Purity Culture is the Sin.

I traveled to 70 countries over a decade searching for God.

I looked for God in temples and ashrams, in meditation halls and ancient rituals, chanting mantras for hours and waking before sunrise to practice yoga. I sat at the feet of teachers. I studied traditions that had been asking the same questions I was asking for thousands of years.

What is God? Why are we here? Are we all sinners? Is there really something wrong with us simply for being human? Are we supposed to spend this life trying to rise above our bodies, our desires, our humanness?

For years, I thought getting closer to God meant becoming more enlightened, more disciplined, more “pure.” I practiced celibacy for years, believing that denying my sexuality would reveal the answers. I was always reaching for some purer version of myself, carrying shame around who I was, without ever questioning why God would create me this way only to ask me to spend my life trying to escape everything that made me, me.

I spent years walking barefoot through temples waiting for a clear message from the Divine. Tantra, the discovery of Goddess worship and the history of traditions that treated the body as sacred would lead me to question where God could and couldn’t exist.

The beliefs I had built my life around began to unravel. Through traditional Tantra, I encountered a spirituality that didn’t ask me to escape my humanity in order to meet the Divine. As I went deeper into Goddess worship and Śākta traditions, I encountered the feminine not merely as a female version of a male God, but as Shakti: the Divine power moving through existence itself. Creation and destruction. Life and death. The body and consciousness. Nothing existed outside of Her.

If the Divine was present in everything, how could our bodies be excluded? If this human existence was an expression of the sacred, why are we trying so hard to escape it? If Shakti moved through all of creation, where exactly did God stop and something “impure” begin?

There isn’t one moment in history when humanity decided sex was sinful. Sexual restrictions existed long before Christianity across many cultures. But as Christianity developed, things intensified. Celibacy and virginity became spiritual ideals. By the fourth and fifth centuries, some of Christianity’s most influential thinkers were placing virginity above marriage and treating sexual desire as something that needed to be controlled. St. Augustine became influential in shaping the Christian belief that humanity’s sexual desires had been corrupted by original sin and therefore needed to be restrained.

Female value became based around virginity and modesty. Enjoying sex could itself be considered sinful, even between husband and wife. Women weren’t simply taught to control what they did with their bodies. They were taught to suppress what their bodies wanted. And when we learn to suppress the sensations, desires and instincts of the body, we become disconnected from what’s meant to guide us: our bodies, our intuition and our personal power.

The Jesus described in the Gospels repeatedly crosses boundaries people had constructed between pure and impure. He touches people considered unclean. He sits with the rejected. He eats with people called sinners. Again and again, he moves toward the people society has decided are unworthy.

There are also early Christian writings in which Mary Magdalene appears as an important disciple with a close spiritual relationship to Jesus. Later traditions and writers have perceived that relationship as romantic or sexual.

Why would sex make Jesus less holy? Why would loving a woman with his body somehow diminish his relationship with God?

To me, purity has nothing to do with how many people you have slept with, how much of your body you show or how freely you experience your sexuality. Purity lives in the heart. It’s the intention not to cause harm. It’s how you treat your family, the people you love, strangers, animals and people who can give you absolutely nothing in return. It’s honesty. Compassion. Integrity. It’s moving through the world trying not to leave unnecessary pain behind you.

A woman can be completely sexually liberated and have a beautiful heart. She can have multiple partners, make porn, love pleasure and still be deeply loving, spiritual and kind. And someone can follow every rule of sexual “purity” while being cruel, dishonest or causing enormous harm to other people. I know which one feels closer to God to me.

As a vegan, of course, it deeply confuses me that the unnecessary torture and death of TRILLIONS of innocent beings every year (with animal consumption being a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death worldwide) isn’t what religion is focusing on as sin, but instead the “sin” is us enjoying our natural human pleasures in safe, consensual spaces. Please, make this make sense.

Purity culture is in our obsession with a woman’s “body count.” It’s in calling virginity something she can “lose,” as though sex removes something from her. It’s in separating women into the ones you sleep with and the ones you marry. It’s in the way a woman can be celebrated for being beautiful until she becomes too aware of her own beauty, too comfortable with her sexuality, too unapologetic about enjoying being desired.

I see pieces of the same thinking resurfacing in the trend of the “traditional wife.” There is nothing wrong with wanting to stay home with your children, cook for your family or have a traditional marriage. If that’s genuinely the life a woman wants, her freedom to choose it matters just as much as my freedom to not choose it.

The homemade bread and feminine dresses aren’t the problem. It’s when they become attached to the idea that women were somehow better before feminism gave us choices. That men should lead and women should submit. That sexual purity makes a woman more valuable. Many are forgetting that women living in that past didn’t have the freedom to choose another life.

We should be careful not to dress patriarchy in prettier clothes and call it liberation.

Purity culture suppresses what is natural within us and then acts surprised when that suppression doesn’t make it disappear.

I went into celibacy with clear intentions. I wanted discipline. I wanted to get closer to God. But about a year into it, I was thinking about sex constantly! I was pushing away my natural desires and, in doing so, giving it even more power over my mind.

Suppression doesn’t free us from desire. It can make us obsessed with the very thing we’re trying to escape. And we have to be willing to look at what happens when entire cultures build themselves around sexual suppression.

The history of sexual abuse within religious institutions is impossible to ignore. A history this devastating should force us to question cultures that have treated healthy sexuality as dirty, forbidden and too dangerous to speak about while horrific sexual violations were happening behind closed doors.

Clearly, something isn’t working. Suppressing sexuality doesn’t make human beings nonsexual.

It buries desire underneath so many layers of shame that people lose the ability to understand it. It creates a world where someone performs purity publicly while living an entirely different sexual reality privately.

Sexuality doesn’t need to be eradicated. It needs consciousness.

What would happen if instead of teaching people to fear their sexuality, we taught them how to understand it? How to experience desire without shame. How to communicate. How to respect boundaries. How to understand consent.

Interestingly enough, the adult industry and porn prioritizes all of this and gives us a safe space to exercise healthy sexual practices.

One of the main questions I get from people in the spiritual community since I started adult films is how I handle “absorbing everyone’s energy.”

I understand where the question comes from. I believe sex can be an incredibly powerful energetic exchange. I believe our interactions with other human beings affect us emotionally, physically and energetically. But I don’t believe women are helpless energetic sponges, collecting pieces of every person who touches us until we become spiritually contaminated.

The language has changed, but it’s the same old fear: that sex leaves something on a woman. That enough sexual experiences make her heavier, dirtier, less spiritually intact.

My sexuality does not disconnect me from the Divine. It brings me closer to it.

There is nowhere the Divine is absent. The body. Pleasure. Desire. Sex. Grief. Ecstasy. Shame. The beautiful experiences and the painful ones. The things we proudly place on an altar and the things we hide from everyone we know.

My spirituality asks me to be here. Fully. In this body. In this strange, wild, human existence. In the pleasure and the pain and the contradictions of it all. To stop searching for God somewhere outside and recognize the Divine pulsing through all of life within and around me.

God was in the temple. God was in the ashram. God was in my body. God was in my sexuality. God was in the places I had once been taught were sinful.

The sin was teaching us that God could ever be separate from us.