Get the shame-free sex education you deserve with The Purity Culture Recovery guide

Out February 19, 2026

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.

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Advanced Praise:

  • “When you know how your body works you can make informed decisions about it,” which is exactly why purity culture exists in the first place. 

    The Purity Culture Recovery Guide will heal people raised with shame, silence and fear around sex. Erica Smith brilliantly and respectfully speaks right into the wounded curiosity experienced by purity culture survivors, answering questions we held in secret. What’s normal? What’s real? Why do I feel this way? In high-control religion, even forming the questions themselves can be scary. The Purity Culture Recovery Guide is the book I wish I had growing up and I wish I’d had it to hand my maturing children, which makes me hope this books reaches a new generation preventively—so that in a few years, there’s less need to recover.

    — Tia Levings, author of the NYT Bestselling memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy and I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma

  • “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. Smith provides grounded expertise dedicated to the virtues of sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.”

    —Sara Moslener, 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. 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.”

    —Tina Schermer Sellers, 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.”

    —Matthias Roberts, 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.”

    —Blake Chastain, author of Exvangelical &  Beyond

  • "Many of us grew up with fear, misinformation, and outright lies about sex—all in the name of pleasing God.

    For those taught to see natural human development as a threat to their spirituality, Erica’s words are more than education—they heal wounds, and open prison doors. With wisdom, wit, and warmth, she frees us from shame and teaches us to trust ourselves again."

    —Brian Recker, author of Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love