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 all the things you feel compelled to hide?
And does that activate the sexual accelerator, or does it hit the brake?
Now imagine having sex when you feel tremendously confident and beautiful. Imagine a person you care about touching your skin with their hands and their gaze, when you love every inch of yourself and can feel your partner appreciating how gorgeous you are.
The eagerness 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 their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies.
So, to have more and better sex, love your body.
Which is one of those things where you’re like, “Yeah! . . . But . . . how?”
It’s hard, because 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.
What it comes down to is that 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. I want to address two things you’ve been taught that are definitely wrong, and what’s right: first, that self-criticism is good for you and second that fat is bad for you. These things are both false. Here’s why: criticizing yourself = stress = reduced sexual pleasure 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— 7 brakes.So it’s not surprising that self-criticism is directly related to 8depression—and does depression improve your sexual well-being? It does
not.
Here’s how that works: When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of 9 stress.I described stress in chapter 4 as an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism to help us escape threats—“I am at risk.” When we think, “I am an inadequate person!” that’s like saying, “I am the lion!” Literally, our 10 stress hormone levels increase.Your body reacts to negative self- evaluations as if you’re under attack.
The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness.
Women tend to have a two-layered response to this idea. First, they instinctively love the idea of being more accepting of themselves and not blaming themselves when life isn’t perfect. The research tells women what they already know intuitively: Self-criticism is associated with worse health 11 outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.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.”
But then, 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. As in: “If I stop beating myself up for the ways I’m not perfect, that’s like admitting to the world—and to myself—that I’ll never be perfect, that I’m permanently inadequate! I need my self-criticism in order to maintain hope and to motivate myself to get better.”
When we tell ourselves, “I can’t stop criticizing myself or else I will fail forever!” that’s like saying, “I can’t stop running/fighting/playing dead, or the lion will eat me!” That’s absolutely what our culture has taught us, so it makes sense that many of us believe it. It’s so entrenched in our culture that
it sounds . . . sane. Rational, even.
But it’s not.
Think about it: What would really happen if you stopped running from yourself or beating yourself up? What would happen if you put down the whip you’ve been flogging yourself with for decades?