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 secure property, legitimacy, and power. While societies have changed, echoes of these systems remain embedded in modern attitudes toward women’s bodies and sexual behaviour.

Silence and secrecy have often shaped our sexual experiences and histories. Speaking openly about sex hasn’t always been welcomed and has often been viewed as distasteful; at times it has been met with judgment, misunderstanding, or shame. In that context, hesitation makes sense. The hesitation itself feels meaningful, not something to push past, but something worth paying attention to.

Protection and control

Sexual morality is frequently framed as protection: protection of dignity, bodies, families, and communities. Patriarchy often presents this as care or safeguarding, yet what is imposed rather than chosen is a form of control.

This is especially evident when moral expectations fall more heavily on women than on men, or when women’s sexuality is discussed primarily in terms of risk, consequence, family reputation, or restraint rather than mutual responsibility, pleasure, or agency.

Perhaps the question is not whether sexual morality protects or controls, but when it does, and who gets to decide.

Internalisation and early patterns

These messages do not remain external. Many of us internalise them from a young age, long before we have the language to question them. Patterns formed in childhood (around shame, modesty, fear, or self-surveillance) can be remarkably difficult to unlearn.

Over time, these internalised beliefs may shape not only how women experience sex, but how they relate to their bodies more broadly: how much space they take up, how visible they allow themselves to be, how safe it feels to desire, age, or simply exist without apology.

Faith

Many women today are not rejecting spiritual or religious practice. For many, faith remains a source of meaning, grounding, and moral guidance. Yet there is an increasing willingness to question how certain teachings have been misinterpreted, over-emphasised, and enforced over time within societies shaped by unequal power.

This can create tension, anxiety, and often guilt: valuing faith deeply while sensing that conversations about women’s bodies and sexuality may have been shaped as much by cultural and political forces that benefit masculinity as by spiritual doctrine.

Living within that tension is an ongoing reality for many women.

A wider question

One might wonder how different women’s inner lives might look in a freer society, one less preoccupied with control, perfection, and moral surveillance of the female body.

Would rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and body dysmorphia be different? Would the relentless striving for physical perfection, anti-aging ideals, and nervous system dysregulation soften if women were not taught, explicitly or subtly, that their worth is tied to appearance, restraint, or desirability?

These are not simple questions, nor do they have easy answers. But they feel worth asking.

Why these conversations still matter

There are easier and equally important topics to discuss: menopause, retirement, aging, and health. These invite open and very necessary conversations. Yet sex and sexuality remain central to our freedom of spirit, mind, and body.

Sex sits at the intersection of faith, power, morality, identity, and selfhood. Avoiding the topic doesn’t remove its influence; it simply makes reflection more difficult. Perhaps some of our collective lack of joy, ease, or the celebration of the feminine is rooted in these unexamined subjects that feel too complex or uncomfortable to approach.

An invitation

You are invited to notice where silence exists, and to question what and especially who the silence has protected, and what it may have cost.

If these questions feel uncomfortable, that may be a sign of how personal and important they are. Dialogue doesn’t require certainty or resolution. Sometimes it begins with permission to wonder out loud, and to ask the questions that may, over time, lead us toward healthier, more expansive, and more joy-filled lives as women, and yes, especially as enlightened men.