Female pleasure has been historically associated with sin. Apparently, since Eve ate the forbidden fruit and unleashed evil into the world, women acknowledging themselves as sexual beings just feels… wrong.
Act “ladylike”: don’t take up too much space. Shut down. Sit right. Cover up, lust is not only inevitable but also, somehow, your responsibility.
Girls have long been taught that their bodies are not entirely their own. So what happens when they stop treating their urges and cravings as threats? After all, what’s so frightening about pleasure?
Purity Culture
Purity culture is the set of social and religious beliefs that equate sexual purity with morality. At its core, it teaches that premarital sex is more than a personal choice; it is a reflection of your character, your worth, and even your relationship with God.
The message was especially loud during the 90s and 2000s, when purity culture grew strong within evangelical Christianity in the United States. It spread among young people through campaigns that encouraged them to remain virgins until they’re married.
Religious teenagers made abstinence pledges and wore purity rings, as a way to affirm and publicly commit to saving themselves for marriage. It was a symbol of virtue.
In this scenario, girls were constantly reminded that their desires could lead them somewhere dangerous – not only because they could sin themselves, but because they could supposedly push boys towards sin, too. There was a particular concern with making sure young women did not “provoke” male desire: what they wore, how they behaved, how much skin they showed, whether they were being too flirtatious. His sin, her responsibility.
The psychologist Carla de Almeida Pereira explains: “When certain social, moral, or religious beliefs are conveyed as absolute truths, they can interfere with the relationship a woman develops with her own desires and with the expression of her psychic energy”.
And it goes further, as Carla shares that the theorist Carl Gustav Jung expanded the concept of libido beyond sexuality, understanding it as a psychic energy that can manifest in different ways throughout human life. In this sense, when the expression of one’s own sexuality is presented from an early age as something wrong or shameful, they may develop psychological barriers that make it difficult for them to consciously connect with important aspects of themselves.
So while getting older and developing, sexuality was not simply something to understand; it was something to control and avoid. Eventually, constant judgment turns inward: “Am I showing too much?” “Being too forward?” “Too easy?” Self-policing becomes second nature, with every choice measured against the possibility of being read as provocative or “too much”. It seems instinctive, but it has all been taught ever since a girl is born.
And despite what many might assume, being non-religious doesn’t make you immune to purity culture. This kind of discourse does not belong exclusively to faith-based institutions; it can survive long after the religious context is gone, because it’s ideas are already deeply internalized in our patriarchal society.
How many times have you heard a woman calling another “ran through,” as if having multiple partners could somehow make them less worthy? Calling other girls degrading names based on an assumed sexual past? That is purity culture at work, too: sexist ideas so deeply internalized that they can be reproduced by the very people they were designed to repress.
“While certain beliefs remain unconscious, they may continue to influence the way a person thinks, feels, and acts (…) A person may project them onto others and, as a result, react to them with judgments, criticism, or rejection that, to some extent, concern aspects of themselves that they have not yet recognized”, says the psychologist. From this perspective, we can think that some judgments reproduced among women may carry cultural and psychological contents that have been internalized but have not yet been brought into conscious awareness.
Express yourself, don’t repress yourself
Something to hide, can also be something to obsess over or eventually reclaim. Within the rise of purity culture, Madonna released her arguably most bold record Erotica (1992). The album wasn’t merely sensual; it made sex impossible to ignore.
Through its imagery, lyrics and performances, Madonna positioned female pleasure as something to be embraced and proud of, rather than apologized. And, in doing so, she became one of the most visible examples of what happens when a woman refuses to feel scared of her sexuality.
According to Carla, a woman becomes self-aware by turning her attention back to herself and her real wants. It happens when she stops being merely a sexual object and assumes that she also has desires.
“She begins to recognize and reclaim the power of choice that had been shifted to external expectations. But notice: it is not possible to reclaim your own life simply by replacing one external rule with another. A woman needs to look at herself and ask: What, in fact, is mine? What do I desire? Which choices do I make because they truly correspond to who I am, and which do I make to meet other people’s expectations?” That’s what Madonna did, and the results are witnessed on songs like “Fever”, “Where Life Begins” and “Erotica”.
At a time when female sexuality was being heavily policed, she deliberately played with it instead. She could’ve been sensual, provocative and explicit, but the difference was that she was in control of the performance. And that’s what attracted backlash.
Madonna was harshly criticized by the public and the media. But according to Carla, that backlash speaks to something bigger than a single controversial record. She frames it through the Jungian idea of individuation: “Becoming what one truly is involves a process of differentiating and integrating the different aspects of the personality.”
In other words, once a woman takes the wheel of her own life back, she’s no longer being driven by someone else. She becomes the one who decides where she wants to go, who she wants to be with, how she wants to exist. She signs her own letter of manumission, freeing herself from the psychic bondage she had been kept in for so long.
Society punishes women for owning their sexuality
There’s a strange consistency in how society treats female sexuality, depending on what it’s for. When a woman’s body serves reproduction, marriage, family… that’s accepted, expected. But the moment her sexuality exists for her own fantasy, her own pleasure, with no man’s approval built into the equation, it suddenly becomes suspicious. Punishable, even.
Of course you can be sexy, as long as you don’t ever admit that you want sex!
Revenge porn is one of the clearest expressions of how that works. At its core, it isn’t really about sex – it’s about reasserting control over a woman the instant she seems to have any autonomy over her own body or image.
Kim Kardashian‘s case gets brought up a lot in this conversation, and for good reason. She didn’t set out to make a statement about sexual liberation; a private tape was leaked without her consent in 2007. And yet, she, the person whose intimacy had been violated, became the one who had to answer for it. Publicly. Repeatedly. For years.
Whether she spoke about the experience, moved on from it, was seen as too comfortable in her own skin, or simply kept living her life, every choice got read as more proof against her, never less.
That’s the throughline, really: it doesn’t matter what triggers it: an outfit, a leaked video, a woman openly wanting pleasure. The verdict is always some version of the same sentence: she was asking for it, she wanted the attention, she should’ve known better. The specifics shift, but the logic underneath stays identical – female sexuality can be consumed, just never fully claimed by the woman herself.
Carla helps make sense of why that logic runs so deep: “We can think again about the unconscious dimension of human behavior. A man who uses the exposure of a woman’s body or sexuality as a form of punishment, humiliation, or control may be expressing a power dynamic in which the other person is no longer recognized in her autonomy and comes to be treated as an object.”
And clarifies: “For the woman who experiences this kind of violence, the psychological effects can be significant. It can affect her self-esteem, her relationship with her own body, her confidence, and the way she experiences her sexuality. Psychological care can be an important space for working through that experience, and for her to rebuild her relationship with herself.”
For all women who have gone through what Kim did, having their intimacy violated and then being made to feel responsible for it: don’t feel ashamed for what someone else cowardly chose to do to you.
Your body is still yours. Your sexuality is still yours. And so is the right to decide how, when, and with whom you share it. Whatever happened to you does not make you less worthy, less respectable, or less deserving of being loved and believed. You never have to ‘earn back’ the right to feel at home in yourself.
Pleasure is autonomy
As a woman, reclaiming your own pleasure and having control over your sex life is a way of saying that you do not belong to anyone but yourself. After all, the fear was never really about pleasure itself. Maybe it was about what happens when women learn to claim it.
“Pleasure can be reclaimed once a woman becomes aware, first, of these systems that have contributed to the internalization of limiting beliefs within her psyche, where they have remained at an unconscious level throughout her life, until the moment of her awakening. In other words, if this woman wants to regain autonomy over her own body, the work and the access are internal – they are hers to work through with herself, not something to be sought externally”, psychologist Carla says.
“When we teach little girls to fear their own pleasure, we are teaching them to fear their own inner power – a power that can manifest itself and transform their lives, leading them toward fulfillment and a sense of inner wholeness; something that can manifest externally in their lives in the most beautiful ways.”
For a woman to allow herself to feel pleasure is to allow herself to experience life as alive, free, and present in its entirety. In a visceral and soulful way. Through her own beautiful vehicle: the body.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The article above was edited and translated by Ana Beatriz Carvalho Sapata.
Liked this type of content? Check Her Campus Cásper Líbero home page for more!