Hope with Holly

This video is for educational purposes and discusses consent, s*xual coercion, relationship dynamics, and healthy intimacy between adults. Follow Hope With Holly for more.

If someone has to be begged, guilted, pressured, shamed, manipulated, or worn down into s*xual activity, that is not the same thing as freely given desire.

Marriage does not create permanent consent.

And a partner saying, “Fine, I’ll do it so you’ll stop asking,” is very different from a partner freely choosing intimacy because they genuinely want to participate.

Sometimes s*xual desire is responsive and may grow after affectionate or intimate contact begins. But the key is that the person wants to be there, feels free to stop, and is not being pressured into continuing.

If your partner repeatedly does not want s*x, the answer is not more pressure.

The better questions are:

Does s*x feel pleasurable for them?
Do they feel emotionally and physically safe?
Is there resentment, stress, pain, exhaustion, hormonal change, medication effects, or relationship disconnection?

Healthy intimacy is not something one person extracts from another.

It is something two adults freely choose together.

Educational content only. This post is intended to promote consent, healthy relationships, and s*xual wellbeing.

This is satire. Satire to prove a point for educational purposes. Follow Hope With Holly for more.

A man told me women are the property of men because “God knows what’s best.”

So I used the same kind of cherry-picked biology, theology, and statistics to “prove” the opposite: that men belong to women.

My ridiculous case?

Women create men.
Men inherit an X chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from their mothers.
Male development requires additional biological signaling.
Men are stronger, so clearly they were built for manual labor.
Women create life, so obviously we should run civilization.
Women live longer.
Men commit the overwhelming majority of serious violence.
The Grandmother Hypothesis suggests older women may have helped descendants survive.
Some female animals can reproduce without males.
And women never needed to write a holy book declaring men belonged to us.

Do I actually believe women own men?

Of course not.

That would be ridiculous.

That’s the point.

I can cherry-pick biology, evolution, statistics, and theology to manufacture a hierarchy in women’s favor, and it still wouldn’t make it true.

Women don’t own men.
Men don’t own women.
Human beings are not property.

And calling domination “God’s design” doesn’t make it divine.

What if one of the most harmful things we ever did to marriage was convince people that hierarchy was holy? Follow Hope With Holly for more.

I’m not saying every marriage with traditional gender roles is abusive. I’m saying that giving one adult automatic authority over another adult simply because of s*x creates a power imbalance that love does not require.

Healthy relationships need mutual respect, shared influence, compromise, accountability, emotional safety, and the freedom to disagree without being labeled rebellious or disobedient.

If a husband is wise, loving, safe, and trustworthy, he does not need God-given authority over his wife to be those things.

And if he is controlling, immature, or abusive, giving him “biblical authority” can make the situation far more dangerous.

Maybe partnership was never the threat to marriage.

Maybe hierarchy was.

Sometimes the question isn’t “Do I love them?” Follow Hope With Holly for more.

It’s “Do I like who I am when I’m with them?”

If you’ve become more anxious, controlling, hypervigilant, insecure, isolated, or afraid to speak honestly, pay attention.

That doesn’t automatically mean your partner is a terrible person. But it may mean the relationship dynamic is bringing out a version of you that you don’t want to keep becoming.

Healthy love should leave room for your voice, your friendships, your goals, your boundaries, your personality, and your peace.

You should not have to abandon yourself in order to keep a relationship.

Sometimes the biggest red flag isn’t who they are.

It’s who you have to become to stay with them.

I grew up believing thunderstorms meant God was angry. Follow Hope With Holly for more.

As a little girl, thunder wasn’t just weather. I had been taught about an angry God, demons, angels, spiritual warfare, punishment, hell—and that my prayers and behavior somehow mattered in this invisible cosmic battle happening around me.

So when the sky cracked open, my nervous system didn’t hear science. It heard danger.

Now I know thunder is simply sound created when lightning superheats the air so rapidly that it expands and produces a shockwave. And I can watch a storm roll across the sky with awe instead of wondering what I did wrong.

That’s one way religious trauma works: beliefs taught in childhood can become fear responses in the body long after our adult minds stop believing them.

Children should be allowed to look at thunderstorms with curiosity and wonder—not terror that God is angry with them.

Sometimes healing is learning that the thing you were taught to fear was never coming for you in the first place.

It took me 15 years of therapy, a mountain of books, and a lot of trial and error to learn these 20 things:
Follow Hope With Holly for more.

1. Be the love of your life.
2. Stop outsourcing your worth.
3. Perfectionism is not the goal.
4. Shame keeps you stuck; self-compassion helps you change.
5. Learn to regulate your nervous system.
6. Watch patterns, not promises.
7. Urgency is often anxiety, not intuition.
8. People-pleasing is self-abandonment.
9. Understanding someone does not require tolerating harm.
10. Boundaries are about what you will participate in.
11. Confidence and self-respect are not the same thing.
12. Heal your attachment wounds.
13. Feelings are real, but they are not always facts.
14. You do not have to obey every thought.
15. Financial independence gives you walk-away power.
16. Unlearn the conditioning that taught you to center everyone else.
17. Awareness is not enough. Healing requires practice.
18. Pause before you react.
19. You cannot heal while continually abandoning yourself to stay connected.
20. The ultimate goal is self-trust.

That is what I am teaching inside my Year to Self-Respect program: the lessons that took me years to piece together, organized into one year of practical healing work.

You do not need to become perfect.

You need to become someone you can trust not to abandon.

Love,
Hope with Holly

I have two very different jobs, but honestly, they’re connected by the same purpose. Follow Hope With Holly for more.

Part of my days are spent creating content for Hope with Holly, sitting on Zoom calls with women who are healing from relationship abuse, religious abuse, trauma, and years of losing themselves. I also host women’s retreats where we slow everything down, regulate our nervous systems, reconnect with ourselves, and remember what peace actually feels like.

And when I’m not doing that, I’m usually doing my other job.

I own a 15-acre farm outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, where I host weddings, private events, luxury date nights, romantic proposals, women’s retreats, picnics, and fishing.

But this property was never supposed to be just a business.

I bought it during one of the hardest transitions of my life. We were living through a global pandemic. My children were going through puberty. I was newly divorced. I was entering perimenopause. Life felt like a lot.

I wanted to create a sanctuary for me and my children — somewhere peaceful, beautiful, and safe where we could make new memories while we healed.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wanted to share that sanctuary with other people too.

Now I get to watch children catch their very first fish here. I watch people get engaged beneath the trees. Couples celebrate anniversaries beside the pond. Families gather together. Brides walk toward the person they love. Women come for the weekend exhausted and leave feeling a little more like themselves again.

That’s what my farm means to me.

It isn’t just 15 acres of land.

It’s a place where people get to slow down, breathe, love each other, celebrate something beautiful, and hopefully leave with a memory they’ll carry for the rest of their lives.

Maybe my two jobs aren’t actually that different after all.

Both are about helping people create a life that feels a little safer, a little more peaceful, and a lot more their own.

If you’re deconstructing from MAGA or Christian nationalism, I see you. Follow Hope With Holly for more.

It is not easy to question the belief system that built your identity. It is not easy to lose your tribe, your certainty, your moral framework, and your imagined future. That kind of unraveling feels like grief because it is grief.

And.

Your awakening does not erase your impact.

Some people were hurt. Some are still healing. Some are still angry. That doesn’t mean growth isn’t real — it means repair takes time.

This is the work:
Staying in the discomfort.
Not running back to certainty.
Not centering your shame.
Becoming trustworthy through consistent action.

You don’t deserve abuse.
You also shouldn’t expect applause.

Growth is possible.
But growth includes consequences.

If you’re serious about truth — stay.

The Bible never directly forbids ma********on.
Follow Hope With Holly for more.
It also never commands men to remain virgins until marriage.

But women? Their virginity was closely monitored, tied to bride-price, family honor, male lineage, and their value as wives.

That is because biblical s*xual ethics were built inside a patriarchal system where women could be sold, exchanged, captured, inherited, awarded, or transferred between men.

So when Christians use the Bible to shame women for ma********on, premarital s*x, desire, divorce, or s*xual autonomy, we need to ask a much bigger question:

Why are we treating an ancient patriarchal collection as the final authority on healthy s*xuality?

This is the same Bible that:

• allows fathers to sell daughters
• permits men to take female war captives as wives
• allows polygamy and concubinage
• makes men pay fathers after taking a virgin’s s*xuality
• gives women to military victors
• allows husbands and fathers to cancel women’s vows
• portrays women being handed to mobs to protect men
• never places an equal virginity standard on men

And then the church built purity culture on top of it.

A culture that taught women their bodies were dangerous, their desire was shameful, their virginity determined their worth, and men’s behavior was somehow their responsibility.

I do not believe healthy s*xual morality should be based on ownership, patriarchy, fear, or control.

I believe it should be based on:

Consent.
Honesty.
Equality.
Safety.
Respect.
Responsibility.
Freedom from coercion and exploitation.

The Bible may tell us what ancient men believed about s*x.

That does not mean God said it.

And it certainly does not mean we should still live by it.