sexualshame

“My libido is strong. I have a high sex drive.” How often are such phrases used to justify inappropriate, disrespectful, and unhealthy sexual behaviour? How often do politicians, actors and other celebrities make the news for unwanted sexual advances? And how often does it happen and not make the news? What is the libido? We […]

In his award-winning documentary Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain visited Koreatown in Los Angeles and spoke to several self-confessed ‘bad Koreans’ who had defied family expectations about their lifestyles. All of them referred to the han (or haan) as a family or communal pressure to meet expectations, such as becoming doctors, lawyers, or accountants. Korea’s supposedly […]

The word ‘patriarchy’ is mostly understood in simplistic terms. Patriarchies are societies where men rule, and women get bashed down. The problem with this view is that it clouds the extent to which such societies distort natural human functioning and wellbeing. The best-kept secret of patriarchy is that everything is toxic. We’ve been living in […]

What is sexual energy? It may seem like an odd question, an obvious question, even an unnecessary question. Yet it is the question that unlocks answers to some of life’s deepest mysteries. Sexual energy is high-octane, high-rev life energy colliding with the ‘red line’ of sexual shame. What is sexual energy? What is the energy […]

I grew up in the shadow of World War 2, in the Channel Islands—the only part of the British Empire occupied by the Nazis. My mother’s family buried their valuables in a potato pot and evacuated to the mainland. Six years later they returned to find the potato pot undisturbed. In my own life, something […]

“Pile on many more layers and I’ll be joining you there,” Pink Floyd lead singer Roger Waters sang in ‘Shine On, You Crazy Diamond, Parts VI-IX’ which closed their 1975 album Wish You Were Here. Many of Waters’ lyrics refer to the layers of dysfunction, disconnection and alienation that separate us from wellbeing. Any porn […]

A recently unveiled statue of Mary Wollstonecraft has caused outrage by depicting the pioneering feminist writer naked. The statue depicts a nude woman emerging from an amorphous mound of organic matter. The BBC described the statue as “a swirling mingle of female forms.” The problem isn’t the statue. It’s the underlying unconscious shame that precludes our ability […]

As this site deals with awkward topics such as shame, generational trauma and porn addiction, from time to time I receive interesting queries. One such recent query was about the shame of lack of sexual experience. Double-whammy This is an absolutely valid query on an absolutely valid issue. The lack of sexual experience can be […]

What is the impact of generational trauma? How do we count the emotional cost of generational trauma? This photograph from Sydney Sims says it all. We spend our lives trying to paste on a smile to cover up the hole at the heart of our existence—a hole that has no obvious source. And because it […]

In What is unconscious shame? I described how all the feminine aspects of our being—our emotions, our feelings about our body and our sexuality—have been pushed down into our unconscious by several millennia of patriarchal culture. In this blog I want to focus on what is perhaps the most significant and difficult part of this […]