Based on the pretty much everything about me, it should come as little surprise that I was raised Catholic—which, as we all know, is a euphemism for, “I now answer to no god and am also probably into some weird, depraved kinky shit.” But while my annual guest appearances at Christmas Eve mass with my mom always serve to remind me that I have not yet rid myself of all the markings of my God-fearing upbringing—that sign-of-the-cross muscle memory is strong, my friends—I’m grateful to say that the Catholic sex guilt never really took.
Don’t worry, I still feel guilty about lots of other things, like the fact that I exist. But the sex stuff? IDK, didn’t stick! Most of the time, I consider this to be a blessing—like when my innate sexual shame guard allows me to build a career on baring the most salacious details of my sex life for all the world wide web to see.
But there’s one instance, one grimy little part of my otherwise unapologetically smutty self that makes me wonder whether just a dash of Catholic sex guilt might have done me some good. Namely, when someone who just dicked my damn brains out announces they’re going to go hop in the shower and I realize there is, in fact, nothing I would rather do less.
To be clear, it’s not just that I don’t want to get in the shower with them (which, of course, I absolutely do not; showering together is a scam and we all know it). It’s that I don’t want to shower after sex, period. Sorry, but unless we got up to some real messy shit involving, say, certain bodily fluids that aren’t, you know, the usual ones, rushing to go rinse off my post-sex glow isn’t high on my list of preferred postcoital activities.
Frankly, there are very few things I want to do less after sex than drag my ass out of our little sin nest and into a hard, uninviting shower. Unlike the good Catholic girl I never was, I have no desire to wash the sin off. In fact, I wanna let it marinate. If you’ve heard it’s easy to get me into bed, best believe it’s hard to get me out of it. Assuming the sex was, you know, actually good, the only two things I want to do in the aftermath of it are either run it back immediately or lounge around in my blissed-out postcoital haze—which you are very rudely interrupting with all this showering.
Listen, I know some of you love your self-care rituals and bask in your TikTok Everything Showers, but I’m afraid you’ve been lied to. Showering is a chore—something you have to do in order to remain a functioning member of society. And you want me to do that? Right after sex, one of the most primal and sacred escapes we, as humans, have from the drudgery of daily life? Should we also fold the laundry or get a head start on our taxes? Be so fucking for real.
Clearly, I have no qualms about exercising my own God-given right to choose filth. The problem, however, is that once you, lucky theoretical sex partner of mine, decide to take a post-sex shower, now I feel like I’m gross if I don’t follow suit. Or, rather, I’m worried you think I’m gross, and then it turns into an R-rated version of that weird stalemate that happens when you’re washing your hands next to someone in a public bathroom and neither of you wants to be the first one to stop lest you seem insufficiently hygienic and the other person gets to walk away feeling smug about how much better they are than you.
So now you, post-sex showerer, are lathering up in there, foolishly unaware of the fact that I’m in your bed thinking, “Oh, I see—you think I’m disgusting. In fact, the whole reason you’re even taking a shower right now is because of how gross you think I am, right? Say no more. I get it—you hate me, don’t you?” A spiral that could have easily been prevented if you had simply laid around with me in my postcoital filth, as God and nature intended!
All of which is to say: No, no I don’t want to hop in the shower. I don’t want to hop in the shower with you and I don’t want to hop in a sloppy seconds shower after you're done. But by all means, go do your little rinse-off. I’ll be out here spiraling in our sweaty sex sheets, because it turns out that if the Catholic sex guilt doesn’t get you, I fear the post-sex shower shame will.
