Not Tonight Dear, I Feel Fat

“The first guy I ever slept with told me I was fat. We were in college, and looking back, I know now that I wasn’t. I just wasn’t super-skinny. But ever since then, I have felt really self-conscious in bed. Even today, I just can’t seem to let go and enjoy myself because I’m worried my body isn’t ‘good enough’ for my boyfriend. But here’s the funny thing: I know I’m attractive and that my boyfriend is crazy about me. Yet I keep having the same thoughts: ‘My thighs are too big, my stomach is pooching out too much.’ Even when he’s making passionate love to me, I can’t help thinking that he’s fantasizing about someone thinner. I’d never admit it to him, but sometimes I have stronger orgasms when I’m by myself—because I’m not worried about how I look...”

There are three aspects to body image: judgment (the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your physical attributes), the emotional impact of your judgment, and the “investment” you make—the level of self-worth you draw from your appearance and the lengths you’ll go to enhance or manage it.

Keep this definition in mind as we go forward: judgment, impact, and investment. It will help you understand the influence your body image has in the bedroom.

There are many factors that contribute to a negative body image—growing up in a judgmental family that stressed dieting, children who made disparaging comments about the way you look, a competitive girl culture that thrives on judgment, encourages rivalries, and magnifies the importance of appearances, and of course, being objectively overweight or obese. But there’s a bigger reason for your body self-consciousness—a much bigger reason: the extent to which you buy into, compare yourself to, and try to achieve the media’s ideal of feminine beauty. There is no other factor that comes close.

The main reason most women have such a poor self-image is because not only have they accepted the media’s beauty ideal, but they also have invested heavily in trying to achieve its anatomically impossible standards. This is not some feminist polemic espoused by scholars with a political agenda. It is the conclusion of nearly every academic study ever done on the issue of body image. Let me explain how researchers discovered this.

It started with academic research on eating disorders. Researchers suspected that eating-disordered women were somehow affected by the relentless, ubiquitous, inescapable images of below-normal-weight women on TV, magazines, movies, and the Internet. After years of research, a clear picture emerged: the media’s presentation of a single standard of below-healthy-weight beauty and the compulsion toward conformity it generated was the main cause in the development of eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The relationship was simple, clear, and replicated across nearly every study ever done: the more you internalize the media’s below-normal-weight ideal, the more you invest in trying to conform to it, the more likely you will develop a diagnosable eating disorder.

That all might be interesting, but if you’re like most women, you don’t have an eating disorder. What does this have to do with you and the problems you face in the bedroom?

In the past ten years, body image research has focused more on “healthy” women, or rather women who do not have diagnosable eating disorders. The thinking went something like this: If the media’s relentless presentation of a single standard of beauty is a leading cause of eating disorders, what else might it be a leading cause of?

So, researchers got to work on it. The next wave of body image research, conducted by experts like Dr. Michael Wiederman, Professor of Psychology at Columbia College, specifically excluded eating-disordered women.

As stated before, there are several contributing causes to body shame—your family, the judgments of both men and women, how much you compete with other women, and how objectively overweight you are. But researchers found that the strongest predictor of body dissatisfaction in healthy women is the same as it is for eating-disordered women—the extent to which you internalize the media’s standard for thinness. The more you agree with the below-healthy thin ideal, the more you compare yourself against it, the more you invest in trying to achieve that standard, the more dissatisfied you will be with your body.

Let me give you a small example of just how insidious the media’s standard of beauty is in affecting your self-esteem. Dr. Laura Choate of Louisiana State University published a fascinating study in the Journal of Counseling & Development. She had a group of women read news magazines while another group read fashion magazines. There were no differences between the groups in age, height, or weight. Yet when they filled out a body image assessment immediately after reading the magazines, an amazing picture emerged: The women who read the fashion magazines reported greater body dissatisfaction and a lower ideal body weight than women who read the news magazines. They were only reading the magazines for fifteen minutes. As Dr. Choate’s study concluded, “Even brief exposure to media images portraying the sociocultural ideal directly shapes perceptions of the ideal body type expected for women.”

It would be one thing if there were just a few studies showing the media’s corrosive impact on women’s self-esteem, but I couldn’t find a single study published in the last twenty years that didn’t come to the same conclusion. For example, one study exposed a group of women to ads with thin models while the other group exposed women to the same product ads without any models. The women who viewed ads with models rated their body satisfaction lower than the women who viewed the product ads without the models.

Supermodels Create Appearance Anxiety in Men, Too

It’s well documented that when women see impossibly beautiful women in magazines, their body image drops faster than Marie Antoinette’s guillotine. But the most fascinating studies show that men report significant body consciousness when exposed to gorgeous women in magazines, too. For example, in a study published in Human Communication Research (2009), Dr. Jennifer Aubrey at the University of Missouri found that men exposed to ads and editorial features with beautiful women suffered immediate and long-lasting body consciousness. This confounded Dr. Aubrey because the men were mainly exposed to images of women. Why would men have such a dramatic reaction to images of beautiful women? In a later study, Dr. Aubrey answered her own question: The supermodels reminded men that they weren’t good-1 ooking enough to date such beautiful women!

In yet another study, this time in the North American Journal of Psychology (2006), male subjects were exposed to photographs of muscular men in magazines like Maxim, FHM, and Men’s Health. Immediately after exposure they reported significantly lower levels of body satisfaction.

If that ain’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is.

The media’s power to make you feel bad about how you look is almost omnipotent. Once you submerge yourself in over two decades of body image research, it’s easy to reach a startling conclusion: reading a fashion magazine does to your body image what smoking does to your lungs.

Everybody knows that men want the kind of skinny chicks the media presents. Everybody, that is, except guys. It’s news to them. As you’ll see later in the book, attractiveness studies show that men seldom pick the below-healthy-weight body types you see in the media as their ideal form of beauty.

This is a critical point to absorb because so much of your suffering is based on a demonstrably false assumption of what guys like. Yes, men judge women harshly. Yes, they base their desire almost entirely on appearances (at least at first). In fact, they emphasize it so much they’re unwilling to have any type of romantic relationship unless they are first sexually attracted. The Male Gaze is alive and well, but what it seeks is not the unhealthy women you see on TV, magazines, and movies. Men are turned on by what you rarely see in the media: normal curves, healthy weight, and slender-to-average waist-to-hip ratios. It isn’t men insisting that you be so skinny to be desirable—it’s you. You internalized the media’s beauty ideal and projected it onto what men want.

Let’s look at one of the most fascinating body image studies done in the last ten years. Researchers at UCLA wanted to know which contributed more to women’s body dissatisfaction: the ubiquitous media standard of beauty or the desire for male attention.

Well, the only way to separate those variables is to study women who are not interested in men—lesbians. So they designed a study (“Body Image Satisfaction In Heterosexual, Gay, And Lesbian Adults,” Archives Of Sexual Behavior, 2009) that recruited gay women to participate in the same kind of study typically reserved for heterosexual women. The researchers were convinced that lesbians would have much higher body esteem because they are not motivated by the reward of male attention. If they didn’t want, welcome, or seek male attention, it made sense that they’d score higher on body esteem assessments.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to proving that hypothesis. It was completely wrong. Lesbians were not at a lower risk for body dissatisfaction than heterosexual women. As the researchers concluded, “It is widely assumed that the desire to attract and retain a male partner contributes to body image concerns. The finding that lesbians (who desire female partners) and heterosexual women (who seek male partners) are similar in body dissatisfaction raises questions about the relative importance of attracting a mate versus adhering to broader cultural ideals of attractiveness for women’s body satisfaction.”

This is an astounding conclusion: The media has more power to influence your body image than the men you’re trying to attract.

So, an older fish swims up to two younger fish and she says, “Hi, girls, how’s the water?” The young fish smile, nod, and the older fish swims away. About a minute later, one of the young fish turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

To understand the process of how media gets you to hate your body, you first have to realize, like the older fish in the story, that you’re surrounded by water—in the form of endlessly repeating images of a single form of feminine beauty; an inescapable, singularly monolithic idea of what you’re supposed to look like if you want male attention and female admiration. Once you realize the “water” you’re swimming in, it’s easier to understand the reaction so many women have to the image overload: There must be something wrong with me because I don’t look like that.

Your conviction that there is something seriously wrong with your body—that it needs work, that it is not worthy of looking at and especially not worthy of having sex—is not a fact you discovered; it’s a fiction thrust upon you. You didn’t make the judgment that there’s something wrong with the way you look. The media did. You just bought into it. You did not come to the conclusion that you should be ashamed of your body. The media did. You merely accepted it.

But how is that possible? The images of thinner-than-healthy women may be inescapable, but they’re just images. Even if they’re repeated endlessly, how can they make you feel so bad about yourself? Because the singular representation of beauty isn’t just presented as an ideal but as the solution to all your problems, the path to a happy life, the road to sexual ecstasy. If you look like the women they present, you’ll get your man. If you can fit into a size two, you’ll get the respect you crave. If you can take the curves out of your figure, you’ll put love into your life. If you can get your thighs to look like tubes, you’ll be the envy of all women. If you could just look like the media-sponsored women, men would fight over you, shower you with attention, and make you feel loved and cared for. If you just looked like them, sex would be something you’d deserve, look forward to, be confident about, and get pleasure from.

The media purposefully presents these skinnier-than-possible models because they’re trying to move product. They can’t sell diet books, plans, and programs to women who are satisfied with their bodies. They can’t sell slimming foods or exercise regimens to women who like their form and shape. They can’t sell magazines filled with beauty makeovers to women who think they look fine. No need means no sale. Therefore, they must create a need, and the best way to do that is to create dissatisfaction. Advertisers are quite literally giving you a problem so they can sell a solution. From Cosmopolitan magazine (“Get a Banging Beach Bod in Three Days!”) to People magazine (“Fastest Celebrity Post-Baby Slim-Downs”) to O, The Oprah Magazine (“Dress 10 Pounds Slimmer”), the messages are clear and unmistakable: there’s a problem with the way you look, and we know how to solve it.

The media’s feminine ideal comes with a premise (thinness is vital to personal happiness) and a promise (thinness solves every problem, especially in bed). The playbook is clear: get thin or get out. You either get as thin as those models or you’re doomed to a lonely life without male attention or female admiration.

Now, who wants to be damned into eternal loneliness? Who wants to be invisible to men? Disrespected by women? Celibate in the bedroom? Understandably, you don’t want to be left behind. You see how everybody is constantly observing and evaluating the female form and you understand, intuitively, that you must also. In order to be loved and accepted, you must be able to present your body the way the media presents bodies. You must be able to look at and evaluate your body the same way others do or you won’t know if you’re acceptable. So, you do what a lot of women in your situation do. You...

Slowly, gradually, without knowing it, from the time you were a little girl, you agreed to take on the role of observer of your own body. Just like so many look at you as something to be evaluated, as an object that might be worthy of desire, you slowly started observing and evaluating your body the way others do. And now you devote a great deal of your attention to self-surveillance, habitually and constantly monitoring your body’s outward appearance.

But what happens when you observe that your body doesn’t look like the media ideal? You react the same way you react to any public rejection, like being benched in front of your teammates, being passed over for promotion, or failing a college entrance or medical board. You react with shame, guilt, worthlessness, anger, and self-loathing. You call yourself stupid, lazy, incapable of discipline. You get anxious that others will see your obvious failure and judge you. You become afraid of being the butt of jokes. They’ll say you’re so dumb you got locked in a grocery store and died of starvation. They’ll say your blood type is Ragu. And if they don’t make the insults, you’ll gladly do it for them.

Every day, the media asks you to take a “yes or no” test: Do you look like the women we say are beautiful? Pass the test and you get rich, handsome men to adore you over a candlelit dinner. Fail it and you spend Saturday night alone eating cat food.

If you buy into this fiction—caviar if you pass the media’s beauty test, cat food if you don’t—you are destined to a world of hurt. It is anatomically impossible for all but the tiniest fraction of women to look like the ideal of beauty the media peddles. For example, the average fashion model has a BMI of 17.1, according to Will Lassek, MD, a former assistant surgeon general, while the average American woman has a BMI of 28.1. Unless you’re already there or close to it, trying for it is a recipe for self-hatred. You’ll look at your shortcomings and have a field day with the disappointments. You’ll dislike yourself, sure, but the real hatred will be reserved for the uncooperating body parts—the tummy that won’t go flat no matter how many crunches you do, the thighs that won’t slim down no matter how much you run.

But you persevere anyway. You formulate an action plan. You start investing a lot into your appearance, particularly dieting and exercise. You blast your butt, feel the burn, crunch those abs. You mainline hope into your veins. You don’t buy that bullshit about the anatomical impossibility of achieving the kind of body you see flickering on the screen or staring out at you from every magazine page. Yes, you’re average size for an American woman—close to 5 feet 4 inches and 142 pounds. And yes, those media beauties are 5 feet 9 inches and 110 pounds. But it can be done. You’re sure of it. Maybe you can’t grow five inches, but you can lose thirty pounds, drop four dress sizes, and decrease your body mass index by a third if you just worked hard enough. How do you know? Because the media tells you so. Why are they telling you? Because they’ve got product to move. So they create the need, then the hope, and finally, the sale.

Every day they trot out new workouts and diets that promise eternal salvation from the mirror. They treat the body as a construction site, assuring you that with the right motivation and materials you can turn stadiums into skyscrapers.

So you go for it. Again and again. And fail again and again. Oh sure, you have moments, true victories, but they’re temporary. The only thing you end up losing permanently is balance and selfrespect. The cycle of self-loathing is set: Try, fail, shame. Try, fail, guilt. Try, fail, despair. You live out a daily pattern: compare your body to the media ideal, constantly monitor it for flaws, spend time and money trying to fix it, then collapse into a cycle of shame, depression, and despair.

Now that we know how you got in this mess, let’s answer a specific question: Exactly how does a poor body image affect you in the bedroom? Studies have shown body image has a direct cause-and-effect relationship with almost all sexual functioning. A poor body image can choke the life out of your libido. It can make you turn down sex even when you want it. It distracts your attention from pleasurable physical feelings to your perceived imperfections. The shame lowers or eliminates your ability to ask for the things that turn you on, reducing the overall pleasure of an experience. It forces you to emotionally disengage from what’s going on, leading to difficulty climaxing or less pleasurable orgasms. As stated before, a study in the Journal of Sex Research went as far as saying that body image has as much of an impact on sexuality as menopause.

Let’s concentrate on desire for a moment, as low libido is one of the issues that women complain about most. Body anxieties can turn you into a sexual camel—somebody who can go great lengths of time without sex. A simple study was conducted a few years back that powerfully demonstrated the link between body esteem and libido. Women were asked to read aloud an erotic story and then asked about the state of their sexual desire. Women with a negative body image reported much lower arousal levels than women with positive self-judgments.

The link between body image and sexual desire does not correlate with actual body size, by the way. Studies are remarkably consistent in their conclusion that BMI (body mass index—the ratio of height to weight) is not related to levels of sexual desire. In other words, your weight isn’t the problem; it’s your perception of your weight. To be clear, actually being overweight or obese increases susceptibility to a poor body image, but studies show that body image is far more important than actual body mass in predicting sexual function.

Which brings me to a refrain you’re going to hear often: Unless you are seriously overweight, losing weight is not going to improve your sex life. Let me repeat this. If you are waiting to have sex until you lose ten pounds, forget it. It’s the perception of your body, rather than your actual body size, that’s affecting your experience of sex.

Researchers have known for years that body image has a profound impact on women’s sexual functioning. They’ve examined the effects, documented them, and then replicated the results with a multitude of studies over the last twenty years. They know what it does, but it’s only recently that they’ve been able to explain how it does it. While there are differing variations among academics, the critical path pretty much goes like this:

Self-surveillance
You scrutinize, inspect, and monitor your physical attributes for perceived imperfections.

Appearance anxiety
The self-surveillance reveals that you are not, in fact, a supermodel. So you invest a lot of time, money, and energy trying to upgrade your appearance to acceptable standards, but the self-judgments don’t go away. Your fear of being evaluated, scorned, and rejected results in a constant preoccupation with weight and other aspects of your appearance. You’re caught in a cycle of shame, embarrassment, and anxiety.

Self-consciousness in the bedroom
Appearance anxiety compels you to avoid sexual positions that give your partner an unflattering view of your body. You insist on lights out, and wear some type of camouflage clothing. You feel inhibited, passive, and unable to articulate preferences that would make sex more enjoyable. You restrict your movements in bed to ensure limited views of your body.

Unwanted sexual problems
You experience a significant reduction or a complete loss of desire. You emotionally disengage from your partner. You experience reduced physical sensations because your attention is focused on your appearance. You find it difficult to climax, and when you can, it is less pleasurable than it used to be.

This is the typical way self-conscious women experience sex, and it is no wonder that they seek relief in any way they can. But the preferred solutions (lights out, covering up) aggravate the problem. You don’t need to get a better body or improve your image of it to experience wonderful, shame-free sex. You can do it by activating a series of feedback loops that I’m about to introduce.