The Purity Culture Recovery Guide

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents The Purity Culture Recovery Guide: The Shame-Free Sex Education You Deserve by Erica Smith read by Patricia Rodriguez

You deserve to understand your body, embrace your sexuality, and find joy without shame.
For those raised in purity culture, messages about sex were rooted in fear, silence, and control. Virginity was prized above all else, sexual desire was condemned, and women, queer, and trans people were often left shrouded in shame. The results have been devastating: fear of intimacy, painful or unsatisfying sex, and a lingering sense of brokenness.

In The Purity Culture Recovery Guide, sex educator Erica Smith—founder of the Purity Culture Dropout® program—offers the comprehensive, inclusive, and trauma-informed sex education many never received. Drawing on more than two decades of professional experience, Smith replaces shame with empathy, self-compassion, and empowerment. She provides medically accurate information about bodies, birth control, pleasure, communication, consent, and abortion, alongside affirming discussions of gender, sexuality, and relationships.
Smith’s approach is both practical and healing. Readers will learn how to set boundaries, challenge damaging beliefs, explore their own sexual values, and build a new sexual ethic based on respect, autonomy, and joy. Most of all, this book insists that there is nothing wrong with you.

Whether you are beginning your recovery from purity culture or seeking to deepen your sexual self-understanding, The Pleasure You Deserve is an essential, shame-free guide to reclaiming pleasure and rewriting your sexual story.

Critics Review

Smith’s approach to unraveling the harms of purity culture offers significant relief from a collection of post-purity resources that fail to fully detach from patriarchy, homophobia, and misogyny. As a trained and experienced sex educator, Smith provides the anatomy, social-emotional, and ethical lessons many adults who were raised in American evangelical communities never received. She is not interested in universal truths about human sexuality, but in helping people find a set of practices that allow each of us to cultivate a genuine relationship with our bodies and desires, regardless of our religious or spiritual leanings. Unlike current and former evangelicals whose work deconstructing purity culture is over-shadowed by their own projects in personal reclamation, Smith provides grounded expertise dedicated to the virtues of sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.
author of After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America
The Purity Culture Recovery Guide is the warm, empowering resource that readers escaping religious sexual shame have been waiting for. For anyone raised with silence, fear, and negative messaging about sex, this book offers the antidote: comprehensive, compassionate, and inclusive sexuality education. Creator of the Purity Culture Dropout Program™, Erica draws on decades of expertise as a sexuality educator serving the people most impacted by authoritarian upbringing and fear-based religions. This book will provide you with the accurate, science-backed guidance your body and heart have been craving. Nurture, heal, and liberate yourself with this important book, and step into the life you so richly deserve.
PhD, LMFT, CST. CST-S, Author of Sex, God, & the Conservative Church
I’ve been waiting for someone to write a book like this for years and Erica Smith was the exact right person to do it. To those of us who grew up entrenched in purity culture: Reading this book feels like coming up for air. Free of shame, full of life and pleasure, if you’re looking to step into a new way of being, The Purity Culture Recovery Guide will help you do just that.
Therapist and Author of Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms
Purity culture distorts one of the core aspects of being human—our sexuality—and addressing these distortions takes nuance and compassion that can be overlooked in other guides. Erica Smith has written a useful primer, blending kindness, humor, and truth-telling, tailored for those recovering from purity culture.
author of Exvangelical & Beyond

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