Authors: Emily Nagoski
What it comes down to is that a lot of women trust their bodies less than they trust what they’ve been taught, culturally,
about
their bodies.
But culture has taught you stuff that is both incorrect and just
wrong
.
Hurtful. I want to address two things you’ve been taught that are definitely wrong, and what’s right: first, that self-criticism is good for you and second that fat is bad for you. These things are both false. Here’s why:
criticizing yourself = stress = reduced sexual pleasure
Women have been trained to beat ourselves up when we fall short. We criticize ourselves—“I’m so stupid/fat/crazy,” “I suck,” “I’m a loser”—as a reflex when things don’t go the way we want them to. And our brains process self-criticism with brain areas linked to behavioral inhibition—brakes.
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So it’s not surprising that self-criticism is directly related to depression
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—and does depression improve your sexual well-being? It does not.
Here’s how that works:
When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress.
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I described stress in chapter 4 as an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism to help us escape threats—“I am at risk.” When we think, “I am an inadequate person!” that’s like saying, “I am the lion!” Literally, our stress hormone levels increase.
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Your body reacts to negative self-evaluations as if you’re under attack.
The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness.
Women tend to have a two-layered response to this idea. First, they instinctively love the idea of being more accepting of themselves and not blaming themselves when life isn’t perfect. The research tells women what they already know intuitively: Self-criticism is associated with worse health outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.
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That’s right: Self-criticism is one of the best predictors of loneliness—so it’s not just “I am at risk,” it’s also “I am lost.”
But then, when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit.
As in: “If I stop beating myself up for the ways I’m not perfect, that’s like admitting to the world—and to myself—that I’ll never be perfect, that I’m permanently inadequate! I need my self-criticism in order to maintain hope and to motivate myself to get better.”
When we tell ourselves, “I can’t stop criticizing myself or else I will fail forever!” that’s like saying, “I can’t stop running/fighting/playing dead, or the lion will eat me!” That’s absolutely what our culture has taught us, so it makes sense that many of us believe it. It’s so entrenched in our culture that it sounds . . . sane. Rational, even.
But it’s not.
Think about it: What would
really
happen if you stopped running from yourself or beating yourself up? What would happen if you put down the whip you’ve been flogging yourself with for decades?
When you stop beating yourself up—when you stop
reinjuring
yourself—what happens is . . .
you start to heal.
Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.
Later in the chapter, I’ll describe three evidence-based ways for changing patterns of self-criticism, but for right now let me just point out that you can’t stop criticizing yourself by beating yourself up when you criticize yourself. If you notice yourself thinking, “Ugh, I suck,” and then think, “Darn it all, Emily told me to stop doing that! I
suck
!” that’s not really helping, right? So when you notice yourself thinking, “Ugh, I suck,” or whatever it is you say to yourself when things don’t go your way, just notice that. Just notice that it’s a weed. You didn’t put it there—it snuck under the fence. And take that opportunity to plant a seed of something positive. For example, when you think, “Ugh, I suck,” plant the thought, “I’m okay.” As in, “I’m safe,” “I’m whole,” or “I’m home.” You’re okay.
And change happens—it happens all the time!
Let me tell you about my friend Ruth. We were sitting together one
afternoon, talking about sex (an inevitable topic, if you talk to me long enough), and she told me, “You know, I’ve been through a lot of things, but my sexuality has really opened up and been so much better lately.”
“Awesome!” I said. “What changed?”
“I just feel a lot more confident in myself, in my body! I know now that I’m amazing to be with and I can revel in that.”
“That’s
awesome
! How did you make it happen?”
She said, “It’s like one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?”
Yep. That.
health at every size
Weight is just one of several things people (especially women) criticize themselves for, but it may be the most universal, with half of girls as young as three years old worrying that they might be “fat”
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—and it’s certainly among the most dangerous and needless.
People want to lose weight for two reasons: health and beauty. Whether you can measure beauty on a scale, I don’t know,
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but I do know you definitely can’t measure health that way, and I’m determined to bust that myth right now, once and for all.
Here’s the myth as plainly as I can state it: If I know how much you weigh, I also know something about your health.
And that’s wrong. The fact is, weight alone tells us almost nothing about health. The research is painfully clear, though plenty of people have a hard time accepting it—there’s been controversy about this research in the mainstream media, and even among academics, because it runs so contrary to what we’ve all been told, and it somehow feels dangerous to give people permission not to hate their bodies (despite the fact that the research I described in the previous section proves that people are healthier when they don’t hate themselves). But if you think about it logically for two seconds, you’ll see how obviously true it is that weight is nothing more than a measure of
gravity.
Look:
• Want to lose ten pounds without diet or exercise? Cut off your leg at the knee! I guarantee, the next time you step on a scale, you’ll weigh less.
• Or, hey, want to lose five pounds of fat? Have your brain removed—its mass is almost 100 percent fat!
• You know who’s always thin? People who’ve been living in a prison camp!
• Quick and easy weight loss! Fly in a plane! Better yet, go into space! They don’t call it “weightless” for nothing!
If that sounds glib, good. I think it’s stupid and destructive that “experts” have been telling us that we can measure our health by measuring something we can change by removing a limb, torturing ourselves, or going on a plane and measuring it up there instead. You can achieve your medically defined “ideal weight” without improving your health at all; it might even substantially impair your health!
In case that’s not compelling enough and you’d like a medical opinion, let me tell you this story. One evening during the conference where I learned about Health at Every Size (HAES), I actually went on a date with a cardiologist. I told him about the conference and asked him about this specific statistic that a speaker mentioned.
I said, “Dr. Date, is it true that it can be healthier to be seventy-five pounds over your medically defined ‘ideal weight’ than to be five pounds under it?”
And Dr. Date said, “I don’t know if I’d use those precise numbers, but that’s the right idea. For different reasons, being just slightly underweight carries greater risk than being obese.”
The date wasn’t very successful, and two years later I married a cartoonist and his two cats, but Dr. Date and I had a nice dinner and he verified that weight is not what matters,
healthy behaviors
are what matter.
My friend and personal trainer, Kelly Coffey, weighed more than three hundred pounds when she graduated from Smith College. She was
completely miserable and thought her weight was to blame. So she had bariatric surgery and lost half her body weight.
And she says, “I felt happy for a few weeks, and then the depression, the self-hate, all of it came flooding back.”
So when did things change for her?
“When I realized it wasn’t about weight,” she says. “It was about learning to respect myself and my body and treat it with love.”
It’s not about weight or size or fat—weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else—it’s about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today.
Which brings me to Health at Every Size. HAES is, as the name implies, an approach to living inside your body based on health rather than weight. Linda Bacon literally wrote the book on HAES—
Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight
—based on her decades of research on nutrition, exercise, and health. There are four major tenets, according to “The HAES Manifesto”: (1) accept your size, (2) trust yourself, (3) adopt healthy lifestyle habits including joyful physical activity and nutritious foods, and (4) embrace size diversity.
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It’s almost too simple: Welcome your body just as it is, listen to your own internal needs, and make healthful choices around food and physical activity. You might lose weight (you probably won’t), but you’ll definitely be healthier and happier.
Can it be true? Happy and healthy without losing weight?
It can.
Do you want it to be true?
That’s another story.
What it comes down to is whether you’re willing to try on the possibility that you
are already beautiful
and whether you’re ready to prioritize real health over conforming to some cultural standard of how your body is “supposed” to look.
I know that intellectual awareness of the negative impact of self-criticism and about the lack of relationship between health and weight can’t instantly undo the decades of shaming that so many women have
absorbed. In my experience, women are reluctant to let go of their self-critical thoughts and the cultural thin ideal even when they believe that it’s all nonsense—which it is—and they’re even more hesitant to believe that they are beautiful just as they are—which they are.
Later in the chapter I’ll describe three evidence-based strategies for shifting from self-critical ways to live in your body, to compassionate and healthful ways to live in it. But in the end, it will come down to a decision to stop cultivating the weeds of self-criticism and instead nourish the flowers of confidence
today
—and then remaking that decision each day.
“dirty”
I keep a basket of single-use bubble packs of lubricant in my office. They’re all different colors, so it looks a little like a basket of candies or lip glosses. Coming to my office for the first time, a student will poke her finger into the basket, drawn by the colors, and ask, “What’s this?”
“Different kinds of lube,” I say. “Feel free to take as many as you like.”
About half the students say, “Cool!” and rummage around for a few they like. And the other half yank their hand away like the basket is suddenly filled with snakes.
That’s sexual disgust. It’s a learned withdrawal response from things that are “gross.” Everyone has something that grosses her out sexually, and everyone’s yucks are different. And nobody ever
needs
to use packaged lube (though I recommend it; you’ll see why in chapter 6)—we got along just fine without it for a few hundred millennia—so it may not matter much if lube is on your list of yucks.
But what happens when that same sexual disgust is activated by one’s own body?
“My partner wants to . . .”
I have a lot of conversations that begin this way, trailing off into embarrassed silence. In one particular case, the student continued, “. . . He wants to give me oral sex,” and then she turned bright red.
“Okay,” I said. And I waited.
So she said, “Well . . . I mean . . .” and she trailed off again, not making eye contact.
“Would
you
like him to give you oral sex?” I prompted.
“I . . .” she said, wincing.
“I mean . . .” she went on.
“Isn’t it . . .” she finally asked, “dirty? Down there? The hair? The . . . mucus . . . ?”
My instinctive response to a question like that is, “Of course not, it’s beautiful down there! Congratulations on having a partner who appreciates that fact!” And sometimes that is effective. But often there’s a huge resistant knot of beliefs that has to be untangled before the person can get there.
Fortunately, science has provided me with a knife specifically designed to slice through that particular knot: Moral Foundations Theory. Jonathan Haidt and his team have found that there are six “moral foundations” in the human brain, each of which is a solution to a particular evolutionary problem our species has faced.
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Of the six, it’s the “sanctity/degradation” moral foundation I find most relevant to sex.
The sanctity foundation is about contaminant avoidance, and it’s powered by
disgust.
Humans have generalized from avoidance of physical contaminants (we’re innately grossed out by rotting corpses) to avoidance of
conceptual
contaminants (we can feel grossed out just by the words “rotting corpses”). You can visualize sanctity as a vertical axis, with stigmatized and taboo behaviors described as “low” and “dirty,” and socially sanctioned behaviors as “high” and “pure.”