By Dr. Lisa Valle | Oasis Women’s Sexual Function Center Founder/CEO
There’s a conversation that happens far too rarely in women’s lives — and far too rarely in most physician’s exam rooms. It’s the conversation about sex. Not sex as reproduction. Not sex as risk management. Sex as pleasure, as intimacy, as identity, as a vital dimension of what it means to feel fully alive in a woman’s body.
And the silence around it isn’t just culturally awkward — it is clinically consequential.
After years practicing gynecology and women’s health, I’ve come to believe that sexual shame is one of the most under-recognized threats to women’s wellbeing. It lives quietly in exam rooms, in bedrooms, in the spaces between what women actually feel and what they feel safe enough to say. And it is costing women dearly.
The weight of not saying it
When women carry shame about their sexuality, the effects ripple outward in ways that are both deeply personal and measurably physical. Research has found that sexual shame negatively affects women’s sexual functioning across the board — dampening arousal, suppressing desire, interfering with orgasm, and contributing to sexual pain.
Social stigma around female sexuality remains pervasive in Western culture, with the result that women routinely avoid or feel embarrassed discussing their sexual health with their healthcare providers — even their gynecologists. This reluctance cuts across all demographics: age, sexual orientation, race, education, and relationship status.
And what are the consequences? Women assume that pain during sex is inevitable. They accept low libido as a normal feature of aging. They suffer quietly through conditions like genitourinary syndrome of menopause or hypoactive sexual desire disorder — treatable, real, named conditions — because they lack the language, the permission, or the confidence to bring them up.
What France got right
In 2016, sociomedical researcher Odile Fillod collaborated with the Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie in Paris to create the world’s first anatomically correct, open-source 3-D printed model of the clitoris- introduced into French school curricula from primary through secondary level. The goal was education. It was the radical act of treating female anatomy as worthy of being named, seen, and understood.
From Fillod’s model, students learn that the clitoris is composed of the same erectile tissue as the penis. That it has legs, bulbs, and a substantial internal structure. That female erections are real — you simply can’t see them, because most of the clitoris is internal.
Fillod’s reasoning was elegant: “In understanding the key role of the clitoris, a woman can stop feeling shame, or that she’s abnormal if penile-vaginal intercourse doesn’t do the trick for her — given the anatomical data, that is the case for most women.”
Think about that. A generation of French schoolchildren — boys and girls — are growing up knowing something that most adult American women have never been taught about their own bodies.
What we name, we can validate. What remains nameless, we shame by omission.
The language gap starts young
Even before French schools introduced the clitoris model, pediatric specialists had long argued that teaching children the correct anatomical names for their bodies — vulva, clitoris, labia, vagina — is not only appropriate but protective. The American Academy of Pediatrics supports using correct anatomical terms from a very young age, noting that children who know the proper names for their body parts are better positioned to communicate, to seek help, and to develop a healthy sense of bodily ownership.
Most of us weren’t raised that way. We grew up with euphemisms or with the conspicuous absence of any word at all. When we substitute nicknames for real names, we send a message — however unintended — that these parts carry some quality of shame, of unspeakability.
The parts of the body we can’t name, we can’t advocate for.
When shame has a wound at its center
For many women, sexual shame doesn’t begin with cultural messaging alone — it has a wound at its center. Past sexual trauma, whether a single violating experience or a pattern of harm that unfolded over years, fundamentally disrupts a woman’s relationship with her own body. Trauma teaches the body that it is not safe, not sovereign, not entirely hers. And when that lesson goes unnamed and unwitnessed — as it so often does, in a culture that has historically disbelieved, minimized, or blamed women for the violations done to them — shame fills the silence. Not shame about what was done to her, but shame that lives in her, woven so deeply into her sense of self that it can be nearly impossible to separate from identity. This is one of the cruelest legacies of sexual trauma: it takes what was an act of harm and converts it, through silence and stigma, into something a woman carries as though it were her own.
The mental health consequences of this carried shame are profound and far-reaching. Research consistently links sexual shame — particularly when rooted in trauma — to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and difficulties with emotional intimacy. Women who have experienced sexual trauma and who have not had access to safe, non-judgmental spaces to process it often find that the shame extends far beyond the bedroom: it shapes how they speak about their bodies in medical settings, how much they believe their pain deserves to be taken seriously, and whether they feel entitled to pleasure at all. In my clinical experience, I have sat with women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are, for the first time, connecting symptoms they’ve carried for decades — sexual pain, numbness, avoidance, disconnection from their bodies — to experiences they were never given permission to name. The path forward is not simple, and it is not the same for every woman. But it begins, always, with the belief that what happened to you is not who you are, that your body is still yours, and that healing — including sexual healing — is something you are allowed to want.
This brings me to my recent feature on the latest episode of Lisa Ling’s Mighty Lings platform on YouTube which beautifully demonstrates the next steps in a healing journey for Lisa’s mom.
Direct Link to YouTube Channel: MightyTransformations: Mary's Sexual Health Journey
What this means for you, right now
I want to say this directly, woman to woman and physician to patient: your sexual health is not a footnote to your health. It is your health.
Sexual wellbeing is connected to cardiovascular health, mental /emotional/spiritual health, hormonal health, pelvic floor function, relationship satisfaction, sand overall quality of life. Especially as we move through perimenopause and menopause — a transition during which the landscape of sexuality can shift dramatically — the conversation about sex becomes not just meaningful but medically necessary.
If sex has become painful, say so- by name. If your desire has changed, say so. If you’re not experiencing pleasure you once experienced, or you're curious about whether something is normal, or you simply want to understand your own body better- say so. These are not embarrassing questions. They are the questions of a woman who is paying attention to her whole self.
The deeper stakes
Shame about female sexuality is not accidental. It is historically constructed, culturally enforced, and often internalized so early that it feels like our own voice. We learn to be modest, to be accommodating, to prioritize others’ comfort over our own bodies’ truths.
Women who cannot name their bodies cannot fully inhabit them. Women who cannot speak about pleasure cannot fully claim it. Women who are taught that their sexuality is for others — or for reproduction, or for nothing at all — lose access to a dimension of their lives that is deeply, irreducibly theirs.
This is not a minor inconvenience. It shapes the quality of relationships, the confidence with which women move through the world, and the level of care they seek and receive for their bodies.
The antidote to shame is language. The antidote to silence is conversation — in schools, in exam rooms, around kitchen tables, in the spaces where women gather and tell the truth about their lives.
France understood something when it put a 3D-printed clitoris in a classroom: that we are willing to name, we are willing to see. And what we are willing to see, we are willing to care for.
It’s time for us to catch up.
About the Author
Dr. Lisa Valle is a board-certified gynecologist and sexual medicine specialist practicing in the Santa Monica area. She is the founder and CEO of Oasis Women’s Sexual Function Center.
© 2025 Dr. Lisa Valle. All rights reserved.
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