SEX, STRESS AND CELLULITE: A COMBINATION FOR LOVEBy Lisa Earle McLeodwww.forgetperfect.com I'm too fat and tired to have sex. If you haven't said it or thought it, chances you are, you've heard it - either from your wife or a group of women, lamenting their lack of libido. Exhaustion and poor body image are often two big stumbling blocks for women when it comes to sex. Either we're too tired for a romp in the hay, or we're too weird about out bodies to enjoy it. The flat-line-versus-frisky phenomenon has been mourned by husbands around the world and documented by woman's magazines and talk shows from coast to coast. The most commonly cited cause is stress. Study after study has confirmed what every woman alive already knew - if your life makes you feel like the frayed end of a rope you're hardly in the mood for love. It's completely natural for a woman who feels overwhelmed to lose her sex drive. After all, Mother Nature gave us a sex drive so we would reproduce. If you can't handle the life you've got, the last thing nature wants is for you to produce another one. A woman's libido crashes and burns under stress, Mother Nature's instant birth control. Men, however, often respond differently. The male brain makes the leap from, "I'm under stress" to "I might not survive" to "I better leave a little reminder of me for the universe before I keel over" faster than you can say "testosterone surge." There's a pretty simple solution to this problem, right? Reduce the stress and women will want to have more sex. (Hint to the men out there: Simply telling your wife not to worry about the grocery shopping, childcare, cooking, cleaning, and driving will not reduce her stress. However, you actually taking over some of these jobs is pure erotica.) But while stress may be a completely logical, natural and even fixable cause of low sex drive, I suspect that poor body image is an even more insidious problem. For some bizarre reason, we often believe that only the great-looking people get should have sex. Or, I should say, we women believe that. It seems very few men worry that their beer gut will interfere with an intimate moment. But if a woman thinks she's fat, flabby or anything less than a 10, she's often so fixated on her flaws that she can't enjoy the moment. I personally blame television. Glamour girls and guys are seen gleefully tumbling around in bed every afternoon on the soaps, but when was the last time you saw an overweight, middle-aged married couple hanging from the chandelier? Sex expert Michael Alvear, who gives sex advice to couples on his hugely popular British TV show "Sex Inspectors" says, "In all the people I've interviewed and worked with, I have not encountered a single woman who did not have some sense of body shame." If every woman in England has something she doesn't like about her body, I'm guessing every woman in America does too. Alvear goes on to describe one woman on a recent show who was so uptight about her body that "she would only have sex when the lights were out, they were under the covers, and without getting too graphic, they were doing it in such a way that her husband could not see her body." "My heart just sank," says Alvear. "Her husband thinks she has a beautiful body, but it was really painful to hear the depths of her shame." As usual, the husband doesn't even notice, and may even love, the roll around his wife's middle, but the woman is all wigged out about it. The issue here isn't whether or not you have jiggle thighs. The problem is that we've been programmed to believe that a woman's biggest contribution in the bedroom is her body. She is an object to be presented, and if the presentation is not flawless, the sex will not be good. Alvear says, "The biggest problem for women in the bedroom is the mirror." I have to wonder what would happen if women started thinking about themselves as active participants, the way men do. Instead of assuming that the way you look will determine the outcome, think about the way you feel - physically and emotionally - and the way you can make your partner feel. It's always weird to talk about sex, and almost every time I write about it people send me letters accusing me of being a smut queen. But isn't it a little strange that we don't want to talk about an issue about which so many people are having problems? I'd hate to think of millions of stressed-out, flabby women out there suffering from low libido simply because nobody told them that chubby girls can have great sex. So here's the bottom line: Sex is the great equalizer. Everybody's had it, including your mother. And everybody deserves to enjoy it, no matter what you look like or how behind you are on the laundry. Sex was meant to be one of the great emotional, physical, and yes spiritual joys of life, so don't let the size of your thighs or your to-do list ruin it for you. Lisa Earle McLeod is a syndicated columnist, a nationally recognized speaker and the author of "Forget PerfectTM: Finding Joy, Meaning, and Satisfaction in the Life You’ve Already Got and the YOU You Already Are." (Penguin/Putnam) She has been featured in Real Simple, Essence, and The New York Times and seen on Good Morning America, Lifetime and FOX. Contact Lisa at www.ForgetPerfect.com if you would like additional columns. Editors: If you’d like to run Forget PerfectTM in your paper contact Lisa@ForgetPerfect.com. Column must include byline and photo. 
|
