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January 11 - March 25, 2025
The Moral Message: “You are Damaged Goods.” If you want or like sex, you’re a slut. Your virginity is your most valuable asset. If you’ve had too many partners (“too many” = more than your male partner has had), you should be ashamed. There is only one right way to behave and one right way to feel about sex—not to feel anything about it at all but to accommodate the man to whom your body belongs. Sex is not part of what makes a woman lovable; it can only be part of what makes a woman unlovable. It may make her “desirable”—and many women try to be desirable, but only as a lesser alternative to
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Translation: If you enjoy being entertained, you will lose your mental virginity, which makes you the same as a prostitute. Which would, it goes without saying, make you unlovable. And a slut. Jane Austen knew it was bogus. You know it’s bogus. But it’s there in the culture you were raised in, and it sneaks under the fence and invades like poison ivy.
But if you’re ready to take that risk, sexual functioning should happen in a particular way—desire, then arousal, then orgasm, preferably during intercourse, simultaneously with your partner—and when it doesn’t, there is a medical issue that you must address. Medically. With medication. Or possibly surgery. To the extent that a woman’s sexual response differs from a man’s, she is diseased—except for pregnancy, which is what sex is for.
Simultaneous orgasm can be very nice. But you know as well as I do that it is not the marker of a “perfectly adjusted” sexual experience. And yet, nearly one hundred years later, the idea of simultaneous orgasm during intercourse persists as a bogus cultural marker of “sexual excellence.”
The Media Message: “You Are Inadequate.” Spanking, food play, ménages à trois… you’ve done all these things, right? Well, you’ve at least had clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, uterine orgasms, energy orgasms, extended orgasms, and multiple orgasms? And you’ve mastered at least thirty-five different positions for intercourse? If you don’t try all these things, you’re frigid.
In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong, too, try something else. Forever.
On the day we’re born, most of us are celebrated and called beautiful. But something happens between that joyful day when every inch, every ounce, every roll, and every bump of a girl’s body is celebrated as perfect and lovable precisely as it is… and the day she hits puberty.
What happens is she absorbs messages about what is or is not lovable about her body. The seeds of body self-criticism are planted and nurtured, and body self-confidence and self-compassion are neglected, punished, and weeded out.
Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are.4 And it’s messing with our orgasms, our pleasure, our desire, and our sexual satisfaction. There is a direct trade-off between sexual wellbeing and self-critical thoughts about your body.
important links between body image and just about every domain of sexual behavior you can imagine: arousal, desire, orgasm, frequency of sex, number of partners, sexual self-assertiveness, sexual self-esteem, using alcohol or other drugs during sex, engaging in unprotected sex, and more.
Women who feel worse about their bodies have less satisfying, riskier sex, with less pleasure, more unwanted consequences, and more pain.6 I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that feeling good about your body improves your sex life. It’s obvious once you think about it, right? Just imagine having sex if you feel insecure and unattractive. How would it feel to have a person you care about touching you and looking at you, when the thought of your own body makes you uncomfortable? Would you pay attention to the sensations in your body and your partner’s—or would you pay attention to
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Now imagine having sex when you feel tremendously confident and beautiful. Imagine how it feels to have a person you care about touching your skin with their hands and gaze, when you love every inch of yourself and can feel your partner appreciating how gorgeous you are.
The wanting mechanism is fully on board in both cases—but in the first case the mechanism is torn between moving toward the sexual experience and moving away from your own body. In the second, when you enjoy living inside your own skin, the mechanism moves toward sex and toward yourself, without conflict.
So of course body self-criticism interferes with sexual wellbeing. We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress. And women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with...
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you never chose not to love your body. You didn’t choose much that happened to you between the day you were born and the day you hit puberty, and that’s when most of the body self-criticism was taking root. You never even got a chance to say yes or no to the self-criticism being planted in your garden.
a lot of women trust their bodies less than they trust what they’ve been taught, culturally, about their bodies. But culture has taught you stuff that is both incorrect and just wrong. Hurtful.
self-criticism is good for you and second, that fat is bad for you. These things are both false.
Women have been trained to beat ourselves up when we fall short. We criticize ourselves—“I’m so stupid/fat/crazy,” “I suck,” “I’m a loser”—as a reflex when things don’t go the way we want them to. And our brains process self-criticism with brain areas linked to behavioral inhibition—brakes.
Self-criticism is associated with worse health outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.12 That’s right: Self-criticism is one of the best predictors of loneliness—so it’s not just “I am at risk,” it’s also “I am lost.”
when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit.
When you stop beating yourself up—when you stop reinjuring yourself—what happens is… you start to heal.
Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.
when you notice yourself thinking, “Ugh, I suck,” or whatever it is you say to yourself when things don’t go your way, just notice that. Just notice that it’s a weed. You didn’t put it there—it snuck under the fence. And take that opportunity to plant a seed of something positive. For example, when you think, “Ugh, I suck,” plant the thought, “I’m okay.” As in, “I’m safe,” “I’m whole,” or “I’m home.” You’re okay.
Here’s the myth as plainly as I can state it: If I know how much you weigh, I also know something about your health.
accept your size, (2) trust yourself, (3) adopt healthy lifestyle habits including joyful physical activity and nutritious foods, and (4) embrace size diversity.15
Welcome your body just as it is, listen to your own internal needs, and make healthful choices around food and physical activity. You might lose weight (you probably won’t), but you’ll definitely be healthier and happier.
women are reluctant to let go of their self-critical thoughts and the cultural thin ideal even when they believe that it’s all nonsense—which it is—and they’re even more hesitant to believe that they are already beautiful—which they are.
in the end, it will come down to a decision to stop cultivating the weeds of self-criticism and instead nourish the flowers of confidence today—and then remaking that decision each day.
sexual disgust. It’s a learned withdrawal response from things that are “gross.”
“My partner wants to…” I have a lot of conversations that begin this way, trailing off into embarrassed silence. In one particular case, the student continued, “… He wants to give me oral sex,” and then she turned bright red.
“Isn’t it…” she finally asked, “dirty? Down there? The hair? The… mucus…?”
often there’s a huge resistant knot of beliefs that has to be untangled before the person can get there.
In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response.
But many of us were raised in cultures that say our own sexual bodies are disgusting and degrading, and so are the fluids, sounds, and smells those bodies make, as are a wide array of the things we might do with our own bodies and our partner’s.
If a sexual behavior or a part of your body is considered “low,” do you suppose that activates the accelerator? Nope. Disgust hits the brakes.
Recognize her own beauty of body and spirit Feel fully in control of who touches her body, and how, and when Know how to protect herself against consequences like infections and pregnancy
“I’d never want Julia to feel like there was anything wrong with any part of her body. I am not being a role model for her.”
Disgust can function as a social emotion—that is, we learn about what aspects of the world (including our own bodies) are disgusting by reading the responses of the people around us. For example, infants will avoid a toy that their adult caregiver looks at with an expression of disgust.
women tend to be more sensitive than men to learned disgust, particularly in the sexual domain,
If a girl has a particularly sensitive brakes system, one incident might be enough to create a tangled knot in her arousal process. For many women, though, it takes consistent reinforcement of a negative message in order for it to be embedded in sexual response, and consistent reinforcement takes a sex-negative culture.
begin to recognize where your learned disgust response is interfering with your own sexual pleasure, and decide whether it’s something you’d rather let go of. Your genitals and your partners’, your genital fluids and your partners’, your skin and sweat and the fragrances of your body, these are all healthy and beautiful—not to mention normal—elements of human sexual experience. You get to choose whether you feel grossed out by them.
disgust, as a learned response to sex, impairs women’s sexual functioning and is especially associated with sexual pain disorders.23
Sex-negative culture has trained us to be self-critical and judgmental about our bodies and our sexualities, and it’s interfering with our sexual wellbeing.
Sometimes we cling to our self-criticism. We think to ourselves: “If I stop beating myself up, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and then I’ll never change!”
“To accept myself as I am would be to accept that I am a flawed, bad, broken person, and to abandon all hope that I could one day be good enough to deserve love.”
experiencing yourself as a threat that needs to be escaped (which is impossible), conquered (which is literally self-destructive), or avoided through shutdown (which is counterproductive, to say the least).
Self-kindness is our ability to treat ourselves gently and with caring.
Common humanity is viewing our suffering as something that connects us with others, rather than separates us.
Mindfulness is being nonjudgmental about whatever is happening in the present moment.
over-identification, as in over-identifying with your own failures and suffering, holding fast to the pain and being unable to let it go.
