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Your sexuality is not a community project—and it never needed a committee’s approval. We’re pulling back the curtain on how purity culture, patriarchy, and respectability politics train women, especially Black Gen X women, to carry shame like an heirloom. I share where I’ve judged and been judged, why celibacy and casual sex are both valid when they’re chosen freely, and how agency turns the volume down on everyone else’s projections.

We get practical and personal. I walk through the questions I ask before intimacy—am I safe, aligned, honest, and free to change my mind—and tell a story about a surprising, respectful one-night connection that felt calm, clean, and shame-free the morning after. From there, we dive into deprogramming: replacing endurance with consent, building aftercare to release guilt immediately, and dropping the imaginary audience of pastors, aunties, and internet pundits living rent-free in our heads. A woman with sexual agency is hard to control, and that’s exactly the point.

Midlife brings its own truths. Perimenopause shifts sensitivity and libido, but pleasure remains powerful: better sleep, lower stress, improved mood, pelvic health, and deeper embodiment. We talk HRT, lube, longer foreplay, sex therapy, and the basics of safety—barriers, testing, clear exits, location sharing, and listening when your spirit says no. Sexual freedom today might be a season of celibacy, a safe friends-with-benefits, or simply self-pleasure without apology. Your body is yours. Your yes is yours. Your no is yours. If this conversation gives you language or relief, share it with a sister who needs to hear she’s not too old, not too much, and not required to be chosen to deserve pleasure.

If this resonated, subscribe, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, share with a friend, and grab my book, Grace Axley: Memoirs of Life, Faith, Loss, and Black Womanhood. Then tell me: what belief about sex are you ready to retire?

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