the only change you make after reading this book is to reduce your body self-criticism, that alone will revolutionize your sexual wellbeing.
Next, I’ll talk about another core emotion, like stress and attachment: disgust. Like body self-criticism, disgust is so entrenched in the sexual culture that it’s difficult to know what our sexual wellbeing would be like without it. But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to.
And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self- criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into. When you take the time to notice your unchosen beliefs, and to say yes or no to those beliefs, you empower yourself to have the sexual wellbeing that fits you, custom made. three messages Many of my students come to my class thinking that they know kind of a lot about sex, only to discover, about halfway through the first lecture, that they kind of don’t.
What they do know a lot about—and they really know a lot about it—is not sex itself but rather what their culture believes about sex. They, we, all of us, are surrounded by messages about these beliefs, messages that are not only short on facts but are also actively self-contradictory.
I was puzzled by the false beliefs my students brought with them into the classroom, until I began reading antique sex advice manuals. And there they were in black and white, written a hundred years ago or more—the same false ideas my students believed. Students have absorbed these ideas from their families and their cultures, without any of them ever having read those books.
One day in class, I read aloud a couple of definitions of “sex.” First I read from Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique by T. H. van de Velde, from 1926. He wrote that “normal sexual intercourse” is
that intercourse which takes place between two sexually mature individuals of opposite sexes; which excludes cruelty and the use of artificial means for producing voluptuous sensations; which aims directly or indirectly at the consummation of sexual satisfaction, and which, having achieved a certain degree of stimulation, concludes with the ejaculation—or emission—of the semen into the vagina, at the nearly simultaneous culmination of sensation— 1or orgasm—of both partners.
Then I read from The Hite Report, published in 1976, from the chapter titled “Redefining Sex”: Sex is intimate physical contact for pleasure, to share pleasure with another person (or just alone). You can have sex to orgasm, or not to orgasm, genital sex, or just physical intimacy— whatever seems right to you. There is never any reason to think the “goal” must be intercourse, and to try to make what you feel fit into that context. There is no standard of sexual performance “out there,” against which you must measure yourself; you aren’t ruled by “hormones” or “biology.” You are free to explore and discover your own sexuality, to learn or unlearn anything you want, and to make physical relations with other people, of either sex, 2anything you like.
And I asked my students, “Which of these is more like what you learned
growing up?”
No contest. Ideal Marriage.
Many of us have absorbed ideas about sex that are at home in a century- old sex manual, even though all the research and political change since then has busily dismantled every single aspect of those old ideas. Somehow the culture has not absorbed the more inclusive and evidence-based ideas of more recent decades.
The outdated ideas consist of three interwoven cultural messages of sexual socialization that women encounter in modern America. I call them the Moral Message, the Medical Message, and the Media Message—sent by three separate but intertwined messengers. To varying degrees, each has pieces of truth and wisdom to offer, and to varying degrees each has a self- interested agenda. We’ve all absorbed at least a little of all of them, and they shape the story we tell about our own and others’ sexualities.
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 being lovable. If you are sexually desirable, you are, by definition, unlovable.
And a slut.
This is the oldest message, having changed only superficially in the last three hundred years. There are almost too many examples to choose just one, but let’s take a paragraph of rhetorical questions from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, published in 1766 and read aloud by Mr. Collins to the ladies in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. The overall message of the Sermons is “women are appealing when they’re meek and ignorant and pure.” In this section, Fordyce is discussing “public diversions” involving “oaths, imprecations, double meaning, everything obscene” (he means going to the theater): Between the state of virgin purity and actual prostitution are there no intermediate degrees?
Is it nothing to have the soul deflowered, the fancy polluted, the passions flung into a ferment? . . . Such indeed one would think were the opinion of those, who imagine there can be no harm in a passion for places of entertainment . . .
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.
The Medical Message: “You Are Diseased.” Sex can cause disease and pregnancy, which makes it dangerous. But if you’re ready to take that risk, sexual functioning should happen in a particular order—desire, then arousal, then orgasm during intercourse simultaneously with your partner— and when it doesn’t, there is a medical issue that you must address.
Medically. Women’s sexual response is biologically analogous to men’s, though most women want sex less than men and take longer to achieve orgasm. 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. One woman even told me that her (male) doctor said her low sexual desire was caused by her body shutting down her sex drive in order to prevent her from getting pregnant. She asked me if that’s true. Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no, and I hope that doctor reads chapter 7.
This is a newer message, dating from about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. As an example, Marie Stopes’s 1918 classic, Married Love,
has this to say on the subject of intercourse: Where the [man and woman] are perfectly adjusted, the woman simultaneously reaches the crisis of nervous reactions and muscular convulsions similar to his. This mutual orgasm is extremely important . . . and it is a mutual, not a selfish, pleasure, more calculated than anything else to draw out an unspeakable tenderness and understanding in both partakers of this sacrament.
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. If you’ve had too few partners, don’t watch porn, and don’t have a collection of vibrators in your bedside table, you’re a prude.
Also: You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small.
Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong too, try something else. Forever.
This is the newest message, following close on the heels of television and the birth control pill, around the middle of the twentieth century. To see an example, just look at the checkout counter of any drugstore, where magazine racks announce in bright sans serif fonts all the exciting things you could (and, it goes without saying, should ) be doing in bed. In the month that I’m writing this, the covers of various women’s magazines announce “Break the Bed Sex: 21 New Ideas to Blow Your Own Damn Mind” (Cosmopolitan), “The First Time He Sleeps With You: Four Confessions That Shocked Us” (Glamour), and “Total Body Sex: Follow This Road Map to a Longer, Stronger Big-O!” (Women’s Health).
You know it’s just for fun. You’re not really trying to live up to the standard set by characters on a TV show. But it’s there, affecting your garden, whether you welcome it there or not.
Camilla had said, “The images we see—or don’t see—matter.
They tell us what’s possible.”