And it’s just as true for the stories we tell as it is about the images of the people in the stories.
Camilla had spent a lot of her early adolescence reading old romance novels from the 1970s and ’80s. These stories stuck with her so powerfully that she even wrote her undergrad thesis on gender and race politics in ephemeral art.
But now, having figured out context and the dual control model, she revisited a collection of romance novels, examining the contexts that the narratives created for the women’s sexualities.
And those contexts were bizarre.
She told Henry and me, “So here’s the universal story: The heroine is a Good Girl, who has no accelerator and a sensitive brake, who has never had the slightest sexual feeling until she meets the Hero. You can tell he’s the Hero because suddenly Good Girl’s accelerator is going bananas. But Good Girl has to keep the brakes on because sex is inherently bad and dangerous, and so of course the Hero just has sex with her anyway—”
Henry raised an eyebrow and shook his head at this. I face- palmed.
“But gradually the purity and goodness of her squeaky-clean vagina ‘tames’ the Hero and they fall in love and get married.”
This is both hilarious and tragic, because it is so not how
women’s sexuality actually works.
But here was the next-level insight: She said, “So what I’m thinking is . . . what if the way women’s sexual desire and emotions and relationships are represented in the media is just as distorted as the way women’s bodies are represented?
What if everything about how sex works is just as poorly drawn as the Escher Girls? What if basically everything culture says about sex is wrong, and my slow-to-heat accelerator is actually just completely normal?”
And of course it is. She’s made of all the same parts as everyone
else, organized in a unique way. you are beautiful On the day you were born, how did you feel about the chub of fat on the back of your thighs?
How did the adults around you feel about it?
Every baby needs her caregivers to hold her in their arms with affection and joy, and most of the time in the Western world, those caregivers are bursting with eagerness to meet that need. 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.
Students laugh like I made a joke when I ask, “What would happen if you met your friends at dinner and said, ‘I feel so beautiful today!’?”
“Really, what would happen?” I insist.
“No one would do that,” they tell me.
“But . . . how often would someone meet friends at dinner and say, ‘I
feel so fat today’?”
“All the time,” they say.
3All the time.
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 4way we are.
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. A 2012 review of fifty-seven studies, spanning two decades of research, found 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, 5 engaging in unprotected sex, and more.The results vary somewhat among different age groups, among women of different sexual identities, and across different racial groups, but the overall result is universal: Women who feel worse about their bodies have less satisfying, riskier sex, with less 6pleasure, more unwanted consequences, and more pain.
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 think about having sex if you feel insecure and unattractive. How