Unbelievable, but true: for men, anxiety about the imperfection of their own body prevents them from enjoying sex more than women.
A common joke says that women’s glossy magazines are half advice on how to accept and love yourself for who you are, and half diet descriptions. Numerous educational projects by feminist organizations and perfume companies that expose the use of photoshop in advertising and promote “natural” images of “ordinary” people are also addressed exclusively to women.
However, men also suffer from the awareness of their own bodily imperfection. Moreover, as it turned out thanks to the recent work* by Robin Milhausen (Robin Milhausen) and her colleagues from the University of Guelph in the Canadian province of Ontario, published in the journal Archives Of Sexual Behavior, sometimes suffer even more than women.
The study involved 143 people aged 18-25, men and women in romantic relationships. They answered questions from numerous tests about the quality and satisfaction of their sexual life and relationships with a loved one in general, as well as about the perception of their own body and assessment of its sexual attractiveness. The questionnaires included, for example, questions about whether respondents wear baggy clothes to hide figure flaws, or whether they try to take a pose in moments of intimacy in which they look slimmer. In addition, the researchers measured their weight (more than half of the participants had it within the normal range, that is, a BMI did not exceed 25) and the percentage of fat in body weight.
A significant part of the results obtained corresponded to expectations and ordinary common sense. So, the strongest connection was found between the quality of relationships and the quality of sex: the stronger the love, the better things are in bed, and this is true for both men and women. In addition, objectively fatter men and women were less satisfied with their sex lives than more slender ones.
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However, much to the surprise of psychologists, the subjective self-assessment of body image for men turned out to be more important than for women. So, it was those men who, embarrassed by their physical imperfection, true or imaginary, tried to make their partners see them naked less, and reported less satisfaction with sex. For women, as it turned out, even purposeful efforts to hide from the eyes of a loved one excessive wrinkles on the body do not at all interfere with enjoying intimacy. In addition, the relationship between excess weight and the desire to hide fullness is also stronger among men. But it turned out that it was more important for women to have sex more often in order to appreciate their sex life.
Researchers offer several hypotheses to explain these paradoxes. Perhaps women are so accustomed to worrying about the imperfection of their body that for them it is the norm of life and its usual background, while men of this kind of anxiety (yet?) overtakes only in special cases. Or it’s all about permanent relationships: their very fact gives women a signal that they are “accepted and approved”, while this is not enough for men to relax and allow themselves imperfection.
Be that as it may, one thing is clear: the problem of “body image”, contrary to what has been believed until now, is not a woman’s face.
* R. Milhausen et al. «Relationships between body image, body composition, sexual functioning, and sexual satisfaction among heterosexual young adults». Archives Of Sexual Behavior, 2014, doi:10.1007/s10508-014-0328-9