For People With Poor Body Images, Baring It All Can Be Unbearable

The 36-year-old Mar Vista mom and businesswoman has long been married to a man who finds her body irresistible, even though she considers herself overweight.

He even declares his love for her stomach, the very part of her body she most loathes. But despite her husband’s admiration, the woman, who asked to be anonymous, doesn’t like to be nude in front of him.

“I was never the kind of person to run around naked with all the lights on,” she said. “After sex, I always kind of lie there and don’t get right up. If I am taking a bath and my husband walks in, I get kind of uncomfortable. But he doesn’t like it when I am hiding and not feeling good about myself.”

She is not alone in what might be called her buff-o-phobia. Nearly 60% of women who regarded themselves as overweight said that they would not allow their partner to see them naked, according to a recent survey of 2,000 women conducted by Slimming Magazine, a British publication. More than 80% of the women surveyed claimed that their excess weight was also ruining their sex lives.

A Psychology Today survey published last summer found that 56% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies, with the majority identifying their abdomens, hips, muscle tone and weight as the biggest concerns.

Another study published in the Journal of Sex Research last year investigated the effects of body image self-consciousness in the bedroom, finding that 35% of 198 heterosexual female college undergraduates reported experiencing body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy. Women with the most pronounced self-consciousness reported being less sexually assertive, and avoiding physical intimacy with a partner. Only 7% of the women in the study were obese, according to national weight-height criteria.

“What we found is that regardless of how thin women were, those who felt more anxious and more self-conscious about their body image in the bedroom said things like, ‘I couldn’t imagine letting my partner give me a full body massage’ or ‘I couldn’t imagine taking a shower with my partner,’” said Michael Wiederman, a psychology professor at Columbia College in South Carolina and author of the Journal of Sex Research study. “The irony is that these are 19- and 20-year-olds.”

One can’t generalize to the larger population of women based upon a study of undergraduate students, warned Wiederman. But, he added, women and men everywhere probably suffer from the contrast effect, the phenomenon of seeing a barrage of unrealistic, doctored images of models and actresses in the media, and subsequently comparing oneself.

“If you show someone images of really beautiful people, they tend to feel worse about themselves,” said Wiederman. “We are tricked into thinking they really exist.”

One 46-year-old woman who lives in San Diego offered that she had internalized the real and celluloid images of perfect-bodied women as has her husband, and that has made it harder for her to bare it all. “To me it is pragmatic,” said the marketing executive and mother of two. “I just know my bad side and good side. If I can help it, I won’t have my husband even accidentally see my bare [backside]. He works among beautiful women, sees Victoria’s Secret’s commercials on TV, actresses in television shows and real-life people walking on the beach. I don’t compete in that arena.”

Two years into their marriage, the woman urged her husband to tell her why his interest in sex seemed to be dwindling. When pressed, he finally told her that he thought she was overweight. “I have just resigned myself to this is how it is,” said the woman, who added that she thinks other physical and emotional issues contribute to her husband’s low sexual desire.

One three-year longitudinal study of nationally representative married couples published in 1987 found that weight gain in women resulted in decreased sexual interest and satisfaction among their husbands, but such was not the case with regard to men’s weight gain and wives’ sexual interest. But Oakland-based clinical psychologist Carol Rinkleib Ellison suspects that a complex puzzle explains the study results.

“If a woman is gaining weight, it could be her partner is meeting fewer of her emotional needs,” said Rinkleib Ellison, author of “Women’s Sexualities: Generations of Women Share Intimate Secrets of Self-Acceptance.” “Men are victims too. They are plagued by performance anxiety, and they may think they need to see a sexy body to turn on rather than turning on through other kinds of intimacy. I have seen couples in my practice where the man complains about his wife’s body or weight because he needs to blame her for his sexual dysfunction, which is due to his own aging process or from medication.”

A 47-year-old woman, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with her husband and two children, said that she would rather wear baggy pajamas than be naked in front of her husband any day.

“The thing that drives me crazy is I feel horrible about my body and think I look terrible from the waist down, but my husband thinks I look great,” she said. “I find it mind-boggling. I say to him, ‘What are you saying to me?’ What I can’t understand is why I can’t believe him. He still hasn’t convinced me of that for myself. I want to say, ‘Let me point out to you this flaw and this one.”’

All the critical messages about one’s body accelerate when we’re naked or scantily clad at the beach or at a pool party because the body is free of the pleats, scarves and layers that are used to disguise perceived flaws, said Adrienne Ressler, a body-image consultant at the Renfrew Center, an eating disorders clinic and treatment center in the Fort Lauderdale area. She counsels never pointing out one’s own flaws to a partner, even if it means chewing on the sheets.

“The biggest turn-on to a partner is not having a perfect-bodied partner but having a passionate body to make love to and having somebody who responds back,” said Ressler. “If you are self-conscious, you are always anticipating a move or regretting a move, or creating a scenario in your head, and you are not there in the moment.”

Body obsession may have traditionally been the domain of women, but increasingly, men are joining the ranks. A landmark national survey of 548 men published by Psychology Today in 1997 found that 43% said they were dissatisfied with their body versus 15% in 1972. The complaints sound like those of women: The majority of men were dissatisfied with their abdomen, weight, chest size and muscle tone.

And the problem is certainly not limited to heterosexual interactions. A 37-year-old storefront designer said that when he first moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco in 1990, he was tall and skinny. Since then, he has acquired the muscular physique of a weightlifter. He fell in love with a man who is a bit heavyset, he said, the physical opposite of himself.

“My boyfriend says to me, ‘I don’t know what you see in me,”’ said the interior designer who lives in Los Feliz. “I tell him, ‘I can’t believe that you think that. You are the most wonderful person in the world.’ My friends say to me, ‘He needs to lose 10 pounds.’ I say to them, ‘Yeah, and you need a frontal lobotomy.’”