mention normal—elements of human sexual experience. You get to choose whether you feel grossed out by them.
The research tells us that disgust, as a learned response to sex, impairs women’s sexual functioning and is especially associated with sexual pain 22disorders.
In the next section, I’ll describe three strategies for making your own choices about what is or isn’t disgusting—they’re the same strategies you use to make your own choices about self-criticism. But the first step is to begin to notice when you experience an involuntary withdrawal from sex- related things, and try on the possibility that the sight, the smells, the sounds, the stickiness of your own sexual organism are glorious and beautiful parts of being a human being.
Because what if all of that actually is beautiful and glorious? What if
your body is cause for celebration?
(P.S. It totally is.) • • • Let’s get practical. 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. So how do we create a bubble of sex positivity for ourselves, where we can explore and celebrate and maximize our own sexual potential? How do we maximize the yum, in a world that tries to convince us we’re yucky? I’ve found persuasive evidence that the following three strategies can genuinely create positive change. maximizing yum . . . with science! part 1: self-
compassion 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!”
And then we cling to our self-judgments even more tightly—after all, these are moral issues, involving whether you are a good, decent, worthy person or a bad, disgusting, worthless person. We think: “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 better, that I could one day deserve love.”
Remember that beating yourself up is the emotional One Ring equivalent of treating yourself as your own internal lion, 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).
And that’s why we need self-compassion.
Self-compassion is the opposite of self-criticism and self-judgment. In her book Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, researcher and educator Kristin Neff describes self-compassion’s three key elements: • Self-kindness is our ability to treat ourselves gently and with caring. On the Self Compassion Scale (SCS), a survey used to assess self-compassion, self-kindness is described with items like “When I’m going through a very hard time, I give myself the caring and tenderness I need.” In contrast, its opposite, self-judgment, is assessed with “I’m intolerant and impatient towards those aspects of my personality I don’t like.” • Common humanity is viewing our suffering as something that connects us with others, rather than separates us. It’s assessed on the SCS with items like “When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are shared by most people.” Its opposite, isolation, is assessed with “When I fail at something that’s important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure.” • Mindfulness is being nonjudgmental about whatever is happening in the present moment.
I talked about mindfulness in chapter 4, and I’ll be talking about it again in chapter 9.
Mindfulness is important. On the SCS it’s assessed with items like “When something painful happens I try to take a balanced view of the situation.” Its opposite is over-identification, as in over-identifying with your own failures and suffering, holding fast to the pain and being unable to let it go. It’s assessed with items like “When I’m feeling down I tend to obsess and fixate on everything that’s wrong.”
Self-judgment, isolation, and over-identification turn you into your own lion, being your own threat—“I am at risk.” And they’re normal—we all experience them. Self-compassion doesn’t mean never feeling them, it means being kind to yourself when you do.
I like to visualize the lion of body self-criticism as a sweet little kitten that’s been treated badly and needs me to give it affection and tenderness.
That’s what helps me to forgive my culture for teaching me such bullshit. A woman I know prefers to imagine it as an enemy, and she visualizes herself beating the crap out of it. She finds her way to forgiveness of her culture (and of herself, for having believed her culture) through a sense of conquering the enemy. Whatever works!
Both of us complete the stress response cycle with physical activity, affection, a good cry, self-care, or any other strategy that deals with the stress itself, as I described in chapter 4. We let our bodies know we have successfully escaped the lion—“I am safe. I am whole. I am home.”
Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often
contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others.
Self-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we’re doing well and when we’re struggling— 23because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.
Nor is self-compassion the same as self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is what you do to numb emotional pain rather than allowing it to complete the cycle. Olivia’s moments of compulsive sexuality are an extreme example, but for most of us self-indulgence takes the form of binge-watching Netflix or eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting because “I deserve it,” instead of feeling our Feels. Self-indulgence is a form of freeze, sedating the lion instead of escaping or conquering it.
Emotional pain is exhausting, and sometimes it’s necessary to take a break from the pain, numb out for a while. Just remember what happens when the sedated lion comes out from under the anesthesia. The cycle has to complete, it wants to complete. Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process—and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.
24Here’s an exercise to help increase self-compassion: 1. Write a description of a situation that you’re beating yourself up about—it can be anything from an aspect of your sexual functioning to your romantic relationship (or lack thereof) to your work to your body or anything else. Be sure to include the self-critical thoughts you’re battering yourself with.
2. Then write the name of a good friend at the top of the page and imagine that that person is describing this problem. Imagine that she’s asking for your help, and write down what you would tell her. Imagine that you’re in your best, most empathic, calmest, most supportive state of mind, and tell her all the things she needs to hear.
3. Now reread what you wrote. It’s for you.
The shorthand version of this exercise is: Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.
Olivia told me this story about how she figured out how to stop hitting the gas pedal when she got stressed out.
One night during finals week, Olivia tried initiating sex at bedtime.
Patrick, predictably, was too tired, and said so.
In the wake of his gentle refusal, self-doubt flooded through Olivia like a fast-rising river. What if her high sex drive wasn’t cool or sexy or fun or empowered? What if she was just trying desperately— pathetically—to get attention the only way she could? What if actually
she was just trying to control people with her sexuality? What if— Her heart was racing and she felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Into the darkness, she reached out to her partner. “Patrick?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m having a meltdown.”
“It’s finals week. It happens. Deep breaths.”
“No, I’m having a meltdown about sex.”
“Babe, I’m so tired . . .”
“No, I know, I’m not saying that!” She explained in a breathless panic about the flood of self-doubt, adding her sudden recollection that her theory about testosterone and her genitals and her sexuality was wrong. “What if all the things I’ve told myself about my sexuality are just an invention to mask the truth that actually I’m totally just this bully using my sexuality to manipulate you? What if I’m out of control and, like, a danger to myself and others?”
Patrick turned on the light and looked at her. “Wow, I had no idea you had so much of this cultural brainwashing still buried in your brain. It’s like the anxious part of your brain seriously believes all the women-who-like-sex-are-evil stuff, and when you’re stressed out, all those beliefs come with the stress—even though the calm version of your brain totally knows how awesome you are. Keep breathing, babe,
you’re holding your breath.”
And there it was.
When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.
And the negative opinions she had when she was stressed just added another level of stress and escalated the situation, which made her feel all the more self-critical, which eventually activated her least adaptive coping strategies. It was like trying to douse a fire by pouring
gasoline on it.
Solution?
Stop adding fuel to the fire. Notice that you’re doing it, and do something else. Let the fire burn itself out.
She had already figured out that exercise helped her complete the cycle, coasting to the end of the biological stress cycle without hitting