Sexuality – Cosmia

Do you believe sexy nuns are inherently problematic? If so, you’d find yourself right at home on ex-Twitter. An artist made the following provocative tweet, and the Discourse took it from there.

@pykle_ writes: "dont care how much religious trauma u got, stop sexualizing nuns (im serious)"

Below that is a digital illustration of a nun. Well, it's two nuns but it appears to be the same person in two different poses. She is wearing standard black and white nun attire, with long flowing robes that obscures her form. She is wearing a cross necklace with a golden hue. In the first pose she smiles with her hands together in prayer. In the second pose she holds her arms are down and she holds an arrow with her right hand. Except you can't see the hands under the robe. She has a look of disapproval. — 12 million views. 27 thousand likes. This is truly what the people needed to see.

I honestly mostly like this artwork. The colors are nice, the poses and expression are drawn well, and it’s got an effective simple art style that conveys a lot without being overly elaborate. I’m not sure what that arrow she’s holding in the second pose is supposed to mean, but whatever. Her expression says enough. That being said, I take issue with the words attached to it. I don’t want to attack the artist here too much. I checked their page, I think they got pretty good art and some cognitive dissonance. I hope they grow into an amazing artist with better takes. In the meantime I want to focus less on the person saying it and more on the idea of sexualizing nuns.

One song frequently came to my mind when I looked at tweets relating to this art: “Sister” by She Wants Revenge. An all time great song about a man’s sexually charged encounter with a religious woman. I love this song, it’s my favorite one off the album and there’s some tough competition. Yet if I were to fully subscribe to the above take loving it would be wrong. The title “Sister” is meant to allude to nuns in the Catholic tradition. If we want to get technical there is a difference between a sister and a nun, but it’s not an important distinction for our purposes. I am quite confident the OP wouldn’t want you to sexualize sisters either. In this song titled “Sister” the woman offers kinky sex to the man. It’s an entire song about sexualizing nuns, GASP! Does that mean loving this song makes me a bad person???? You can come to your own conclusions, but I don’t think so. I’ll explain what I love about this song and my position on the issue writ large.

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Sister