Generational Change and Shame-Free Sex Talks

I read that line three times.

“This book will bring generational change.”- K.W.

Someone who read an early copy of Shame-Free Sex Talks put this review on Amazon. Thank you, K.W., for a very generous review.

“This is not a manual for how to control your kids or the way they understand sex. This is a path to freedom from shame, freedom to flourish, freedom to integrate your body and soul—and to give your kids that space and safety that wasn’t there in purity culture. Kelly Edmiston is a prolific thought leader and has brought about a sexual ethic for families to share with children of all ages and parenting stages. This book will bring generational change. Bravo!”

I sat with that word — generational — for a long time. Because this book didn’t start as a project. It started as a phone call.

I was twenty-five, three weeks married, half weeping and half shrieking into the phone to my mentor: “It won’t fit!” I had done everything right. Everything I’d been told to do to have sex the “right” way, the way God wanted for me. And everything was going wrong. I froze. I felt dirty, scared, exposed — like my innocence was being taken from me on the one night I was finally, officially, allowed to want my husband. I cried for months, wondering what was wrong with me.

Nothing was wrong with me. Something was wrong with what I’d been taught.

I grew up in the height of purity culture — purity rings, the wilted rose passed around a youth group room, a youth pastor draining a tube of toothpaste to show us what we’d lose if we “gave it away.” No one ever told me sex was good. Only that God didn’t want me to have it, that my body was a problem to be managed until a wedding day made it, briefly, not a problem anymore. You can’t spend your whole life being taught to be disgusted by something and then flip a switch on your honeymoon and feel free.

That’s the sentence I keep coming back to as I’ve watched this book take shape: shame doesn’t leads to lasting change. Shame is a control and fear tactic. Shame doesn’t motivate. Shame, when used effective, is something that gets buried in our bodies. Stored within the sinews of every nook and cranny from the top of our heads to the bottom of our toes.

Shame may have kept me a “virgin” until my wedding day but it also has been the single most destructive force in my life that I have spent every day since my wedding day healing from. Today included. And this is important for you to hear, Beloved. Healing is available, by the way. Healing is the slow long work of learning that our bodies are holy, that pleasure is good, and that God is everywhere (3 of the 5 values I teach in the book)

So Shame-Free Sex Talks isn’t a manual, and it isn’t a set of rules dressed up as theology. It’s an attempt to answer a different question than the one purity culture asked. Purity culture asked, how do we keep kids from having sex? I wanted to ask, what did God actually make sex, and bodies, and pleasure, for?

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what I wrote the whole book to say plainly: your body is holy. Not “holy if you behave.” Holy. I wrote at one point that our bodies are “holier than the most holy place you have visited” — and I mean that. Bodies are where Christ dwells. Bodies are how we’re joined to each other and to God. That’s not a permission slip. That is a vision.

The whole book rests on one move: stop treating the body as a barrier between us and God, and start teaching our kids to experience it as a resource for knowing God more. Sexual repression happens when we believe we have to get past the body to become spiritual. But integration — letting our spirituality and our sexuality “grow up” together, the way two lanes merge into one — is what lets our kids actually flourish instead of just comply.

That’s the freedom my reviewer named, and it’s the right word. Not freedom from consequence or from wisdom or from waiting well. Freedom from the shame that convinced a generation of us that our desire made us dirty. Freedom to integrate body and soul instead of divorcing them. Freedom to give our kids the safety we didn’t have — so that when they come to us with their real questions, we don’t freeze— the way I did on my wedding night.

If this book does what I hope, it won’t just change one conversation at your kitchen table. It’ll change what your kids teach their kids someday. That’s the generational part. That’s what I’m praying for.