When we set out the editorial standards for this magazine, we wrote one rule above the others: no shame. It's the line we test every brief against, every edit against, every reader letter against. It's also the line that gets misunderstood the most. So we want to set out, honestly, what it means and what it doesn't.
This is the manifesto we wrote for ourselves. We're publishing it because the readers who write to us deserve to know what we're trying to do, and the writers we commission deserve a clear standard to write toward.
What we mean by shame
Shame, in the sense we use it, is not embarrassment. Embarrassment is a passing flicker — the sound your body made, the awkward sentence, the misread cue. It's social and it fades.
Shame is the bigger, structural thing. It's the conviction that something about you, sexually, makes you less worthy of love or belonging. That you are dirty, broken, perverted, frigid, used, behind, ahead, wrong. That what you want or what happened to you or what you can't seem to do is evidence of a fundamental defect.
Shame in this sense is not a useful signal. It does not produce better choices. It produces silence, secrecy, avoidance of clinical care, postponed conversations, faked orgasms, untold fantasies, untreated infections, hidden desires, ended relationships, and people who feel alone with experiences that millions of others share. We have read enough reader letters to know this is not theoretical.
So when we say no shame, we mean: we will not, in our pages, add to that pile.
What 'no shame' is not
It is not "anything goes." It is not the absence of judgement. It is not the position that all sexual behaviour is equally acceptable, all relationships equally healthy, all habits equally fine. We make distinctions. We name things that hurt people. We have boundaries.
The line is between calling out behaviours and calling out people. Behaviours can be examined, criticised, recommended against. People remain people, with full standing, regardless of what they've done or wanted or failed to do.
A few specifics, since this matters:
- We are unequivocal about consent. Coercion, assault, and abuse are not framed as kinks or as misunderstandings. They're harms, and we will say so.
- We are unequivocal about safety. We don't soften the science on STIs, contraception, or risk because softening it would feel kinder. Real information is the kindness.
- We don't romanticise relationships that look unhealthy because the people in them are sympathetic. Sympathy and clarity coexist.
- We don't pretend behaviour that's harming someone is fine because the person doing it is reading.
What we will not do is treat ordinary human sexuality — desire, fantasy, inexperience, slow development, late discovery, kink, queerness, polyamory, asexuality, low libido, high libido, body that won't cooperate, body that does — as evidence of a moral failing.
Why this matters for sex writing specifically
Sex writing in the wider culture has two failure modes. The first is moralising — the wagging finger that treats every reader as someone needing correction. The second is permissionless cheerleading — the breathless tone that treats every difficulty as something fixable with the right product or affirmation.
Neither is honest. The moralising tone fails because it makes shame the default emotional register and sends readers away with less information than when they arrived. The cheerleading tone fails because it lies about how hard things actually are, and readers can tell.
The standard we hold ourselves to lives between those two. It's writing that takes the reader's experience seriously, doesn't make it a sermon, doesn't make it a slogan, and trusts the reader to be an adult.
What this looks like in practice
A reader writes in saying she's faked orgasms for eight years. The shaming version of the answer is "you should have been honest from the start." The cheerleading version is "your truth is beautiful, queen." Neither is the answer she needs. The answer she needs is what we tried to write: this is common, here's why it happened, here's how partners typically receive disclosure, here are the practical steps if you want to change the pattern, here's what to expect emotionally.
A reader writes in saying their fantasies scare them. The shaming version is "well, examine yourself, perhaps that's revealing something dark." The cheerleading version is "all fantasies are valid, embrace them." The answer that respects the reader explains what fantasies actually are, what the research says about them, where the genuine red flags live, and how to relate to one's own arousal map without becoming its prosecutor.
The pattern repeats. Real information, real options, real complications. Spoken to as an adult.
The South African context
This editorial line is not neutral in the country we publish from. South Africa carries unusual weight on questions of sex — the colonial inheritance of religious sexual morality, the ongoing public health emergency around HIV, the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the world, queer rights enshrined in the constitution but uneven on the ground, abortion legal but unreliably accessible, sex work criminalised, and a cultural diversity that means there is no single national conversation on any of this.
"No shame" in this context is not a soft commitment. It's a specific position: that the people reading us deserve writing that doesn't replicate the moral architecture that has, for many of them, made the conversation about sex into a punishment to be endured rather than a wellbeing topic to be engaged with.
We're not going to flatten that complexity by pretending South Africa is one thing. Township queer life is not the same as suburban heterosexual marriage is not the same as rural Christian conservatism is not the same as urban polyamorous community. We try to write so that any of those readers can find themselves, or find genuinely new information about people not like them, in our pages.
What we ask of writers
We ask three things of every piece commissioned for this magazine.
- Specificity over generality. Vague advice is shame's friend. The more concrete a piece is — what to actually say, what to actually do, what the actual options are — the less room shame has to fill the gaps.
- Plain English. Jargon is exclusion. Clinical terms when they're necessary; ordinary language otherwise. A reader should not need a dictionary to find out what's happening to their body.
- The reader as an adult. No condescension. No assumption of fragility. No softening of facts because the reader might not handle them. Adults can handle facts. They struggle with being patronised.
And we ask one thing about tone: warmth without performance. We are not anyone's friend. We are also not anyone's lecturer. We are an editorial voice that takes the topic seriously and the reader more so.
Where we have got it wrong
We will get this wrong sometimes. We have already published pieces where, on rereading, a sentence carries an unintended judgement we didn't catch in edit. We have used words that have become loaded in ways we didn't initially see. We have run pieces where the framing serves a part of our audience and quietly excludes another.
The standard isn't that we are perfect. The standard is that the standard is the standard, and when we miss it we re-edit, re-publish, or sometimes write the second piece that corrects the first. Our readers are part of how we find these places.
What we ask of readers
Almost nothing. You don't have to agree with everything we publish. You don't have to take any single piece as the final word — different writers in our masthead will sometimes disagree, gently, in print, and we leave the disagreement in.
What helps us: when we miss the line, tell us. When you wanted information we didn't give, tell us. When you read a piece and felt smaller for having read it, that is a useful piece of feedback and we want it. The "no shame" rule is enforced as much by readers writing in as by editors at the desk.
The neighbouring values
"No shame" doesn't sit alone. It exists alongside several other commitments that we'll name explicitly so the standard is legible.
Specificity. We prefer one concrete piece of information to ten paragraphs of warm reassurance. Specificity is anti-shame in a quiet, structural way. Generality leaves room for the reader to fill in the worst version of themselves; specificity forecloses that gap.
Plurality. We assume our readers are not one demographic, one orientation, one relationship configuration, one body type, one age, one religion, one income, one country. Where a piece is genuinely about a specific group, we say so. Where it isn't, we write so the broadest range of readers can find themselves in the prose without being lectured at.
The clinician's caveat. Where we are giving information that intersects with medical care, we are clear about the limits of editorial writing and explicit about when to see a clinician. We don't use "talk to your doctor" as a hedge to avoid doing the actual work of explaining things; we use it where actual clinical input matters.
Local resources, named. We are based in South Africa. Where we know of specific local services that help — Thuthuzela Centres, OUT, SWEAT, Sonke Gender Justice, the Triangle Project, Marie Stopes — we name them, with phone numbers where useful. The wellness conversation in this country has been carried for years by community-based organisations; pretending otherwise would be a kind of editorial cowardice.
Honesty about complexity. Some of what we write does not have a clean conclusion. Some sexual problems do not resolve with the right framing or the right product. Some relationships do end. Some bodies do not respond to the standard interventions. We write that honestly when it's true. The "no shame" rule does not require pretending that every problem has a tidy answer; it requires not blaming the reader for the absence of one.
The vocabulary problem
A practical issue worth flagging, since it shapes everything we publish: the available vocabulary for sex is bad.
The clinical terms are alienating. The slang is too coded for a general audience. The euphemisms are evasive. The vocabulary that's emerged from sex-positive online communities is sometimes precise but often ingroup-coded in ways that exclude readers who haven't been part of those communities.
We try, sentence by sentence, to find language that's accurate, plain, and not infantilising. This is harder than it sounds. We will sometimes write "vagina" where some readers would prefer a softer word. We will sometimes write "partner" where some readers would prefer a gendered specific. We will sometimes use a clinical term because no plain-English alternative is precise enough. We try to choose deliberately rather than defaulting.
What we won't do: use language that sneers at the reader's body or experience. The body is not the joke. The experience is not the punchline. The plain words for what bodies do are not embarrassing words.
What 'no shame' looks like in editing
A specific window into how this works at the desk. When a draft comes in, we read with a few questions in mind:
- Is there anywhere in this piece a reader could feel smaller for having read it?
- Is the writer using "you" to address the reader or to lecture an imagined wrong-doer?
- Are there sentences that assume the reader's experience matches a default that isn't actually default?
- Are there moments where the writer has chosen reassurance over information?
- Are there moments where the writer has chosen information over warmth in a way that lands cold?
- Does this piece treat the reader as the smartest person they know, or the dumbest?
The answers usually require small line edits rather than structural rewrites. A pronoun swap. A conditional softened or sharpened. A sentence rebuilt from the assumption side rather than the prescription side. The cumulative effect of those small edits is what produces the magazine's house voice.
Where this rule comes from
It comes from the reading we did before this magazine started — hundreds of letters to other publications, reader emails to clinicians we know, the patterns in what people actually struggle with. The single most repeated phrase across that reading was some version of I thought I was the only one. Not "I want a tip." Not "I want a product." I thought I was the only one.
That phrase is what shame produces. The opposite of shame, in editorial terms, is the relief of finding out that what you're going through has happened to many people, has explanations, has paths, and is being taken seriously by someone whose job is to take it seriously.
That is what we are trying to be. The rule exists so we don't quietly stop trying.
What we've learned from the first hundred pieces
The Wellness Center has been live long enough now that we can look back at the first hundred-odd articles we've published and see patterns. Some of what we've learned, in case it's useful for readers tracking what the magazine is becoming:
Pieces about specific lived problems out-perform pieces about general topics. A reader Q&A about one woman's eight years of faking orgasms reaches more people, and lands deeper, than a general explainer on female orgasm would. The specific is generalisable; the general often isn't specific.
Clinical pieces benefit from being more specific, not less. The temptation when writing about, say, hormonal contraception is to keep it broad to cover all readers. The pieces that work are the ones that pick a specific scenario — choosing a pill, switching off the pill, libido changes on the pill — and go deeper than a general overview would.
Essays in named voices are read differently from editorial we-pieces. Sasha writing about somatic experience in first person, Lerato walking through a clinical decision in her own voice, Kabelo's therapist's-room reflections — these reach readers in ways the editorial we doesn't. We use both, deliberately.
The tone that works is not the tone that the wider sex-writing genre uses. The breathless tone, the brand-voice tone, the magazine-feature tone — none of these are quite our register. The register that works is closer to what a really good clinician sounds like in their own consulting room: interested, unflapped, specific, kind in a way that doesn't perform itself.
Readers want to be trusted with difficulty. We've published pieces on trauma, hate crime, sextortion, dead bedrooms, depression's effect on desire, post-illness reconnection, body image, late discovery of queerness. The reader response has been consistent — the harder pieces are the ones that get the most heartfelt mail. The wellness audience is not asking for soft. They're asking for true.
The closing line
If the magazine works, you will leave any given piece with more information, more options, less alone, and not smaller. That's the whole standard. Everything else — the tone, the structure, the language choices, the editorial calls — is in service of that.
If we ever stop doing that, we'd like our readers to be the first to notice.
— The Editorial Team
This piece will be linked from the magazine's about page as our standing editorial commitment. It's a living document; we'll revise it, in public, as we learn what it should mean.
