Why Is It So Uncomfortable When Mothers Are Sexy?

When Mothers Are Sexy: Reclaiming Desire in a Culture of Repression

I have never been afraid of sex. That’s not to say I haven’t had complicated feelings about it—what woman hasn’t? But I’ve always felt at home in my body. I write erotica. I move through the world attuned to desire, to sensation, to intimacy. It’s how I create, how I connect, how I make sense of things. I never saw that as incompatible with being respected, or being maternal.

Then I became a mother.

The shift wasn’t internal—it was social. Overnight, something around me changed. I started to notice it in conversations, in the way people responded when I talked about my writing, in the awkward silences and forced laughter and subject changes. Suddenly, it was as if my sexuality—my very presence as a sensual being—had become inappropriate. Not because I had changed. But because my role had.

Motherhood, I learned, makes people deeply uncomfortable with a woman’s sexuality.

There is still a silent rule in our culture: mothers are supposed to sacrifice their bodies and then fade into them. We’re meant to nurture, not to hunger. We’re meant to love our children, not long for our partners. We’re allowed to "get our body back," but not our desire. That would be too much. Too selfish. Too threatening.

Because a woman who claims her sexuality after motherhood disrupts something—something deep, something ancient, something repressed.

We still live inside the virgin/whore binary, only now it's been recast: the Madonna and the “bad mom.” The good mother is soft, selfless, desexualized. The erotic woman is carefree, childless, maybe even dangerous. And when the same person embodies both? That makes people flinch. They don’t know where to put you.

They want women to be parts. Roles. Symbols. A mother who says I still want—who writes about kink, or posts a sultry photo, or speaks openly about sex—is saying something explosive: that she is still a whole person. That she contains contradictions. That she refuses to disappear.

And that kind of wholeness makes people very, very uncomfortable.

But it’s also necessary. Because repression is the real poison. And women—especially mothers—are taught from a very young age that desire must be hidden, silenced, buried under care-taking and “doing it all.” We’re told that claiming pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, is indulgent or shameful or immature. That we should outgrow it. That once we have a child, that part of us should go dormant.

But I believe the opposite is true.

Motherhood made me more aware of my body, not less. It cracked something open—an awareness of my limits, yes, but also my capacity for intimacy. I have never been more grounded in my physicality than I was postpartum. I have never needed pleasure more than I did when I was sleep-deprived, raw, and disappearing into someone else's needs. And I know I'm not alone.

There are so many mothers I know who are aching quietly. Women who love their children with everything they have, but also feel this low thrum beneath the surface—this hunger for touch, for excitement, for the version of themselves that existed before. Not because they want to go back, but because they want to bring that part with them into the now.

And they should. We all should.

Being sexual does not make me a bad mother. In fact, I’d argue it makes me a better one. I am teaching my child—without shame—that wholeness matters. That we do not have to choose between love and desire, between care and autonomy. That we can be soft and strong and loud and sensual and maternal all at once.

So yes, I am a mother. And yes, I still burn. I still fantasize. I still want.

If that unsettles people? Good. Let them be unsettled. That discomfort is a mirror. Let it reflect everything we’ve been told to hide—and then burn it down.

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If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Have you felt this same tension between motherhood and sexuality? What did you do with it? What were you told? Hit reply or leave a comment—I want to keep the conversation open.