What do beauty standards, the orgasm gap and diet culture all have in common?
They’ve been cleverly manufactured by patriarchy to control women.
Research suggests that the average woman will spend over $70,000 on her appearance over her lifetime. That’s a huge amount of money, and for what?
Women are taught from a young age that our value lies in conforming to society’s beauty standards. From being praised as young girls for being cute, feminine and pretty, to seeing unrealistic beauty standards in magazines and on TV. We read about the dangerous diets celebrities put themselves through to lose weight, praise mothers for ‘bouncing back’ just weeks after having a baby and scroll through photos of models at beach clubs with their ‘perfect’ bikini bodies and airbrushed skin on Instagram as if they were the norm.
We’re treated better when we’re made up and dressed up. We can feel it in the way that others act around us. Conversations amongst friends about botox and plastic surgery aren’t just commonplace, they’re so normalised that we forget we’re talking about injecting poison under our skin.
We are conditioned to value youth and beauty, so much so that embracing our natural state and not conforming is seen as an act of protest. Like Pamela Anderson deciding to go to Paris Fashion Week make-up free. When did a woman showing up as her authentic, natural self become front page news?
We are conditioned to value youth and beauty, so much so that embracing our natural state and not conforming is seen as an act of protest.
All of this leaves women with crippling self-esteem issues. In turn, those issues keep us tired and poor, and therefore much easier to control.
We’re tired because our brains are working at a million miles an hour thinking about the way we look. Thinking about how much exercise we’ve done today to see if we can order the pizza or should just have a salad instead. Imagine how much more energy we’d have if we prioritised our health and happiness over thin-ness. Imagine how much more time we’d have to be creative and think about things that set our souls on fire if we freed ourselves from thoughts about how we look.
Imagine how much more energy we’d have if we prioritised our health and happiness over thin-ness.
This low self-esteem seeps into other areas of our lives too. Take the orgasm gap for example; women orgasm almost all of the time when we masturbate, but a lot of us don’t orgasm when we have sex with men. If you can relate to this, you’ve probably either been told or internalised the idea that this is somehow our fault, that we’re “broken”, when really a lot of us are too busy thinking about what we look like and doing everything we can to please our partner that we forgot that we’re also worthy of pleasure.
We have an organ that exists solely to give us pleasure (thank you, almighty clitoris!), and whilst a lot of men barely acknowledge its existence (which I could write a whole other blog post about), us women also sometimes forget about it completely when we’re having sex with men.
So, how do we take control of the situation?
A really powerful way to push back against patriarchy and societal norms that strip us of our money, time and energy is to practise radical self love.
By rejecting the idea that we’re somehow not good enough just the way we are, we regain our power. Learning to love or even just accept the curves and bumps that we’re born with or the laugh lines that appear on our faces instead of seeing them as problems that need fixing. From there comes the freedom to order the pasta dish that we’re craving at the lovely restaurant because we care more about our happiness than how our bloated tummy looks in that dress. We start to enjoy partnered sex more because we’ve stopped analysing how we look in every position and started fully letting go and allowing ourselves to receive pleasure. We spend money on experiences that set our souls on fire instead of sticking needles in our faces to maintain our youth.
A woman who loves herself is a woman who’s much harder to control.
But pushing back isn’t easy.
The world doesn’t take kindly to women who break free from society’s expectations. We see this when women who enjoy sex are called names and told they’re less likely to find love (which we all know isn’t true, look at the famous porn stars who are happily married and have kids). This is one of the reasons why the sex positive community is so important, you can read more about that here.
The world doesn’t take kindly to women who break free from society’s expectations.
We also see examples of this in the press when female celebrities are said to “look good for their age” when they’re only in their 30s, or told they’ve really “let themselves go” if they let their hair go it’s natural grey or a photo of them on the beach shows a bit of cellulite.
In this journey to self-love, the world is against us. Which is why it’s so important to surround ourselves with people who get it, those who will lift you up and support you instead of making you feel like an outcast. At Sensuali we pride ourselves in having curated an exceptional community of sex-positive people, including coaches that will help you heal your relationship with your body, BDSM professionals that will allow you to explore your pleasure without shame and photographers whose only goal is to make you feel like the best version of yourself.
Tara Margulies
Tara is a social media content creator who specialises in empowering women to be the best versions of themselves. She speaks about taboo topics like sex, periods, feminism and choosing to be child free over on her Instagram @movewithtara.