impact of Western media—especially television—on young women in 28 Fiji.In a culture where there had been “a clear preference for a robust 29 form,”after three years of exposure to late 1990s American television (think Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210), rates of disordered eating among teenage girls rose from 13 percent to 29 percent, with 74 percent reporting that they “feel too big or too fat,” in sharp contrast to pre-TV culture. And this wasn’t just a blip—ten years later, rates of disordered 30eating still hovered around 25–30 percent.
If there were a food that consistently made you sick, you’d stop eating it. So if there’s media that makes you feel more self-critical, stop looking at it.
As you’re looking at movies or television or porn or magazines, ask yourself, “After I see this, am I going to feel better about my body as it is today, or worse?” If the answer is “better!” then do more of that! Increase your exposure to the media that helps you celebrate your body!
But if the answer is “worse,” stop it. You don’t have to get mad and write a letter to the editor or anything (though if you want to, feel free!), just pay attention to how magazines and TV shows and music videos make you feel, and stop buying anything that makes you feel worse. You don’t need to be trained in media literacy and all the ways that you’re being manipulated with digital alteration of images in order to know when something is making you feel better or worse about yourself.
And if it makes you feel worse, evidence suggests that it’s interfering with your sexual wellbeing—even if you’ve been taught to believe that feeling worse about your body “motivates” you to “improve” your body.
That’s a psychological trap you never need to be caught in again. Stop watering the weeds.
By limiting your exposure to media that makes you feel worse about yourself, you’re not just improving your own sex life, you’re also voting with your eyeballs, your ears, and your cash. You’re joining an audience that will pay attention only to things that make women feel better about themselves. Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in a world where performers and artists and media outlets were competing to make the largest number of women feel fantastic about their bodies right now? On behalf of women everywhere, thank you for anything you do to make that real! you do you
We started this chapter with three cultural messages that all of us have been exposed to in one way or another over the course of our lives: the moral message, the medical message, and the media message. All three messages are blended into our individual psyches; none of us lives with just one, and none of us wholly believes any of them. They’ve been layered over each other in our culture, each partially absorbing the others. The contradictions inherent in the three are a source of women’s confusion 31 about how sex is supposed to work.Your faith community tells you one thing, your media culture tells you another, and your doctor seems to have a different attitude entirely.
So whom should you believe? What messages can you trust to promote
your own sexual wellbeing?
The answer is: yourself.
Listen to your own inner voice, which hears all these messages and, somewhere deep inside you, will sound an alarm when it notices bullshit.
We’re all different, so what feels true and what feels like nonsense will vary from person to person. The only possible answer is: Choose what feels right for you and ignore what doesn’t feel right.
Informational cherry picking like this is a bad idea in science and in moralism. Scientific and moral systems, though different from each other in almost every single other way, share the quality of developing coherent structures of meaning where one idea hangs upon the others, the way loops of metal hold chain mail armor together. When you’re working in a scientific or a moral framework, an idea must take its place in the context in which it was intended.
But most of us are just trying to live our lives as best we can. When it comes to investigating and understanding your own individual sexuality, you should cherry-pick. The moral views may be sincere, the media exciting, the doctors apparently expert, but you need not buy in to any system in order to create a coherent narrative of your own sexual self. You don’t need to believe you’ll go to hell if you have sex before marriage in order to decide whether waiting to have sex is a good choice for you. You don’t need to believe you’re sick or broken in order to wish you could just take a pill and want sex out of the blue. And you don’t need to believe that the key to great sex is flavored lube, a giant vibrator, and the ability to deep- throat in order to want to explore, try new toys, new tricks, and new partners.
And even though I’d love you to find meaning in every page, every paragraph of this book, cherry-pick from here, too. We’re all different, so what’s relevant for you is definitely, absolutely not the same as what’s relevant for me or for any of the many hundreds of women I’ve taught.
Take what’s relevant. Ignore what isn’t; it’s there for somebody else who needs it.
Treat cultural messages about sex and your body like a salad bar. Take only the things that appeal to you and ignore the rest. We’ll all end up with a different collection of stuff on our plates, but that’s how it’s supposed to work.
It goes wrong only when you try to apply what you picked as right for your sexuality to someone else’s sexuality.
“She shouldn’t eat those beets; beets are disgusting.”
They might be disgusting to you, but maybe she likes beets. Some people do. And you never know, maybe one day you’ll try them and find you like them. Or not, that’s cool too. You do you.
“She shouldn’t have taken so many fried, breaded things—she’ll end up with a heart attack!”
She might and she might not, but either way it’s her heart and her choice. You do you. Absorb what feels right for you and shake off what feels wrong. Let everybody else do everybody else, absorbing what feels right for them and shaking off what feels wrong.
Laurie and Johnny’s story about “You’re beautiful,” sounds like a story about body image or disgust, but really it’s about love. Laurie’s body shame wasn’t just about the changes to her body. She had absorbed cultural beliefs about what those changes meant about her as a person. And because she believed her body was evidence that she was somehow a lesser person, she hid behind an emotional wall, so that no one could see those parts of her she felt ashamed of. But that wall also stood between her and the love she was starving for.
We build walls for a lot of reasons. To protect vulnerable parts of ourselves. To hide things we don’t want others to see. To keep people out. To keep ourselves in.
But a wall is a wall is a wall—it’s an indiscriminate barrier. If you hide behind a wall to protect yourself from the pain of rejection, then you also block out joy. If you never let others see the parts you want to hide, then they’ll never see the parts you want them to know.
When Laurie let the wall down, the love came flooding in.
No girl is born hating her body or feeling ashamed of her sexuality. You had to learn that. No girl is born worried that she’ll be judged if someone finds out what kind of sex she enjoys. You had to learn that, too. You have to learn, as well, that it is safe to be loved, safe to be your authentic self, safe to be sexual with another person, or even safe to be on your own.
Some women learn these things in their families of origin. But even if you learned destructive things, you can learn different things now. No matter what was planted in your garden, no matter how you’ve been tending it, you are the gardener. You didn’t get to choose your little plot of land— your SIS and SES and your body—and you didn’t get to choose your family or your culture, but you do choose every single other thing. You get to decide what plants stay and what plants go, which plants get attention and love and which are ignored, pruned away to nothing, or dug out and thrown on the compost heap to rot. You get to choose. • • • In this second part of the book, I’ve described how context—your external circumstances and your internal state—influence your sexual wellbeing. I’ve talked about stress and love and body image and sexual disgust, and I’ve described some evidence-based strategies for managing all of these in ways that can maximize your sexual potential.
The next part of the book focuses on debunking some old and destructive myths about how sex works. These myths are part of the context in which women’s sexual wellbeing functions. In busting them, my goal is to empower you to take total control over your context and embrace your sexuality as it is, perfect and whole, right now. Even if you don’t quite
believe that’s true yet. tl;dr
• We all grew up hearing contradictory messages about sex, and so now many of us experience ambivalence about it. That’s normal. The more aware you are of those contradictory messages, the more choice you have about whether to believe them. • Sometimes people resist letting go of self-criticism—“I suck!”—because it can feel like giving up hope that you could become a better person, but that’s the opposite of how it works.
How it really works is that when you stop beating yourself up, you begin to heal, and then you grow like never before. • For real: Your health is not predicted by your weight. You can be healthy—and beautiful —no matter your size. And when you enjoy living in your body today, and treat yourself with kindness and compassion, your sex life gets better.
• Sexual disgust hits the brakes. This response is learned, not innate, and can be unlearned.
Begin to notice your “yuck” responses and ask yourself if those responses are making your sex life better or worse. Consider letting go of the yucks that are interfering with your sexual pleasure—see chapter 9 to learn how.