THE SURPRISING SOLUTION TO SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
“Spanx won’t prevent his hands from touching what I’m trying to cover up, but I use it anyway. I feel like I lessen the damage if I keep him from seeing what he wants to touch.”
— Sophia, 28, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Let me be bold and say that sex is not the problem. The way you’re having it is. Before you throw this book on the floor, hear me out. Often, this is what happens: in your attempt to alleviate your sexual anxiety, you came up with short-term fixes (avoidance, covering up, restricting positions, emotionally disengaging, dieting, exercise) that perpetuated the problem and sucked you into an unresolvable vicious cycle. These solutions require you to pay more attention to your appearance (“Have I covered enough of my belly?” “Is it dark enough that he can’t see my thighs?” “Have I exercised enough to shape my butt?”). Your solutions end up magnifying the appearance anxiety and heightening the significance of the problem.
Instead of looking at the nature of the solution, you looked at the quality of your effort and doubled down on your attempts. You read magazine articles that encouraged you to keep doing what you’re doing only with new, creative avoidance behaviors.
This not only made the problem worse, but it also in many ways became the problem. Now, every session becomes an opportunity to practice the problem. Pretty soon the dogged repetition of behavior that doesn’t work leaves you frustrated, hopeless. Now you’re struggling with the problem and the attempt to solve it. Sex changed from an act of lovemaking to an act of problem-solving. You’re tumbling in a vicious cycle where one trouble leads to another that aggravates the first.
Let’s Change Your Approach to Sex
There is a way of having sex that reduces or eliminates appearance anxiety. There are sexual techniques that can suspend self-judgment, lower obsession, and raise self-confidence. You don’t have to shut off the lights, cover up, diet, or exercise to fight your anxiety. You just have to learn a new way of having sex.
This, of course, is problematic. If you’re too self-conscious to have sex, if you do everything you can to postpone or put conditions on it, how in God’s pajamas are you ever going to have it without the paralyzing effects of your self-judgments?
That will become clear as we move forward. First, let’s take a look at why the research points to sex as the solution to self-consciousness. Scientists and scholars who study body image and the impact it has on women’s sexuality have made some counterintuitive discoveries. For example:
Sex Improves Body Image
Researchers have known for years that body image is a critical component of the sexual experience. But they’ve also observed the reverse—how sexual experiences influence body image. This led to chicken-or-the-egg debates: Does a positive body image create satisfying sex, or does satisfying sex create a positive body image? Most researchers believe there’s a dual feedback loop at work: Great sexual experiences form positive body images, which in turn creates satisfying sex, which then strengthens your body image.
The relationship between body image and sexual experience is reciprocal. Your thoughts shape your experiences and your experiences shape your thoughts. It’s not just academics who observe this dynamic; it’s borne out by the opinion of a great many women. In a Psychology Today survey of 4,500 women, 67 percent felt that good sexual experiences contribute to satisfactory feelings about their bodies.
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Sexual Competence Gives You Bedroom Confidence
Being good in bed reduces appearance anxiety. Women who consider themselves “good in bed” have the highest levels of positive body image. This discovery has important implications for solving self-consciousness. Improving your sexual skills will do far more for your self-image than simply staring at a mirror, reciting positive affirmations, and trying to convince yourself that you look beautiful.
The Great Sexual Paradox
Allow me to introduce a great paradox researchers have wrestled with for years: Positive body image has enormous influence on satisfying sex, but satisfying sex doesn’t require a positive body image.
The contradiction became apparent by the undeniably high number of test subjects that score high on both body dissatisfaction and sexual satisfaction. How could this be possible in the face of all the evidence that a positive body image is crucial to good sex? Researchers must have gotten that confused look ostriches get when they hear a whistle. But as they investigated this surprising phenomenon, they found a few qualities of intimacy that explained the contradiction.
Sex Drains the Charge out of Negative Body Images
Sex “habituates” body consciousness. Habituation means you get so used to a stimulus that it can’t elicit the same response. For example, when you first enter a room, you might get distracted by the noisy sound from the old air-conditioning unit. But over time, you ignore the sound, even though it’s still present.
With enough satisfying sexual experiences, women habituate to their low body esteem. Sex no longer elicits anxiety or self-consciousness even though their negative body image remains intact. Like the sound of the air-conditioning unit, they cannot hear the racket of their appearance anxiety, even though it’s still there.
Researchers also noted a phenomenon closely related to habituation: You can have negative judgments about your body without dwelling on it or punishing yourself for it. It’s possible to think that the slight jiggle in your thighs is a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor rather than a felony that gets you ten to twenty in the big house. It’s possible to believe that sex would be better with a flat tummy and still have great sex.
In other words, beliefs about your body don’t have to get in the way of your pleasure. How many times have you gotten ready for a night on the town, looked in the mirror, didn’t like what you saw, went out, and had a blast anyway? You don’t need to like how you look to have a good time, in or out of bed. This is an important concept to grasp: liking how you look is preferable, but not necessary, to enjoying sex.
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A Strong Sense of Well-Being Is More Powerful Than Body Image
Well-being is defined as the quality of our mental, physical, and emotional lives when we account for health, happiness, attainment of pleasure, avoidance of pain, relationships, meaning, and self-realization. Obviously, sex is a crucial component to an overall sense of well-being. It is an integral part of the communication, respect, companionship, and relationship satisfaction that gives you a higher quality of life.
Researchers have recently concluded that a strong sense of well-being is more important than body image in predicting sexual functioning. They base this belief on a simple observation: Women who score high on well-being but low on body image report greater sexual satisfaction than women who score low on well-being but high on body image. In other words, improving other parts of your life will do more for your love life than improving your body image.
From Vicious Cycle to Virtuous Circle
Let’s review these discoveries: Positive sex experiences produce positive body images. Having regular, satisfying sex can override, reduce, or eliminate body anxiety. Being good at sex builds body confidence. Satisfying sex habituates self-consciousness. Sex contributes greatly to an overall sense of well-being, which exerts a greater influence on sexual functioning than body image. At this point, the answer to your body image woes should be obvious:
Sex is the solution to self-consciousness.
If you look at the research discoveries closely, you’ll notice a series of feedback loops:
Our goal is to take you out of the vicious cycle you’re in to the virtuous circle I just described. In a vicious cycle one trouble leads to another that aggravates the first. In a virtuous circle one accomplishment leads to another that encourages the first. Both operate on a feedback loop—the results of the output feed back to the input.
You may be wondering how you can put yourself into a virtuous circle if sex has become such a source of shame that you avoid, postpone, or put conditions on it. How are you supposed to have sex when you dread it? The short answer is that I’m going to show you ways of having sex that reduce and eventually eliminate the stress you experience, but for now, there’s one thing we need to clear up. And that’s this silly idea you have about what type of bodies turn men on.