I was raised Catholic. Like properly Catholic. I sang in the church choir until I was about 18. I went to church, I knew the prayers, I knew what was considered right and wrong.
When I first started masturbating, I used to say a Hail Mary afterwards.
Every time.
Masturbate.
Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And repeat.
It makes me laugh now, but I also think about it quite often because it says a lot about how I grew up looking at sexuality.
Growing up Catholic instills a very specific kind of shame in you as a woman. Nobody knew I was masturbating. Nobody was telling me off. And yet, I was policing myself. I learned that it was something I was supposed to feel guilty about.
Shame doesn't make the feeling disappear. It doesn't make you less curious. It doesn't suddenly make you stop wanting things. It just adds this little voice afterwards telling you that maybe you shouldn't have wanted it in the first place.
And Catholicism definitely gave me some of that, but I don't think you need to be religious to recognise it. We're pretty good at shame as a society too.
We have opinions about how people dress, how many people they've slept with, what they post online, whether they show too much skin, whether they like attention, whether they're too sexual or somehow not sexual enough.
There is always someone ready to judge you.
Especially when you're a woman.
I've been thinking a lot about bodies, sexuality and consent while rebuilding Perzik, and I keep coming back to shame.
There is a big difference between:
I don't want this.
and
I shouldn't want this.
One is knowing your own boundaries.
The other is something you might have been taught.
And figuring out which is which takes a while, at least it did for me.
And I'm still undoing some of the things teenage me thought could be fixed with a Hail Mary.
