One of the fascinating things to me about human sexuality is how it is pretty much imprinted on us at birth. Our choices that define the spectrum of our sexuality are set long before we have any idea of what sex or sexuality mean.

The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.

—Genesis 2:25

It’s the word “yet” that breaks my heart. Why would the Bible’s authors add that qualifier, unless body shame was already, in their time, a cultural given, a feeling so immediate and gutting that the lack of mortification at one’s own flesh—its size and shape, its smells and hungers—was worth noting in chapter two of the story of How It All Began.