Sex, Morality, and the Questions We Don’t Often Ask
This piece isn’t an argument or a call to abandon deeply held beliefs. It comes, instead, from a place of curiosity. Recently, I’ve had conversations with a number of people about topics ranging from faith and identity to aging and life transitions. One subject, however, consistently brought a noticeable shift in tone: sex. Not disagreement, but thoughtfulness, the topic feeling delicate rather than taboo. Delicate issues For many women, sex and feminine sexuality has been carefully constructed over time through family expectations, religious teachings, cultural norms, and lived experience. These ideas did not emerge overnight. They are rooted in systems that stretch back hundreds of years, including patriarchal structures that shaped social order in profound ways. Historically, particularly in medieval Europe, women’s chastity was tied to inheritance and lineage, rules were enforced to maintain order and secure bloodlines. Control of female sexuality functioned as a way to sec...