A friend of mine who was raised in a very Catholic family once told me that her mother used to refer to her vagina as her “icky,” as in, “Now wipe your icky.” This makes it not the least bit surprising that, as an adult, she thinks of her vagina as unattractive. “A weird little organ,” she calls it. “I can’t put makeup on it.”
It’s also not surprising that Sigmund Freud would observe that “the suppression of a woman’s sexuality”—in this case by a mother’s inadvertent body shaming—“leads to a general inhibition of desire and curiosity, a restriction on wanting and knowing that spreads throughout her life.”
Body shaming—criticizing or demeaning someone’s appearance, overtly or covertly—is linked to what psychologists call dysmorphia, an unhealthy preoccupation with your body’s perceived flaws, which tends to generalize to your perception of yourself. In relationships, it often shows up as a lack of intimacy, because you don’t want anyone getting close enough to see those flaws.
Body shaming is also implicated in something called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, since pleasure begins with the body and its senses.
The Origins of Body Shaming
Contrary to popular belief, body shaming didn’t start with the rise of social media, or the “Mad Men” era of advertising in the ’50s and ’60s, or even the dieting and exercise fads of the last 200 years. It began in primitive times as social comparison, the innate human impulse to gauge your personal and social worth in a tribe by how you stack up against others.
It also grew out of ancient superstitions that, for instance, red hair was a sign of bad luck or bad temper, green eyes were marks of the devil, and a slender body type emblematic of poverty—superstitions that turned into prejudices and beauty standards whose bruising effect is very hard to undo.
But what really fused body shaming with anhedonia were puritanical religions and philosophies throughout human history, with their discriminations and damnations against the pleasures of the body; their insistence that the body is something to jettison on your way to the divine; their belief that sexual thoughts are a distracting impurity, a fly in the ointment of virtue; and the promulgation of ideas like original sin, which is stone-cold guaranteed to shame people to the core.
Gnosticism, a theology related to early Christianity and Judaism, referred to the body as “a corpse with senses, the grave you carry around with you.” Both Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece viewed all forms of sexuality as inferior to abstinence because it involved the body. The medieval Pope Gregory declared that “sensual pleasure can never be without sin.” The temptations encountered by Christ in Judea, Buddha under the bodhi tree, and St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert are almost universally depicted in art as either naked women or demons and monsters.
Reframing Sensual and Sexual Pleasure
It’s critical to understand something about these spurious correlations between the body and blasphemy, sensual pleasure and sin, even the erotic and the perverted: The word “perverted” means to be turned from what’s natural and normal. The body’s sensual and sexual capacities are natural and normal to humans, and by definition whatever blocks their energies, whatever turns us against our own bodies, is what’s perverted.
Our bodies were naturally designed for sensual experience and pleasure. We’re endowed with over 1,000 nerve endings per square inch over our entire body, 10,000 taste buds on the tongue, another 10,000 aromas we can discern with our noses, and a heavenly host of appetites toward which to apply these endowments.
On the other hand, we’ve been told that the supposedly intelligent designer of these gifts is disgusted by our use of them. This is strangely and tragically ironic. If we’re indeed made in the image of God, as the Bible says, by rejecting our bodies we’re also rejecting God—in ourselves and in others, those neighbors we’re instructed to love as ourselves.
The Body as a Channel for Spiritual Experience
What all these teachers and teachings have been telling us—confounding us with—for thousands of years is that our bodies, with their natural and God-given passions, are corrupt and corrupting, and in fact work against our spiritual passions. But the body isn’t an obstacle to spirit and soul, a mere skin to shed on the way to some incredible lightness of being. It’s a channel to them.
The famous Bernini sculpture of a swooning St. Theresa in the Santa Maria Della Vittoria church in Rome—an angel about to thrust the arrow of God’s love into her—is a classic example of how indistinguishable spiritual and orgasmic rapture can be. The Song of Solomon and the texts of tantra both use highly erotic language to describe union with the sacred.
Now surely some of our “temptations”—including a compulsive preoccupation with how we look—can and do interfere with our higher aspirations for ourselves, and create real suffering. But they’re also among our greatest earthly pleasures and shouldn’t be thrown out with the mortal bathwater. (Besides, it was a sensual pleasure that gave each of us life.)
“The historical and psychological splitting of spirit and body,” says Thomas Moore in The Soul of Sex, “of transcendence and sensuousness, virtue and desire, is a neurosis. A disturbance of the soul.” And we are its descendants. Not just we as individuals, but we the people. Your relationship with your own body—and the feeling of being at home there—is on the same continuum as your relationship to the body politic and the body of Earth.
How to Counter Self-Shaming and Reclaim Bodily Pleasure
Reclaiming your body and its pleasures requires disclaiming the judgments and prohibitions against them that were passed down by your forebears, and recapitulated by social media, advertising and beauty standards. But undoing the spell and unshaming yourself also require regular intervention, catching yourself in the act of self-shaming and applying a compensating counter-message.
For example, rather than focusing on how your body looks, focus on the voluminous and miraculous things it can do: enjoy the taste of food, the sensation of dancing, the beauty of nature and art, the rapture of music, the tingle of loving touch, the pleasure of being immersed in water, the exaltation of being able to climb mountains and take in a bigger picture.
