Aesthetic pressure and sexuality: how does it affect us in bed?

Often in consultation I encounter an idea that repeats itself much more than we would like: people, especially girls, who explain that during sex they “see themselves from the outside”. As if, instead of living the experience, they were observing themselves in the third person, paying attention to how they move, whether they are doing it well, how their body looks, the light, the posture. This has a name: spectatoring, or the spectator effect. 

And indeed, it seems natural to me that this happens, understanding the context of aesthetic pressure in which we find ourselves, and even more so now in the digital age and with access to pornography in such a commonplace way. For years we have grown up under very specific and, above all, very strict beauty standards. Normative bodies, “aesthetic” sexuality, “Barbie” vulvas, movements that seem to be taken from an idealized scene, a lot of performance, etc. Added to this is a hypersexualized society, in which sex is shown a lot, but often disconnected from real pleasure and internal experience.

And what happens? Well, this often directly affects the way we have sex. What’s more, it affects our enjoyment, because how can we enjoy sex if we constantly feel examined?

The result is that many people go to bed with an internalized gaze that is not their own, but learned: the gaze of judgment, of comparison, of demand. And this gaze activates the body in alert mode, which would be the opposite of pleasure mode, and this distances us from the capacity to enjoy. It is very difficult to get aroused, connect, or let go when a part of you is focused on whether you are “doing it well” or whether “you look good enough”.

Recovering pleasure involves, in part, deactivating this internal observer. To return to the body, to sensations, to the present moment.