Feeling Myself

Trauma, porn, masturbation, sexuality, sex after motherhood, sex when you feel sh*t about your body, sex after separation... I feel shame for the colour of my skin, shame for being female, and shame for wanting more, but I also felt an intense shame around the subject of masturbation.

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Trauma, porn, masturbation, sexuality, sex after motherhood, sex when you feel sh*t about your body, sex after separation... these are all topics around which we skirt delicately, as if they're bombs which will explode if we prod them too curiously. In this way, sex is intimately connected with shame. Like most of us, shame has followed me around for most of my life. I felt shame for the colour of my skin, shame for being female, and shame for wanting more, but I also felt shame around the subject of masturbation. Even as an adult, I carried an intense feeling that masturbation was somehow dirty. I look back on this now and realise how warped our approach to sex is and how the shame that surrounds these conversations holds women back.


In this honest and revealing memoir, Natalie Lee digs deep into her own relationship with sex to expose the shame that many of us feel. Taking us through her journey, from traumatic beginnings to marriage, motherhood and eventually experiencing sexual freedom after divorce in her thirties, Feeling Myself is a story of learning to be your true self in a society that doesn't prioritise your pleasure. It is a book for every woman to feel empowered by and to learn the tools to experience their own emancipation too.