Experiment 005: Do I Have to Feel Sexy to Want Sex? Body Image, Sexual Agency, and Bodies That Are Hilarious
What happens to our sexuality when we don't feel particularly good about our bodies?
Bodies change. Weight fluctuates. We age, get pregnant, get injured, recover, gain strength, lose strength, and sometimes simply wake up feeling completely different about the body we saw in the mirror yesterday. But does every shift in body image have to determine whether we feel sexual, desirable, or entitled to pleasure?
In this episode of The Desire Lab, Caroline and Andrea explore the complicated relationship between body image and sexuality. They talk about the difference between how a body looks and what it can do, body appreciation versus body appearance, the influence of partners and culture on how we see ourselves, sexual performance, self-objectification, masturbation, and whether we can loosen the connection between I don't like my body today and therefore I don't get to feel sexual today.
Along the way: craft herpes, Kama Sutra page 37, Teflon children, sweatpants, mangled ear piercings, funhouse mirrors, glitter in the carpet, and the rather freeing conclusion that bodies are hilarious, perceptions are unreliable, and maybe we should all just live.
Questions to Take Home:
When I don't feel good about my body, do I automatically disconnect from my sexuality too?
How much of my sense of being sexually desirable comes from my own experience of my body, and how much comes from what I imagine other people think about it?
What changes if I ask not only, How does my body look?, but also, What can my body feel, experience, express, and do?
Research & Resources
Body Appreciation & Sexual Wellbeing
Satinsky, S., Reece, M., Dennis, B., Sanders, S., & Bardzell, S. (2012). “An Assessment of Body Appreciation and Its Relationship to Sexual Function in Women.” Body Image, 9(1), 137–144. Body appreciation predicted aspects of sexual function including arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction, while body mass index itself was not associated with sexual function.
Grower, P., & Ward, L. M. (2018). “Examining the Unique Contribution of Body Appreciation to Heterosexual Women’s Sexual Agency.” Body Image, 27, 138–147. Greater body appreciation was associated with greater sexual satisfaction, assertiveness, entitlement to pleasure, and lower body self-consciousness during intimacy.
Seal, B. N., Bradford, A., & Meston, C. M. (2017). “Appearance Dissatisfaction, Body Appreciation, and Sexual Health in Women Across Adulthood.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46, 1585–1598. Across women aged 18 to 88, body appreciation predicted sexual function and satisfaction beyond the effects of BMI and appearance dissatisfaction.
What Our Bodies Can Do
Alleva, J. M., Martijn, C., Van Breukelen, G. J. P., Jansen, A., & Karos, K. (2015). “Expand Your Horizon: A Programme That Improves Body Image and Reduces Self-Objectification by Training Women to Focus on Body Functionality.” Body Image, 15, 81–89. In a randomised trial, women who practised focusing on what their bodies could do showed improvements in body appreciation and appearance satisfaction and reductions in self-objectification.
Alleva, J. M., Tylka, T. L., & Kroon Van Diest, A. M. (2017). “The Functionality Appreciation Scale: Development and Psychometric Evaluation in U.S. Community Women and Men.” Body Image, 23, 28–44. This work helped formalise the concept of functionality appreciation, focusing attention on what the body is capable of doing rather than primarily on how it appears.
Partners, Relationships & Body Image
Walters, S., Lykins, A. D. L., & Graham, C. A. (2019). “Relationship Quality and Perceived Partner’s Body Appreciation Is Related to Women’s Own Body Appreciation and Sexual Functioning.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 45(4), 265–275. Women’s perceptions of how their partners viewed their bodies were associated with their own body appreciation and sexual functioning, supporting the episode’s discussion of body image as partly relational.
Media, Beauty Ideals & Body Image
Fioravanti, G., Bocci Benucci, S., Ceragioli, G., et al. (2022). “How the Exposure to Beauty Ideals on Social Networking Sites Influences Body Image: A Systematic Review of Experimental Studies.” Adolescent Research Review, 7, 419–458. A review of 43 experimental studies found that exposure to idealised social media imagery can influence body image, supporting the value of paying attention to what we repeatedly consume.
