Come as You Are (55 page)

26.
 Items taken with permission from the Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire (Fraley, Waller, and Brennan, “Self-report measures of adult attachment”).

27.
 Stefanou and McCabe, “Adult Attachment and Sexual Functioning”; see also Birnbaum et al., “When Sex Is More Than Just Sex,” and Cooper et al., “Attachment Styles, Sex Motives, and Sexual Behavior.”

28.
 La Guardia et al., “Within-Person Variation in Security of Attachment.”

29.
 Davila, Burge, and Hammen, “Why Does Attachment Style Change?”

30.
 Taylor and Master, “Social Responses to Stress.”

31.
 David and Lyons-Ruth, “Differential Attachment Responses.”

32.
 The Loving Lab,
www.lovinglab.com
.

33.
 Rumi,
Teachings of Rumi
.

34.
 Ibid.

five: cultural context

1.
 van de Velde,
Ideal Marriage
, 145.

2.
 Hite,
The Hite Report
, 365.

3.
 Britton et al., “Fat Talk.”

4.
 Might this be starting to change? In one study, college women (mostly white) reported that they would like a woman more if she talked positively about her body than if she criticized her body—though they also reported that they expected other women to prefer a woman who self-criticized (Tompkins et al., “Social Likeability”).

5.
 Woertman and van den Brink, “Body Image.”

6.
 Pazmany et al., “Body Image and Genital Self-Image.”

7.
 Longe et al., “Having a Word with Yourself.”

8.
 Powers, Zuroff, and Topciu, “Covert and Overt Expressions of Self-Criticism.”

9.
 Gruen et al., “Vulnerability to Stress.”

10.
 Dickerson and Kemeny, “Acute Stressors and Cortisol Response.”

11.
 Besser, Flett, and Davis, “Self-Criticism, Dependency”; Cantazaro and Wei, “Adult Attachment, Dependence”; Reichl, Schneider, and Spinath, “Relation of Self-Talk.”

12.
 Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn, “Am I Too Fat to Be a Princess?”

13.
 At a 2009 conference on eating disorders, I attended a talk on the cultural origins of the “thin ideal” (Gans, “What’s It All About?”), and this is what I learned: It’s all about social status—
men’s
social status. The “thin ideal” in Western culture originates with notions of women as property and status symbols.

In the seventeenth century, a softer, rounder, plumper female was the ideal because it was only rich women who could afford the buttery, floury food and the sedentary lifestyle that allowed them to accumulate the abundant curves of the women in Rubens’s paintings. Around the mid-nineteenth century, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to advertise how rich he was by marrying a woman who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol to have a wife who was small, thin, and weak, barely able to totter daintily around the house, who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. This is in contradiction to everything evolution would have a woman be: robust, healthy, strong, tall, able healthfully to conceive, gestate, give birth to, and breast-feed multiple offspring.

In the twenty-first century, body shape is still a marker of social status—rich women can afford real food (rather than processed crap) and have the leisure time for exercise. But always these fashions around what shape a woman’s body “should” be are about social class. They have nothing to do with fertility (on the contrary), nothing to do with an “evolved preference,” except insofar as we have an evolved preference for higher social status, and nothing to do with promoting women’s health.

So can you trust what your culture taught you about what your body should look like?

14.
 Bacon, “The HAES Manifesto.”

15.
 Haidt’s website,
moralfoundations.org
, describes the foundations in more detail. But for an important critique, see Suhler and Churchland’s “Can Innate, Modular ‘Foundations’ Explain Morality?”

16.
 See, just for a start, Yeshe,
Introduction to Tantra.

17.
 It is not, however, identical. There are different categories of stimuli, such as “body boundary violations,” which are about body-envelope damage and often relate to blood and physical pain, and “core disgust,” related to digestion. These two kinds of disgust produce distinguishable reactions (Shenhav and Mendes, “Aiming for the Stomach”).

18.
 Mesquita, “Emoting: A Contextualized Process.”

19.
 Borg and de Jong, “Feelings of Disgust.”

20.
 Tybur, Lieberman, and Griskevicius, “Microbes, Mating, and Morality.”

21.
 Graham, Sanders, and Milhausen, “Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory.”

22.
 de Jong et al., “Disgust and Contamination Sensitivity”; Borg, de Jong, and Schultz, “Vaginismus and Dyspareunia”; for a review, see de Jong, Overveld, and Borg, “Giving in to Arousal.”

23.
 Neff, “Self-Compassion, Self-Esteem, and Well-Being.”

24.
 Adapted from
www.self-compassion.org/self_compassion_exercise.pdf
. See link for more ideas.

25.
 Stice, Rohde, and Shaw,
Body Project
, 95.

26.
 Germer,
Mindful Path to Self-Compassion
, 150.

27.
 Hawkins et al., “Thin-Ideal Media Image.”

28.
 Becker et al., “Eating Behaviours and Attitudes.”

29.
 Becker,
Body, Self, and Society
, 56.

30.
 In Becker et al., “Validity and Reliability,” 35 percent of participants reported purging in the last twenty-eight days, using a traditional herbal purgative, but Thomas et al., “Latent Profile Analysis,” report only 74 percent of those using the traditional purgative said they did so specifically for weight loss, as opposed to, for example, medical reasons.

31.
 The aliveness of the simultaneous pressures of the moral model and the media model in particular are observable in the perpetuation of the “Madonna-whore” construction of women’s sexuality. To witness how this is enacted in young women’s sexuality, I recommend Tolman’s
Dilemmas of Desire
(2009).

six: arousal

1.
 Suschinsky, Lalumière, and Chivers, “Sex Differences in Patterns of Genital Sexual Arousal”; Bradford and Meston, “Impact of Anxiety on Sexual Arousal.”

2.
 Peterson, Janssen, and Laan, “Women’s Sexual Responses to Heterosexual and Lesbian Erotica.”

3.
 If you run the same experiment but use a thermistor (a little clip that attaches to the inner labia and measures its temperature as a proxy for blood flow) instead of the photoplethysmograph, you’ll get slightly more overlap (Henson, Rubin, and Henson, “Consistency of Objective Measures”). If you use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to get very precise measurements of changes in blood flow to the pelvis, you’ll get slightly less overlap (Hall, Binik, and Di Tomasso, “Concordance Between Physiological and Subjective Measures”). If you get really high tech and measure not just vaginal blood flow and subjective arousal but also brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), you’ll find out that genital response does not overlap with women’s brain activity (Arnow et al., “Women with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder”).

4.
 Bergner, “Women Who Want to Want”; Bergner,
What Do Women Want?
; Ryan and Jethá,
Sex at Dawn
, 272–73, 278; Magnanti,
The Sex Myth
, 14.

5.
 Angier, “Conversations/Ellen T. M. Laan.”

6.
 Both, Everaerd, and Laan, “Modulation of Spinal Reflexes”; Laan, Everaerd, and Evers, “Assessment of Female Sexual Arousal.”

7.
 Suschinsky, Lalumière, and Chivers, “Patterns of Genital Sexual Arousal.” Hat tip to Kelly Suchinsky and Meredith Chivers for actually sitting down with me and letting me see the clips. Man, that
League of Their Own
scene is sad.

8.
 A recent special issue of
Biological Psychology
was devoted to concordance research, and none of it was sex research (Hollenstein and Lanteigne, “Models and Methods of Emotional Concordance”).

9.
 Matejka et al., “Talking About Emotion.”

10.
 Buck, “Prime Theory.”

11.
 Greenwald, Cook, and Lang, “Affective Judgment and Psychophysiological Response.”

12.
 Kring and Gordon, “Sex Differences in Emotion”; Schwartz, Brown, and Ahern, “Facial Muscle Patterning.”

13.
 Gottman and Silver,
What Makes Love Last?

14.
 Hess, “Women Want Sex.”

15.
 James,
Fifty Shades of Grey
, 275.

16.
 Ibid.

17.
 Ibid., 293.

18.
 Koehler, “From the Mouths of Rapists.”

19.
 Toulalan,
Imagining Sex.

20.
 Moore, “Rep. Todd Akin.” Akin initially apologized for the statement but in 2014 wrote that he regretted the apology because stress—which rape certainly causes—interferes with fertility, and that is what he meant by “shut the whole thing down” (Erika Eichelberger, “Todd Akin is not sorry for his insane rape comments”). To be clear, then: His opinion as a former (and potentially future) lawmaker is that if a woman doesn’t have a miscarriage, she can’t have been “legitimately” raped.

21.
 This has been replicated for the last two decades, but the first evidence was Morokoff and Heiman, “Effects of Erotic Stimuli on Sexually Functional and Dysfunctional Women.”

22.
 Bobby Henderson, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, “Open Letter to Kansas School Board,”
www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
.

23.
 Bloemers et al., “Inductions of Sexual Arousal in Women.”

24.
 Basson, “Biopsychosocial Models.”

25.
 Balzer, Alexandra M. “Efficacy of Bibliotherapy as a Treatment for Low Sexual Desire in Women”; Lankveld, Jacques van, “Self-help Therapies for Sexual Dysfunction”; Frühauf, Gerger, Schmidt, Munder, and Barth, “Efficacy of psychological interventions for sexual dysfunction.”

26.
 Adriaan Tuiten, Emotional Brain,
www.emotionalbrain.nl/about-eb
.

27.
 Bloemers et al., “Toward Personalized Sexual Medicine (Part 1)”; Poels et al., “Toward Personalized Sexual Medicine (Part 2)”; van Rooij et al., “Toward Personalized Sexual Medicine (Part 3).”