Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Body shame runs deeper than diet culture; explore the historical roots of body and sex shaming, and why reclaiming pleasure is a radical act of self-liberation
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[The following is an excerpt from The Sure Thing, by Elana Auerbach, reproduced with permission from the author and publisher.]
Body Positivity
For over a decade, I led a year-long training for the Sanctuary of the 13 Moon Mystery School. Each month, there was a different sacred feminine archetype to connect with and embody. We would focus on one of 13 archetypes (i.e., the Great Mother, the Goddess of Compassion, the Initiator, the Wise Woman) to find our own expression of that energetic pattern. When it was the Primal Goddess month, our outdoor ceremony began around a big fire with drums beating. We invited our wild, innate, instinctual selves to come out and be seen. Some in the group were instantly comfortable with the vibe—their clothes came off as they danced around the fire with abandon. Others had to work their way there.
My attention was particularly caught by two women in the group, Freida and Doreen. Both grew up in the same country in the Middle East. Freida was unabashed in her expression of the Primal Goddess, while Doreen remained clothed, her body language contracted. Doreen couldn’t understand how she could have such a different response from Freida, having both grown up in similar environments, including religiously.
How was it that Freida had come to accept her body just as it was while she, Doreen, was awash in shame?
Freida was thin and petite, while Doreen was larger-bodied and buxom. As the layers of shame dissolved throughout that day, Doreen had an “Aha” moment. On top of the sexual repression she’d inherited from her culture of origin, she had internalized Western ideals of beauty. Doreen’s focus on what she was supposed to look like prevented her from accepting and loving the body that she actually had. By our evening ceremony, Doreen was dancing freely and enjoying her gorgeous body temple.
Body positivity means embracing and celebrating different body shapes and sizes. I see it as the foundation of sex positivity. Sex positivity means treating sex as a normal, healthy part of being human. It means respecting others’ sexual preferences and consensual sexual activity. It’s about a positive attitude toward sex, rather than sex being a taboo topic or a source of shame.
Patriarchy, Puritanism, and Pleasure
Perhaps you’re lucky enough to live in a place or community that is sex positive. But even if you live in a sex positive place, you may not be surrounded by people who consider sex something to be honored and celebrated as a natural part of our human expression. You may also have grown up with influences that didn’t accept and value diversity in body type. The fact is, negativity around sex, pleasure, and our bodies is baked into the dominant cultural narrative of patriarchy and puritanism.
We’re going to delve briefly into this disempowering story in order to see it for what it is—simply a story—so we can move past it.
Patriarchy is a paradigm that centers maleness and hierarchy, and goes back thousands of years. In ancient Mesopotamia, Hamurabi’s Code (c. 1754 BCE) established a social structure where men held authority over women. In ancient Rome (c. 753 BCE–476 CE), the paterfamilias, or eldest male of the family, had absolute authority over all family members, including women and children. In the 16th and 17th centuries, women dubbed witches were burned across Europe and the American colonies. And these are just a few examples.
A primary manifestation of patriarchy is “power over” rather than “power with.” When examined, this describes most of the institutions in political and economic life today. Depending on your personal history and ethnic, religious, or cultural background, you may have had different degrees of experience with overt patriarchy. It is very likely that your life—including your sense of self-worth—has been influenced by this pervasive dominant narrative. Take the gender pay gap as an example. In 2022, women in the U.S. earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. The Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees gender equality as a constitutional right, was first introduced in Congress over a hundred years ago. But it has yet to be passed.
In addition to patriarchy, puritanism is another key word here. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the belief that it is important to work hard and control yourself, and that pleasure is wrong or unnecessary.” The Puritans were members of an English religious reform movement who migrated to New England in the early 17th century. These folks set the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of the so-called “New World.” Aspects of Puritanism still reverberate in American life today. Breastfeeding, for example, was illegal in public until relatively recently. New York was the first state to protect public breastfeeding in 1984, and it took almost 40 years to legalize it in all 50 states. Legislation attempting to dictate what people can and can’t do with their own bodies (such as anti-abortion and anti-trans bills) are examples of initiatives rooted in a patriarchal and puritanical worldview.
Shame is Weaponized
Along with causing active harm, puritanical patriarchy instills shame and fear in us. Shame is intrinsically repressive, and it’s used to try to keep us silent, obedient, and confined. It’s similar to the age-old patriarchal strategy of divide and conquer, which is sewn in fear. This strategy manipulates people to ensure they’re in continuous conflict with one another, rather than turning their attention and collective power against the ruling elites to create a truly just society. We see this when the powers-that-be instigate tensions between working-class whites and people of color, as well as in anti-immigrant narratives.
Shame is exploited in a similar way to fear. The difference is that instead of turning on the “other,” we turn on ourselves.
Much of this comes through the media. We are bombarded with expectations of what is considered attractive. Everywhere you look—social media, fashion magazines, billboards, advertisements—beauty is portrayed in a specific way, with an extremely limited lens. Advertisers prey on our fears that we aren’t enough—we’re too fat, too old, too unattractive, too whatever it is that will make us believe we’re not good enough exactly as we are. In this way, we’re manipulated to believe we’re in need of whatever is being peddled—fad diets, trendy workouts, Botox, blonder hair, anti-wrinkle and cellulite products, cosmetic surgery…the list goes on and on.
This conditioning is used to bamboozle us into spending our attention, energy, and resources on attaining some superficial ideal. And by “us” I especially mean women. We judge ourselves against an impossible standard of beauty—one that is often airbrushed, ironically. We spend countless hours and dollars chasing an elusive dream of perfection.
The sad fact is, shame sells. Collectively, we spend billions of dollars to try to reach some unattainable ideal of beauty. In 2024, in the U.S. alone, $90 billion was spent on weight loss and dieting; over $19 billion was spent on plastic surgery; and $119 billion was spent on beauty products. Capitalizing on our shame for failing to meet such ideals reaps tremendous profit.
Instead, we could be using that time, money, and energy to hone our unique genius, discover our passions, and find genuine fulfillment in our lives.
So why do we fall for it?
Body, Sex, and Pleasure Shaming: A Brief History of Repression
In short, these concepts have deep roots. Body, sex, and pleasure shaming have been used by the puritanical patriarchy to suppress us for quite a while. In Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, Amy Farrell traces the societal denigration of fatness to the mid-19th century, long before there were any health concerns about a large body size, and well before the diet industry emerged in the 1920s. Farrell claims that fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but also to prevailing ideas about race, civilization, and evolution.(1)
For 19th and early 20th-century thinkers, fatness was a key marker of inferiority, of an uncivilized, barbaric, and “primitive” body. This idea―that fatness is a sign of a “primitive” person―endures today, fueling our $80 billion “war on fat.” Anti-fatness stems from the same limited and prejudiced mindset as race science theory and eugenics.(2) In other words, fat shaming is directly related to the slavery-justifying viewpoint that darker-skinned people are inferior to lighter-skinned people.
The first step in emancipating ourselves from these imprisoning perspectives is simply to recognize what is going on.
We have to be able to see the prison bars before we can unlock the gate and let ourselves out. Accepting larger-sized bodies, whether our own or others’, as just as valuable, worthy, and healthy as smaller-sized bodies is actually a profound act of liberation. Because as we affirm larger bodies, we dismantle racist conditioning and free our minds!
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there.
Along with being shamed for how we look, women and girls are generally taught to be ashamed of our sexuality. First, there’s the double standard imposed on women. A woman who explores sex beyond the usual confines of a monogamous relationship or marriage is often called a slut, her behavior considered socially unacceptable. In contrast, men are often cheered for their sexual adventures. In Emily Nagoski’s seminal book Come as You Are, along with this double standard, she identifies three core cultural messages about female sexuality.(3)
- The Moral Message: This can come in different forms, all stemming from a very old paradigm: You are evil if you want or like sex. Moreover, your virginity is your most valuable asset. Nagoski references James Fordyce’s 1766 Sermons to Young Women: “Women are appealing when they’re meek and ignorant and pure.” Clearly, Fordyce and his ilk were at the top of the puritanical patriarchal heap, and perpetuating this worldview to maintain their power.
- The Medical Message: You are diseased. Nagoski condenses this message as: “Sex causes disease and pregnancy, which makes it dangerous.” Nagoski continues: Of course, if you’re ready to take that risk, “Sexual functioning should happen in a particular way—desire, then arousal, then orgasm, preferably during intercourse, simultaneously with your partner.” When things don’t progress in the bedroom in this prescribed way, the message becomes, “There is a medical issue that you must address. With medication. Or possibly surgery.”(4)
- The Media Message: You are inadequate. In Nagoski’s summation: “You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch.”(5)
Taken altogether, it’s only logical that this messaging leads to the notion that we should also be ashamed of feeling pleasure. If the female body is intrinsically wrong, and so is female desire, then of course, female pleasure must also be wrong.
Shame vs. Guilt
Shame is different from guilt. Guilt (or regret) arises when we’ve deviated from our internal sense of morality. For instance, losing your temper and saying something awful to a loved one in the heat of the moment. We’ve all done it. We may regret what we said or even feel guilty for saying it. This experience gives us the opportunity to reflect, make amends, and try to do better next time. Feeling regret or guilt brings the opportunity for growth.
In contrast, when we feel shame, we experience guilt or regret but then add another (imagined) person’s judgment onto our actions. Shame is something from the outside that gets put on us.
The judgments that give rise to shame might come from an individual. For example, if you were caught pleasuring yourself as a child by someone who was sexually closed and then they shamed you for it. You may have thought you were “bad”. When we experience shame as an adult, it’s typically because we have internalized these judgments.
The judgments that give rise to shame, though, can also be cultural, such as buying into a toxic cultural narrative or the patriarchal puritanism described above.
Shame Shuts Us Down
On the level of the nervous system, shame works to shut us down, so we can’t see any options. Dr. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory suggests that the involuntary nervous system’s response to shame is not limited to fight-or-flight, but also includes a social engagement system and a shutdown response. Shame often results in social disconnection and self-isolation, which in turn activates the body’s shutdown response. Thus, shame becomes a self-fulfilling loop of disassociation, where a quick-fix, surface-level solution is sought to assuage the loneliness and unease. Getting the latest glossy product may make you feel better temporarily, but it won’t free you from the shackles of shame.
Pleasure Liberates!
There’s good news. Recognizing how we’ve been manipulated by the false narrative of the puritanical patriarchy disrupts the disempowering cycle of shame. That’s when genuine autonomy and self-empowerment can emerge. We can liberate ourselves from the shame we carry around our bodies and around sex itself, using pleasure as our lodestar.
(1) Amy Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 5.
(2) Sabrina Springs, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 147-168.
(3) Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021), 156-158.
(4) Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021), 157.
(5) Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021), 158.
You may also enjoy reading Could You Love Your Body, Really? Shifting your Body Identity by Peggy Farah
