New Study Links Women’s Negative Body Image With Sexual Dissatisfaction
Body issues follow most women around their entire lives. Here are the facts, along with some strategies to bring security to your relationship
When it comes to women’s sexual satisfaction, most men seem to have it all wrong. This isn’t a slight on men. It’s a byproduct of our cultural assumptions in the West. We have a lot of these presumptions—ones we never question.
Here’s a good example.
In Western culture, everything that’s good is considered “up,” while “down” represents everything bad. From Heaven being considered “up” and Hell being considered “down,” to phrases like “keep your head up” and “reach for the sky,” it’s replete throughout our culture.
When we’re sad, we say we’re feeling “down” in the dumps.
You’d never say you had a great day, so you’re feeling mighty down today.
Something tells me this long-running cultural artifact that suggests that up is “good” and down is “bad” is responsible for much of the work-obsessed culture that’s sprung forth today in the West.
Relaxing is frowned upon.
You’re expected to be up, alert, and engaged.
We miss out on certain things because we speak a loaded language and subscribe to beliefs that come with baggage — it’s tough to unlearn things you never consciously learned in the first place.
One of the assumptions we have is the assumption of material causes. We tend to assume that all things have physical causes in the West. We’re taught cause-and-effect from a very young age, but we’re taught it in such a way that it focuses on mechanics—bodies impacting other bodies in various ways.
This assumption rapidly breaks down the moment we begin discussing humans. People are much more than their bodies. We’ve got thoughts, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and desires.
It’s evident in much of our sexual discourse today.
Don’t believe me?
Take a glance at Cosmopolitan. You’ll find list, after list, after list, after list, after list, after list of sex positions and moves. The focus is on the mechanics at the expense of the intangible stuff.
There’s much overlap between this kind of paltry sex advice and other shallow advice (like get-rich-quick schemes) in our culture. It takes a very complex thing (sex or wealth) and reduces it to a few constituent parts for easy consumption, promising that if you change a few easy things, you’ll crack the code.
We do the same with women’s sexual pleasure. We point out the parts and motions but ignore the deeper contextual aspects of human sexuality.
One essential aspect of women’s sexuality is body security, and a lack thereof can mean bad business for your bedroom.
Perspectives on Attraction
You might have heard me talk about this before…
The human eye takes in 57.6 GB of information per day. It transmits that information to the brain at about 10 Mbps — the speed of your high-speed internet. Researchers have estimated that the eye processes 4.8 GB of data per second. That’s 1,329.6 photos taken with a 12-megapixel camera on your smartphone every second.
Research has demonstrated that it only takes 50 milliseconds, 1/20th of one second, to evaluate whether something (car, cell phone, website, human) is aesthetically attractive or not.
According to research from Princeton University, it only takes 1/10th of a second for people to judge the attractiveness of someone’s face.
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on people to look their best.
It doesn’t help that we live in a society bombarded by media messages telling us that we need to attain specific standards to be classified as “good-looking” even though the evidence shows, time and again, that attraction is more individual than universal (and it’s more environmental than genetic).
Body Image & Sexuality
A new study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sought to uncover the effects of body image on women’s sexual health. The study was conducted by Allanah Hockey and their team in Queensland, Australia.
The study took heterosexual couples and asked them questions about body image, attraction, and sexual satisfaction. And they found some interesting discrepancies between the opinions of men and women.
Men’s relationship satisfaction was linked to their attractiveness to their partners. This might be why women worry so much about being attractive.
Women with a worse sense of body image tended to believe their partners were less attracted to them, regardless of what their male partners actually thought.
Raise your hand if you’ve experienced this discrepancy.
Negative body image among women was linked with lower sexual satisfaction. Women who feel unattractive to their partners will have less satisfactory sex. And it’s no secret why.
Imagine trying to have sex with someone you feel is constantly judging you.
Many men experience erectile dysfunction from performance anxiety. This isn’t isolated to women. It happens because of projection biases.
Projection biases happen when we project our insecurities onto the opinions of others. We might overestimate the amount others agree with us or underestimate the amount they like us. When doing this, we rob people of their views to assuage our insecurities.
They can’t help us clear up our insecurities if we don’t allow them their own points of view.
To combat this, people who date women can give authentic, unprompted reassurance to calm the inner voice. Being a stable, non-judgmental partner is crucial when dating someone with body issues. It’s vital not to point out what we perceive as flaws.
Explaining (again, unprompted) why you love various aspects of your partner’s body could help them eventually accept their bodies.
Don’t let someone else’s skepticism stop you from saying what you really feel—and make it known often how much you appreciate your partner’s body.
There’s also no shame in getting mental health treatment. People suffering from body issues can check out their local county behavioral or mental healthcare center to see what free or affordable options are available.
Everything from couples counseling to individual therapy might be a phone call away.
Wrapping this all up, sometimes sex is about so much more than sex—because people are so much more than just our bodies.
Everything from relationship satisfaction to personal feelings of security plays a huge role in our sexual satisfaction. If we want better sex, we must also maintain these aspects of our lives and relationships.