Permission: Good Women Aren’t Allowed To Want Sex
This is the second in a series exploring the Five Elements of Sexual Agency.
The Five Elements being:
Permission
Power
Performance
Pleasure
Play
Each element invites us to ask a different question about how our sexuality has been shaped, how it is expressed, and how we understand it. We begin where I believe we must:
Permission
Permission is the foundation of our sexual agency.
Women have never been given permission, not only to experience desire, but to embrace it as legitimate, valuable, healthy, and worthy of pursuit. Permission invites us to reclaim what has always been ours: the right to desire.
At its core, Permission asks the question:
Am I allowed to want?
Women have been engineered to be selfless and conditioned to be submissive.
Sovereignty over our own sexual agency has never been fully recognised. Desire isn’t something we’ve ever been encouraged to cultivate. Instead, it has been something to suppress, regulate, or redirect towards someone else’s needs.
Permission to access our desire was never given. With this awareness, it now becomes our responsibility to claim it.
Permission: The Step That Gets Skipped
Concerns about desire are among the most common reasons women and couples seek sex therapy. Whether it’s framed as mismatched libidos or the tension between a higher-desire and lower-desire partner, the conversation is often met with an array of well-intentioned, surface-level interventions.
Many of those interventions have value. But they can overlook deeper forces impacting desire. We focus on the symptoms while missing the foundation. We fail to recognise that beneath the struggle often lies something far more fundamental: the absence of permission to embrace our own desire and our right to sexuality.
Imagine an old hardwood floor. Its scratches and scuffs tell stories and contain meaning and beauty in their age, but a few boards have begun to warp. You don’t fix a warped floor by sanding it or applying another coat of polish. You first ask why it’s warped. Is there water underneath? Rot? Termites? A shifting foundation?
Until you understand what’s happening beneath the surface, you’ll keep treating the symptom instead of the cause.
Without permission, desire is stunted. And without recognising its absence, we skip over it altogether, straight to solutions.
We leap to tactics to “spice things up”: buy a vibrator, read erotica, schedule sex, try role-play, flirt more, pop a pill, or the shudder-worthy advice to fake it till you make it.
With the exception of that last one, none of these approaches are inherently problematic. Many can be helpful and even transformative. But they cannot solve a problem that has roots spanning far beyond your own bedroom. They address individual behaviours when the deeper roots are cultural.
Women Are Set Up To Fail
Be sexy, but not too sexy. Be desirable, but don’t desire too much. Be maternal, but don’t “let yourself go.” Be confident, but don’t intimidate. Be fun, but don’t be loose. Put everyone else’s needs ahead of your own, but also remember to put your own oxygen mask on first. And be sure to summon boundless erotic energy at the end of the day to serve your man.
A selfless mother is the archetype. Women “of a certain age” are dried up. Devotion is treated as the ultimate moral virtue, while focusing on our own needs is selfish, indulgent, and potentially immoral.
But women are sexual beings. We have sexual appetites and drives, erogenous zones, fantasies, needs, wants, and kinks.
Even the mom on the sidelines of the soccer field. (Yes, her.). Even the nice old lady you see in front of you in the check-out line at the grocery store. (Her, too.) They are sexual beings.
Whether, how, or with whom they choose to express that sexuality is an entirely different discussion. But their sexuality exists. It isn’t confined to one age, body, relationship, religion, or way of expressing desire. It exists across cultures, generations, bodies, abilities, identities, relationships, and life stages, including for women who experience little or no sexual attraction at all.
Women are beautifully complex, living within a culture that has long tried to force us into one of two roles: madonna or whore; prude or slut. Pure and selfless, or craven and hedonistic. We’re not supposed to be both. We’re barely permitted to exist anywhere in between.
The Warp Beneath the Floorboards
These attitudes towards female sexuality didn’t emerge from nowhere. They have been formed and reinforced over time. I’ll focus on Judeo-Christian scripture, but these ideas are by no means unique to the West or to religion itself. (For example, classical Islamic scholarship has often emphasised a husband’s authority within marriage and a wife’s duty of obedience. Hindu legal texts similarly described women as living under lifelong male guardianship.)
Across traditions, women have repeatedly been positioned as subordinate to men, while female sexuality has been treated as something to regulate, control, and contain. Don’t even think about celebrating it!
If we’re going to understand why the floorboards are warped, we need to look beneath them. Here are just a few verses that have influenced cultural understandings of women, sexuality, and gender for centuries.
1 Corinthians 14:34–35: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”
1 Timothy 2:11–12: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”
Colossians 3:18: “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”
1 Peter 3:1: “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands...”
Proverbs 5:3–5: “For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave.”
Proverbs 6:24–26: “To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids. For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread: and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life.”
Proverbs 23:27–28: “for an adulterous woman is a deep pit, and a wayward wife is a narrow well. Like a bandit she lies in wait and multiplies the unfaithful among men.”
These texts clearly portray women’s sexuality as disobedient, dangerous, and subversive. They don’t simply govern women’s sexual agency; they also govern women’s agency more broadly. They built and continue to reinforce social structures that serve to diminish women’s autonomy and sexual agency.
Everyday Impact of Cultural Messages
You don’t have to have grown up in a religious household or attended church, synagogue, mosque, or temple every week to have absorbed these messages. You may not be able to quote the verses above, but you’ve almost certainly internalised their underlying assumptions. Today, these ideas are woven into our institutions, social structures, politics, media, laws, and cultural archetypes.
They are powerful narratives, teaching women how to understand their bodies, their sexuality, and their place in the world. They also teach men to understand female sexuality not as something that belongs to women, but as something to regulate and control.
We see these doctrines manifested in women’s uncertainty about desire, the confusion surrounding female sexuality, shame and silence, intimate partner and sexual violence, the rise of the trad wife movement, male-centred sexual pleasure, sexual dysfunction generally, and perhaps, within our own homes and relationship dynamics.
These messages are the water we swim in and the air we breathe.
HOPE (Don’t worry... I will always bring us back to hope.)
Bringing these cultural narratives into the light allows us to reclaim our agency. Awareness transforms us from passive recipients into active participants. We may not be able to change the systems and structures we inherited, but we can choose how we respond to them.
We can reclaim our sexual agency and give ourselves permission to be sexual beings throughout our lives, not just between the ages of 18 and 25.
That doesn’t mean you need to burn your bra, start free bleeding, or begin a monthly devotion to the moon. By all means, do those things if they bring you joy. But reclaiming your sexuality begins with giving yourself permission to return to your sexual self.
Confront your beliefs (in a compassionate way): Do you genuinely believe your sexual agency and desire are worthy of your time and attention? If not, ask yourself why.
Then begin the work of rewiring those beliefs.
Your sexual agency is not frivolous or indulgent. It is a marker of health, an inherent part of your humanity, and worthy of your care throughout your entire life.
So, while you shop for a new vibrator or browse the latest romantasy, ask yourself the question:
Do I genuinely believe my desire matters?
Because if the answer is no, every tactic will eventually lead you back to the same warped floorboard. You can sand it, polish it, or cover it with a rug, but until you understand why it warped, it will always reappear.
Permission isn’t the end of the conversation. It’s the entry point.
And the beautiful thing about permission is: no external authority ever possessed the power to grant your sexual agency in the first place. No church, government, husband, culture, or sacred text.
Which means none of them ever had the power to take it away.
It was never theirs. It has always been yours.
