Good Vibrations Magazine

I have been struggling lately with the relationship between sexual pleasure and guilt. It seems to be lodged somewhere deep in my unconscious that too much pleasure, too much fucking, or too much sexual satisfaction is a bad thing. In particular, I find I have the sense that having everything I want and fantasize about sexually will make me “bad” somehow.

This guilt and shame can be pervasive. For instance, I was having myself a fine, sexy time the other day when suddenly guilt raised its ugly but familiar head. I stopped what I was doing and took a deeper look, managing to kick the guilt into some dark corner of my psyche, as I usually do. Why do I have the sense that there is something bad about being sexually fulfilled? What is so shameful about enjoying your own and another’s sexual pleasure? I can hear the Puritan voices screaming responses, which is probably why so many of us struggle with it.

I know from my own life, my work with survivors of sexual abuse, and conversations with other sex educators, that the guilt issue is a big one in sex. The sex educator motto used to be the three P’s: Permission, Permission, and more Permission. We are still living in a world of rigid morals around sexual expression, a world where there’s a load of sex negative information — and too often sexual violence that confuses the matter even more. We may “know” that sexual satisfaction and pleasure are not bad things. Sex is healthy and good for us — it is about as natural as you can get — but still I think many of us struggle with guilt and shame anyway.

Guilt in and of itself is not a bad thing. Guilt can help us feel the impact of behavior we might not want to repeat. It can show us that we have hurt someone else or ourselves. Guilt can help direct us to be decent human beings. Shame, on the other hand, can be paralyzing. Shame can have us freeze up, unable to take steps to change or see ourselves clearly. Guilt and shame can wind their way around into that state of seeing ourselves as bad. This sense of badness lives inside of us like there is something wrong, something unfixable, in the very fabric of our selves. The sense isn’t necessarily tied to any particular behavior.

There can be a particular flavor of guilt for survivors of child sexual abuse or adult sexual trauma. Sexual abuse often gives the survivor the sense that the abuse was her or his fault. Many survivors are left wondering what else they could have done, how else they could have reacted, if perhaps they wouldn’t have been hurt if they just would have been smarter, quicker, less or more of X. This, of course, is not the case. Those who are going to hurt or harm us are going to do so regardless of the survivor’s behavior. While the survivor can know mentally that the abuse is not her or his fault, this self-blame, the sense of guilt, tends to live on in the deep recesses of the psyche anyway.

For most survivors, sexual pleasure and sexual abuse get mixed up internally. When sex is used as the means to abuse, very vulnerable places get impacted. It is like someone taking something beautiful and meaningful to you and beating you with it. Out of the hurt we begin to distrust what we loved. Sex and pleasure can trigger guilt in the survivor instead of a celebration of satisfaction. Because of the crossing of wires that sexual trauma creates, a survivor can feel like his or her free sexual expression and satisfying sexual pleasure make the abuse the his or her fault. “If I like it now, ” the logic goes, “I must have wanted it then.” Or the confusion can take the form of fearing becoming a perpetrator. If the survivor has what he or she wants sexually, isn’t he or she being a sexual offender?

But consensual sexual satisfaction is as far away from incest and sexual assault as holding hands is from battery. Even so, the emotions and responses to sexual harm are not logical. The difference can get lost in the reaches of trauma.

What is hooked up to sexual pleasure and satisfaction for you? Do you have permission in your mind, body and heart to have sexual pleasure? Do you “deserve” it? If not, what is in the way? How much sexual satisfaction is truly all right with you? Are you satisfied sexually?

In the next column I’ll discuss teasing out the “bad” from the good in sexual pleasure and satisfaction.