Therapy, Comedy, and The Scripts We Didn't Write
“This sounds like a virgin wrote it.”
The line lands with a laugh. But like many things said in jest, it holds a deeper truth. Young girls, especially young Black girls, can be subject to this truth of silence, shame, and unspoken rules that follow them into adulthood. As a therapist and as a Black woman, I know how often these “rules” show up in the therapy room, not as facts but as inherited fears. Yanni Stone and the Honey Pot Trap, which follows a 29-year-old virgin wrestling with desire, creativity, and self-permission, is not just a coming-of-age story. It is a reclamation. Of voice. Of body. Of authorship.
From an early age, many of us were taught to believe that our value or self worth lives in what we shun. That if we stayed pure, chaste, respectable, if we studied hard, kept our skirts long, and our voices soft, we would earn love, safety, and admiration. Desire, we learned, was dangerous. Visibility meant vulnerability. Sexual expression was for women who had nothing else to offer, not for us, the “good ones.”
In Eloquent Rage, Dr. Brittney Cooper calls respectability politics “a garbage tool for Black liberation.”¹ She’s right. Respectability tells Black women to shrink, to avoid being too loud, too smart, too sexy, or too visible. As bell hooks wrote, “No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have Black women.”² These aren’t just cultural messages. They’re psychological traps. They ask us to split ourselves, to be desirable but not desiring, to be present but not embodied.
Dr. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt highlights this painful contradiction in her work Stolen Women, describing how generations of Black women have inherited sexual trauma without ever being given the language to process it.³ She writes about how the impact of slavery, religious conservatism, and racial stereotypes have shaped a legacy where Black women are either hypersexualized or desexualized, never safe to simply be. Simply being is deemed unsafe. These messages can spawn internalized scripts that result in a subconscious system that echoes, “if I explore my sexuality, I’ll be unsafe,” or “if I express desire, I’ll be seen as less worthy.”
Now therapy enters the chat. Therapy helps name the voice in your head that isn’t actually yours. These could be the voices of your parents, friends, and society. It creates space to ask, “who taught me that? And why do I still believe it?” Often, the first step toward healing is laughter, not because the wound is funny, but because comedy offers relief. The protagonist in this play attempts to write about her vagina, and in doing so, stumbles into the architecture of shame that’s deeply instilled in her. She’s brilliant, awkward, curious, and scared. She aspires to be bold, while simultaneously, wanting to be good. This internal battle is not a reflection of immaturity; it’s indoctrination.
In therapy, we call these cognitive distortions, false beliefs shaped by experience, not evidence.⁴ And for many women, especially Black women, the belief that sexuality makes us unworthy is a challenging journey to unlearn. To recognize the belief that sexuality equals unworthiness is rooted in societal, cultural, or historical oppression. This play opens the portal to begin healing. It makes a mockery of shame. It exposes the absurdity of purity culture. It unveils the tightrope this character has been asked to walk, and it invites us to question why the rope is even there.
Audre Lorde noted, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”⁵ To be in touch with one’s erotic self is not to be inappropriate or irresponsible; it is to be fully alive. The character in this play isn’t seeking to just lose her virginity; she yearns to discover herself in the midst of all the noise. She aspires to speak a truth her body has always known but never had permission to say aloud. She wants to be who she is truly meant to be.
Yanni Stone and the Honey Pot Trap is a love letter, that encapsulates the intersection of vaginas, virginity, romantic comedy tropes, and the complicated, joyful, terrifying work of returning home to oneself. It’s about what happens when a woman dares to ask, “what if I’m allowed to want?” “What if my desire is not my downfall, but my doorway?”
In therapy, we often say that healing isn’t about becoming someone new; it’s about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be.⁶ This play does just that. Through laughter, vulnerability, and the awkward, beautiful chaos of becoming, it reminds us that joy is valuable. Comedy can be radical. Pleasure is not shameful. Maybe, just maybe, there is nothing wrong with sounding like a virgin, so long as the voice is finally your own.
Piece written by Saabira Smith
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Footnotes
Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 35.
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 7.
Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives (New York: Wiley, 1997), 2–3.
Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (New York: Penguin, 1979).
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 54.
Common phrase in person-centered and psychodynamic therapy traditions; attributed to therapeutic theorists such as Carl Rogers and echoed across modern trauma-informed therapy.
