By Oluwafunke Allen
Four words. No comma, no colon, no named institution. Rewrite Everything You Were Taught About Sex. Of everything on the list, this is the one that reads less like a subtitle and more like an instruction someone is giving you directly.
What an imperative does that a description can’t
Every other option I’ve been weighing describes the book what’s in it, what it promises, who it’s for. This one skips description entirely and just tells you what to do. There’s something almost confrontational about that, in a way I think is earned. This isn’t a book asking politely for your attention. It’s making a claim: that whatever you were taught, all of it, is up for revision. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t think a subtitle should either but I also don’t think softening it would make it more honest.
Where I’ve actually seen this happen
I think of a woman I counselled years ago who had absorbed, without a single sentence ever spoken aloud, the idea that wanting sex made her less holy. Nobody taught her that on purpose. It was inherited the way most of this is through silence, through what wasn’t said, through the discomfort in a room whenever the subject came near it. Rewriting that took longer than reading a book. But the rewriting had to start somewhere, and it started with someone telling her, directly, that what she’d absorbed wasn’t the whole truth.
What I’m still deciding
An instruction this direct works brilliantly cropped down to a single line of text over a video clip. I’m less sure it works sitting quietly under a book cover on a shelf, where nobody’s scrolling past it in two seconds it may need the room a longer subtitle gives a browsing reader to actually understand what’s being rewritten, and why.
The line I want you to keep
Being taught something wrong isn’t a moral failure. Staying with it once you know better might be the only real failure available to you.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below to find out which one wins.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Companion to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
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