilt, and self-help girlbossery. be empowered, but be soft. be sexy, but not too loud about it. know your worth, but stay desirable. we celebrate thirst traps but flinch at the word horny. we praise confidence, but only when it’s aesthetic. desire is curated. shame is coded. and somewhere in the middle, most of us are left performing a sexuality that doesn’t feel like ours.

girls are called sluts before they know what desire is. so by the time we start wanting, it’s already complicated. half the time you don’t even know if you’re turned on or just performing it. if you’re wet or just well-trained. pleasure starts to feel like a costume you’re supposed to wear convincingly. we’re allowed to have sex. just not want it too much. not first. not more. not without a reason. female desire is still treated like a side effect: of love, of attention, of ovulation, of being desired first. never just ours. never just hunger. wanting sex for no reason is still unladylike. unhealed. unhinged. even now, it’s a little embarrassing to want it plainly. not romantically. not aesthetically. just want it.

but female sexuality wasn’t always shameful. in ancient sumeria, erotic rites were part of spiritual life. priestesses known as nadītu were literate, autonomous, sexually active, and economically independent. their bodies were not scandalous. they were sacred. in many pre-colonial cultures, women held erotic authority, through dance, lineage, or spiritual leadership. sex wasn’t separate from the divine. but as patriarchal empires rose, akkadian, babylonian, and later through waves of colonialism, these roles were stripped of sanctity. sacred became sinful. nude became obscene. desire became deviant. religion arrived with new morality codes, criminalising native sexualities. submission was sanctified. purity became a tool of rule. conquest was never just land theft. it was body theft. the violence wasn’t only physical, it was ontological. entire cosmologies of pleasure were erased in the name of salvation.

and that logic bled into medicine. by the 19th century, women who expressed sexual frustration, or pleasure, outside social norms were diagnosed with hysteria. hystera, greek for uterus. their arousal was framed as malfunction. masturbation was alternately prescribed and condemned. clitoral stimulation became therapy, then pathology. women were sedated, institutionalised, “relieved” by mechanical means, then silenced.

modernity didn’t erase the shame, it just monetised it. now we’re told we’re free because we can profit. OnlyFans, porn platforms, sex work, these offer real agency and income for some, but they also reproduce the same rules: you can express desire, but only if it performs well. only if it sells. only if it stays palatable. even empowerment gets content-moderated. our sexuality must still be readable. clickable. culturally legible. the platforms reward bodies that attract, not bodies that devour. so hunger gets reformatted. it returns as choreography. as angles. as curated captions. never as unstyled craving.

even in the so-called era of liberation, most women are still working through a secondhand sexuality. one shaped around being desirable, not desiring. we still think we’re empowered because we’re allowed to be seen. but what happens when we say what we want? when we name it, without softness, without metaphor? suddenly we’re too intense. too unstable. too much. because it was never about access. it was about containment. we’re allowed to perform sex, but not possess it. we can flirt, post, tease, but say “i want to fuck you,” and the room gets weird.

and yet, the body doesn’t care. it was built to want. dopamine floods not in fulfilment, but in possibility. not in certainty, but in maybe. the body responds in anticipation. it lights up for hunger. for motion. for potential. and still we’re taught to distrust that mechanism. to discipline it. to delay it. to ask permission from someone else before we let it speak.

affective neuroscience shows that chronic emotional suppression, especially around taboo states like lust, alters activity in the insula, the part of the brain responsible for interoception: the awareness of internal bodily states. arousal. hunger. emotion. pain. the body still sends signals, but when the insula is dulled, the brain stops registering them. women raised to treat desire as dangerous don’t lose it, they lose access to it. they feel flat, disconnected, numb, not because they’re broken, but because their nervous system learned to ignore what it couldn’t safely express. this isn’t low desire. it’s learned disconnection. and we mistake it for dysfunction.

and when sex isn’t good, when it doesn’t satisfy, we blame ourselves. because god forbid we blame the system. straight men orgasm 95% of the time. straight women? 65%. and when women start realising that desire doesn’t always arrive in monogamy, in marriage, in him, it’s treated like a personal crisis. not a design flaw. not a rigged game. it’s not the model that’s broken. it’s you. maybe you’re traumatised. maybe you’re repressed. maybe you just need more communication. another book. another toy. another version of the same structure that was never built to fit you in the first place. we’re so quick to hand women a diagnosis before we ever hand them a mirror.

but the pressure doesn’t only come from men. women surveil each other, too. sometimes more ruthlessly. girls learn early which types of wanting are acceptable, romantic, modest, soft, and which are too much. we shame, side-eye, unfollow. we judge each other’s body counts while pretending not to care. we call some women pick-me’s, others attention-seekers, others unhealed. even inside feminist spaces, there are rules. about what kind of sexuality is smart. what kind of pleasure is “for yourself.” what kind of kink is valid. there are hierarchies of coolness, of liberation, of being sexually correct. and too often, women who want messier things, stranger things, too much, are left out of it. not policed by men. policed by each other. quietly. culturally. through the language of self-actualisation and healing and aesthetic liberation. but it’s still control.

and of course, the rules aren’t applied equally. not all women are read the same way. some are punished for wanting anything at all. others are expected to want constantly, perform endlessly, submit quietly. race, class, culture, queerness, these don’t just shift how desire is expressed. they shift how it’s received. a black woman’s pleasure might be treated like a threat. an asian woman’s silence might be mistaken for consent. a brown girl might be taught that her sexuality is a family’s reputation. a queer woman might be told her want isn’t real unless it’s male-approved. desire isn’t neutral. it’s filtered through who we’re allowed to be. and when those filters are thin, warped, impossible to pass through, it doesn’t just distort how others see us. it distorts how we see ourselves.

because male-centred interpretations of desire don’t just restrict women sexually. they compromise personhood. if personhood means the freedom to want what you want to want, then most women have never been fully allowed to be persons. our first-order desires, what we want, are tangled in patriarchy. our second-order desires, what we want to want, are written by systems that don’t centre us. religion. medicine. romance. safety. reputation. it’s not just about what we’re allowed to do. it’s about what we’ve been trained to long for.

and even now, after all the reclaiming, all the empowerment, all the liberal sex positivity, most women are still afraid to admit when sex is bad. when they didn’t come. when they didn’t feel it. we’re still expected to be grateful to be wanted. still expected to perform openness, not claim appetite. because god forbid you’re not desirable enough, or worse, you’re desiring on your own terms. and that threat runs deep. in some parts of the world, women still die for wanting. sex outside marriage is criminalised. pleasure is punishable. girls are cut so they won’t feel too much. women are jailed, disowned, disappeared for enjoying what men think should belong to them. the fear is not that women don’t want sex. it’s that we might stop wanting it with them. it’s that we might want it without them. it’s that we might not need their permission. and there is nothing power fears more than a woman who does not need to be chosen.

this is the old story, dressed in new clothes. mary or magdalene. virgin or whore. saved or suspect. one is admired, but untouched. the other is touched, but punished. neither is free. one is made sacred by absence. the other, sacrilegious by visibility. we were never meant to be full people. just symbols in someone else’s morality tale. metaphors with hips.

but not all performance is oppression. not all submission is erasure. not all kink is compliance. this isn’t an argument against what turns you on. it’s an invitation to ask: who gave it shape? what taught you to want that? is it yours? sometimes the answer is yes. sometimes it’s yes and it’s complicated. sometimes it’s i don’t know yet. the point isn’t to replace one kind of purity test with another. the point is to want with your eyes open. the point is to stop mistaking aesthetics for autonomy.

your sexuality doesn’t have to be righteous.

but it should be yours.