Exposed

As Somatica practitioners, we applaud this note on how foreplay, touch and nudity all tie into body image and great sex.

The only gripe we have is that we don’t love the separation between “foreplay” and sex – foreplay is some of the best sex folks have because it helps with arousal, connection, intimacy and trust, and is often where women have the majority of their orgasms. When you take the time to touch your partner, your message in that touch is “I desire you” and they receive the message “I am desirable”. Sensual and sexual touch (whether passionately firm and hard or romantically slow and soft) delivers a message of desire and body image issues can be softened with an embodied “letting in” of your partner’s loving, desiring touch on your naked body.

Women (and men too) – your body is beautiful, right now, just as it is. So many women spend so much of their lives hating their body, struggling against it and punishing it for having curves or wrinkles or spots. Women feel like they don’t deserve to have sexual pleasure until their bodies are perfect (and there is no such thing as a perfect body, even the magazines airbrush supermodels). The media, the dieting industry, the fashion industry and so many of our cultural outlets tell women that they have to change themselves to be beautiful. In this way, they can keep making money off of women’s insecurities. And, women’s insecurities about their bodies are yet another cause of low libido.

When women diet in unhealthy ways, starve themselves or overexercise, their sex drive goes down – if you think about it in biological terms, it doesn’t make sense to make a baby if you won’t be able to feed it or yourself. Also, many women feel ashamed about being naked in front of their partners and, instead of feeling the pleasure of sexual arousal, experience sex as though they are outside of themselves watching to make sure their stomach or thighs aren’t too fat. If there is one thing that we know about body image, it is that body image DOES NOT CHANGE from changing your body, it changes when you start loving your body just the way it is and stop monitoring every bit you eat or every pound you have and then beating yourself up about it.

Sometimes just the act of loving your body in this way inspires you to take good care of yourself, eat healthy and exercise. When you look at your body with love and picture others doing the same, you begin to walk in the world in a way that is more open and alive, you believe that you deserve pleasure and people begin to respond to this aliveness and this belief. The freedom from diet-brain and self-hatred is a personal freedom, it is about claiming your own right to pleasure and self-love. To improve your body image towards better libido follow the three steps in our previous post on loving yourself in 3 steps.

Also, an this might sound surprising, libido is also about having power out in the world, about claiming your voice, connecting with other women and changing the world in positive ways so that women’s sexuality is celebrated and cherished instead of denigrated and denied. One example of this might be attending a Slut Walk, a walk organized to respond to a comment by Toronto police offer who said that to remain safe, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.” At events like this, women speak out about ways that they have triumphed in the face of adversity and about issues that still need to be addressed around women and women’s sexual freedom. Another option would be starting a women’s group, or a mother/daughter group, with your friends or acquaintances and educating yourselves and each other about women’s issues and women’s sexuality (or girls’ sexual development). We love to come in and speak to women’s groups, so please invite us if you do! When you begin to see how all women have been denied the full expression of their sexual desire, you will become motivated and inspired to change the world and when you make positive changes in the world, you feel more alive and sexual as well!

We would love to have your comments and experiences, so please write them below.

I an earlier blog entry we talked about the importance of hormones, rest and the just-right-seduction in your libido. Here we will talk about the social messages and how they shape and play a role in your sexuality, desire and turn on. How you feel about yourself as a sexual person has a huge impact on your libido and, unfortunately, in our culture and many others, women’s sexuality is repressed and stigmatized. From the time we are girls all the way through the phases of womanhood, we are given messages that sex is not for women – sexual women are still called “sluts” or “whores” and we are told from early on to fear and feel responsible for preventing pregnancy and STD’s. We are also given the responsibility of gatekeeping boy’s and men’s desire in order to protect our virginity or our reputation as women are generally separated into two categories – marriagable mothers or whores who you sleep with.

In the midst of these kinds of negative messages, however, to get in a relationship and keep our relationships happy, we also are supposed to look and act sexy and want sex even though so much of what we hear is that we are not supposed to want it or do it. Have you ever noticed that most highly sexual women in movies and television shows are usually villains, who often end up being punished or killed, while the less sexual women get rescued, loved and married? In the face of a constant bombardment of these messages, some of it inevitably sinks in, leaving women shameful of their sexuality, distanced from their own sexual desires, and denied the freedom to pursue these desires openly and honestly. We distance from our desire to protect ourselves from being labeled “slut”, and end up not being able to reconnect with it when we want it. We often lose our natural abilities to walk in the world comfortably connected with our sexuality, which inhibits not only our libido but many other things including our ability to flirt, attract partners, seduce, enjoy pleasure, touch and move our bodies in sensual ways, make sexual sounds and reach orgasms. Unfortunately, because of all of this, women often don’t even think about the need for sexual compatibility when choosing a long-term partner. So take a moment to think about your own comfort with your sexuality and ask yourself a few questions:

To often we come across articles that talk about women faking orgasm. Our hope is that women will stop faking it and start learning how to give themselves orgasm to then teach their partners how to give them orgasms. Yes, it can be a bit complicated and it can take some time and extra stimulation, but if we continue to let men think that just jumping to intercourse after a few kisses and squeezes is going to work, we all miss out, even men, who actually really want to please their partners! Stop faking and start exploring. Got some tips on how you’ve trained a partner into getting you off? We would love to hear it in the comments.

Women – your libido is tied to shifts in hormones and energy throughout your day, throughout your monthly cycle and throughout your lifetime. In contrast to men, who generally experience a build-up of sexual energy when they have not had sex for a while, and a lowering when they do have sex, your libido is likely to fluctuate more based on your hormonal changes and changes in your energy level throughout your day. Libido is also heightened when sexual experiences have been recent (as opposed to a distant and fading memory). To put your hormonal changes simply, overall your libido-supporting hormones go down throughout your lifetime – in the big picture women in their 40s are less hormonally horny than women in their 20s. That being said, each month, as long as your are not on a hormonal form of birth control, your hormones experience a peak during ovulation and menstruation and these are often when your libido will be at its highest. You can begin noticing when you have peaks in your desire and track these throughout the month. If you have children, you will likely (or likely did), have an experience of heightened libido during your pregnancy and then lowered libido afterward due to hormonal fluctuations. Since rest has a huge impact on libido, getting enough sleep and choosing to have sex in the morning, afternoon or early evening (whenever your energy level is the highest), can do miracles to your sexual desire and response (and also partially explains why women have lowered libido after childbirth – very little rest, and keeping sex to the end of the day when the kids are in bed!). Finally, in menopause, your sexual hormones drop and stay quite low throughout the month.

As we mentioned above, when you go long stretches of time without sex, your body tends to “forget” what you liked about sex in the first place, and often, once you have sex more regularly, you end up wanting it more. There is one caveat to this, it has to be GOOD SEX or else, as your hormonal desire for sex drops, you will be less and less interested. We have this myth in our culture, that our partners are just supposed to know what we want and be able to provide it without us having to ask, however, since your body, your hormones , your orgasms and your needs to be touched change throughout time, it is essential to teach your partner and continue to communicate with your partner what you need in order to feel turned on. As we have lower and lower hormonal support for our arousal, seduction, fantasy, creativity and communication become more and more essential to keep us interested in sex.

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of seduction and how questions from our partners like, “are you horny,” or “do you want to have sex now” are NOT SEDUCTIONS. Research has shown that women often not interested in sex until they are already somewhat aroused, this means that your partner needs to know how to arouse your body instead of asking you if you want sex because you won’t want it until you are already somewhat aroused.

Here are some important tips to take away:

1) Get as much rest as possible – naps can be hugely rejuvenating

2) Look for times to have sex when you feel the most physiologically aroused – this may mean you will have to initiate sex, which many women are not used to doing (we will talk more about this in our next segment on social messages and libido)

3) When thinking about how your partner can seduce you better, don’t only tell them how to touch you, teach them how to look at you, how to talk to you, what kinds of fantasies most turn you on (so they can tell them to you or you can act them out), and how they can help make sure you get enough rest. If you need more ideas about what is on the menu, check out the second half of our book, COCKFIDENCE.

4) Try to find a birth control method with the least hormonal impact

5) If you are one of those SUPER BUSY WOMEN, make sex dates with your partner or yourself, where you set aside time for intimacy and sexual connection. To those who complain that this will not be spontaneous, we say, there is plenty of time for spontaneity once you get to the date and making the time doesn’t mean you have to have sex – just that you do something that helps you connect to your own body and your partner in a sensual or intimate way.

6) Start tracking your menstrual cycle, keeping an eye on when you have peaks in your arousal and initiate sex during these times or any time you think you might be in the mood

In the next couple of blogs, we will tell you more of the reasons why you may have low libido and how you can change it! Also, we would love to hear your experiences and welcome comments and questions – so feel free to leave comments bellow.

While we can all agree with the idea that one “should” feel comfortable in their own skin and embrace their vagina (and every other part of their body) just as it is, the question we always want to ask is how”? It is one thing to say I want to love my body, and feel comfortable in my skin; it’s another thing entirely to actually put that plan to execution. We want you to have the tools in your tool-belt to actually go about making this change and improve your body image. For real-life change to happen, people actually have to have the EXPERIENCE of feeling differently, not just the thought that they should. “Should” after all is something that mostly makes us feel bad about what is. As a wise client of ours once said, “I’m going to stop should-ing all over myself”. Through the Somatica Method, our trademarked brand of sex therapy, we teach people to fall in love with their body all over again (remember, we had only positive feelings towards our body until society taught us that there was something wrong with it).
Here are three ways you can practice loving your body. After all, our body image doesn’t change when we change our body, our body image changes when we take the time to practice falling in love with it. We hope you and your body enjoy every minute of it!!!

1) Touch – Find a part of your body that you usually treat poorly or talk harshly to and take some time to massage it, tease it and stroke it. Start to notice the potential for pleasure located in this previously-hated part. Notice the softness of the skin or flesh in your hands; notice the subtleties of the texture. Feel how the body part receives pleasure and how that pleasure can begin to spread to other parts of your body as well.

2) Arousal – There is nothing like a good dose of arousal to help us see things in a better light. Try this exercise: look in the mirror in your regular state and notice what you focus on and what kinds of things you say to yourself. Next, take some time to heighten your arousal through self-pleasuring. Do some Kegels (squeezing the muscles in your vagina like you are stopping yourself from peeing) and give your whole body and pussy some arousing touch. Once you get to a heightened state of arousal, or in between 2 orgasms, look in the mirror again and bring your aroused gaze to your face, your whole body and make sure you also take a look at your pussy. Notice the lusciousness and fullness of yourself when looked at through aroused eyes. If you start to lose this perspective, go back to arousing yourself and take another look.

3) Voice – Give the parts of your body to which you have been unkind a voice. Imagine that they can speak for themselves and can tell you how tired they are of being treated poorly, of being told that they are “too this” or “not enough that”. Put your hands on each part of your body that you have been mean to and let them tell you how they’d actually like to be looked at and treated