S9E11: Ask a Sex Therapist: Does Body Count Actually Count? With Natasha Helfer

This summer, we've answered the most common questions that we receive as relationship and sex therapists. And this week, we answer one of the most common questions: Does body count actually count?

We live in a culture that views your sexuality based on how often you access it. Men who are deemed to have accessed sexuality a lot are viewed as "studs". Women are simultaneously valued and devalued based on how often they have sex. In Evangelical systems, folks who have sex before they get married are sinners.

There are tons of psychological and relational problems that develop from this question, even as many of us are unlearning the myth that our value is tied to how sexual we are or are not. We talk with Natasha Helfer, certified sex therapist and one of the premier relationship therapists for post-Mormon folks, about how we can ask better questions. Check out our conversations about:

• Does Body Count, Count? (6:00) Julia kicks us off, “ From the conservative Christian perspective, body count does count, but in a very rigid, specific sort of way. And then when folks deconstruct, they often reevaluate this expectation and consider sex with other partners.”

• Purity Culture Embedded (10:00) Natasha highlights, “The reality is that if you grow up in the United States of America, we do have a lot of purity culture baked into the system, including in our laws and our government and our society and our school education systems around sexuality. You name it, we're affected by it.”

• Defining Sex (15:00) Natasha discusses “ When we think about sex only being defined by a penis entering a vagina, I guess lesbian people are not having any sex. I guess gay men are not having any sex, right? Oftentimes making sure that we define sex very rigidly helps with what I call the loophole argument like “I am still a virgin”. I can tell my pastor or my priest or my bishop that I am virginal even though I've given a hand job or received or given oral sex … So all these things that I would consider having sex gets reduced to not having sex.”

• Colonizing Lens & Body Count (20:00) Natasha says, “ We have all kinds of capitalistic and patriarchal and colonizing ways where sexuality was absolutely affected. And so this idea that I'm going to count and gather a count is in of itself not based in an equity model.”

• Grief (24:00) Julia notes, “ A theme that I'm noticing in my practice is that I have several couples in which one or both partners are interested in exploring other sexual relationships. And these are couples from high demand, high control religious backgrounds, and they've been in this monogamous partnership. And one or both of them had all the rigid scripts that we've described. And then one or both of them are saying, "I have so much grief around this developmental loss.”

• Cultural Messages About Waiting (29:00) Natasha says, “ Most of us are getting a lot of these cultural messages and we're getting applauded for doing these choices of waiting to have sex … The whole community is like, hooray, you did a great job. And it's not until usually late twenties to early sixties that people are coming into my office going, what in the hell did we just get involved?”

• Wasting Energy on Purity Culture (38:00) Natasha shares, “ I mean, even personally, when I think about all the unnecessary shame and guilt and sleepless nights and racking myself, trying to hustle for my own worth to be a pure worthy woman, I just get livid. I just get livid that I spent so much energy on these things that were, at the time I thought were helpful to me.”

• Deconstruction, Relationships, and Therapy (42:00) Jeremiah notes, “ In the burgeoning field of religious trauma studies, religious trauma therapy, there aren't a lot of folks that work with relationships and sexuality together that can understand how deconstruction can impact a relationship."

• Integrating Sexuality and Deconstruction (49:00) Jeremiah asks, “If you are seeking relationship therapy and are going through the deconstruction process, what can you expect from a good relationship therapist, who's able to integrate sexuality with the process of deconstruction, with an understanding of the impact of purity culture, religious trauma.”

• Paying Attention to Bias (50:00) Natasha notes “ A good relational therapist is going to be able to handle their own biases around sexuality, around religious beliefs. Because a lot of relational therapists, quite frankly, are themselves either religious.”

• Identity and Sexuality (54:00) Natasha continues “ When we talk about sexuality, we are talking about identity. And identity is very important to our mental health, to our relational health, to our spiritual health, to our sexual health, obviously. And when we bypass or ignore huge aspects of our identity, then we tend to be in unhealthy systems.”