Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Body image, sex and healing from an E.D. with Megan Jayne Crabbe

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

On this week's episode of the podcast, Emma-Louise was joined by OG creator, author and body positivity advocate, Megan Jayne Crabbe. Together they discuss the impact of our restrictive body image ideals, growing up with an eating disorder, how body image issues affect our relationship to sex and pleasure, the power of the body positivity movement and what it means to finally come home to your body. As Megan said on the podcast: "You don't have to love your body. You don't have to think your body's wonderful. You don't even have to think, yeah, this is the body that I want. "But at the very least, our bodies deserve some kind of respect, because they are doing their best up against a culture that convinces us to hate them." For this episode of the pod we partnered up with the team at Fenwick, Kingston where we hosted the recording live from their gorgeous, and newly redesigned, lingerie and nightwear section. You can watching the recording on Youtube here. Trigger warning: this episode discusses eating disorders, anorexia and body image issues. Please take care when listening and if you've been affected by anything discussed you can seek help at Beat below. (Call) England 0808 801 0677 Email support for England: [e-mail] You can purchase tickets to the next live event here. And subscribe to the Sex Talks Substack here.

Hello and welcome to the live version of the Sex Talks podcast, with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more open, honest and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing in changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship for sex tells us so much about who we are, and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'm joined by new guest,

whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine and do well just that. From writers, authors, and therapists, to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to attend a live recording the podcast, click on the Eventbrite link in the show note.

For this week's episode of the Sex Talks podcast, we partnered up with the team at Fenwick, Kingston, where we hosted the recording live from their gorgeous and newly redesigned lingerie and nightwear section. I know how sex talks appropriate, right? So before we get started, I want to say a big thank you to Fenwick for having us. It was such a special evening, no least because my mum was in the audience and she very proudly told me after the conversation that she used to be a Saturday girl at Fenwick in the early 20s. How sweet is that? I did a very detailed intro on the evening, so I'm just going to let us jump straight into that. But before we do, I just want to give a quick trigger warning. We

discuss eating disorders and anorexia in this episode, so please take care when listening. I put a few links in the show notes where you can get help if you've been affected by any of the issues discussed. Now, without further ado, I am joined tonight, of course, by the wonderful Megan Jane Crabb. She's an OG Instacreator. Oh, yes, you are. Best-selling author of Body Positive Power, presenter, an all-round ray of internet and IRL sunshine,

which is a lovely thing, highlighting why we should be treasuring rather than abusing our bodies. So welcome to Sex Talks, Megan. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And thank you everyone for being here. this is really lovely to do things in real life. Isn't it the best? I am an IRL gal.

I love just being able to touch people. That's weird. That sounded really with so much consent. Consent is a big topic. I mean, God, we're off to a good start, are we? Right. Consent is a big topic we discuss at sex talks. With consent, I love being able to hug and embrace all the wonderful people, mainly women, who come to sex talks. Now, the purpose of the conversation this evening is to understand the impact and functioning of restrictive body ideals in our society, how they are connected to and reinforce patriarchy, and how they affect the way women experience sex and pleasure and sensuality.

In better understanding what Naomi Wolf described as the beauty myth, my hope is that we can also articulate how the fuck we shed the shackles of these limiting beliefs so as to, be able to live in our bodies a little more joyfully, something that you showcase, I think, to absolute perfection. Unless we forget, without our bodies, we have nothing. For anyone who hasn't come to sex talks before, my name is Emma Louise Boynton, and I'm the host and founder of Platform, which I set up in order to engender more honest, open and vulnerable conversations around sex, intimacy and future of gender relations. So we love getting deep in all these thorny, fabulous topics. So to get started then, Megan, I would love us to be able to begin with your personal experience dealing with body image issues as it was your battle with an adolescent eating disorder initially that eventually led you to the body positivity movement and hence to everything you're doing and building now.

Can you remember the first time you felt conscious of your body in a negative way? just a heads up I'm going to be like quite honest and I'm going to try my best to obviously not be like triggering or anything if anyone does feel like a certain way at any point I will not be offended if you leave like just take care of yourself and take a beat and that's absolutely fine so I would say that I started having body image issues when I was four years old so first day of primary school I had this what's that noise and where's it coming from Okay, we're good, good. First day of primary school, I just remember going in and thinking, oh, I'm different. I grew up in a predominantly white working class town and I was just like, okay, I'm the only brown one. I'm definitely wearing like at least a size bigger than everyone else. Like when I look at my thighs in this like little primary school chair, why am, why am I taking up more room than the girls next to me? And of course, any, anytime you notice something different for me at least, different means wrong. different means you're the problem different means you should change that so that's when it began and i picked up a lot of diet culture around me i flipped through my mom's magazines i heard conversations about diets between you know the women around me and i got this message that you know if that equals bad smaller equals better there is only one way to be beautiful and i genuinely thought for my whole childhood well i'm going to grow up and look like rachel green so you know it's it's all going to be

fine. It's all going to be chill. I'm going to be happy and like men are going to love me, et cetera, et cetera. I was never going to look like Rachel Green. First of all, she's a blonde white lady. It just wasn't going to happen. And it didn't need to happen because thankfully I'm very happy where I am. So that's when it started. And I started dieting, so about eight or nine years old. And it was when I was 14 that I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, which, you know, isn't just a diet gone. wrong. Obviously, there's so many layers to eating disorders. There's so many factors that we have to weigh in. But pretty much every eating disorder starts with a diet that gets out of control.

And I took a couple of years to kind of claw my way out of that. And it wasn't until I was 21 that I genuinely started to heal my body image issues. And that's because I stumbled across the body positive movement. Thank you so much for sharing that and for sharing such a kind of personal insight into a struggle I know so well. It was so interesting reading, you know, reading up into kind of your past, everything you've gone through. I similarly had an eating disorder that started exactly the same age, or around kind of 12, 13. And I remember the first time I felt negatively around my body was probably about seven or eight. And it was, you know, going, yeah, having lots of friends who were little pin children and not having those, that same like, you know, washboard

Abbs that I saw S Club 7 rocking, all the posters in my room had celebrities and pop stars who I idolised and they all looked exactly the same from a body perspective and I didn't look like that growing up. I had gorgeous puppy fat, which is what children have. And I remember the beginning of the self-loathing that started at around eight years old and then trying on a bikini, which I probably shouldn't be really, you know, wearing a bikini at eight years old anyway. And it didn't fix. It was too small. And I remember just looking at my reflection and hating myself so much because it felt like these kind of roles that I had felt like a point of failure. They felt like a point of difference. They felt like something I'd done wrong. And I just

think looking back on that and hearing you say the same thing, at eight years old, at five years old, how messed up? Possibly. But I think it shows the intensity of the toxicity of the very narrow body image ideals that we have societyly, that we could at such a young age have inculcated so successfully those ideals. Can you just going back momentarily, because I'm definitely going to go into the body positivity movement and the impact it had on your life, but just going back, do you remember that point at which those negative ideas around your body, that feeling of being different, when that translate, when you kind of took action on that, when that was, when that turned into

something where you're like, right, I'm going to, you know, begin restricting myself. I'm going to begin to actually... I remember, um, dipping in and out of these diets, but telling my mom that I was just really concerned with being healthy, because it was also such a shameful thing. You know, I was never going to go home and say to my parents, I hate my body. I want to lose weight. Like, it was this, it's so bizarre because it was like this, like, universal thing that we're all talk, but we don't talk about it. You know, like, it's just you carry it in yourself and you feel ashamed and you fix it because you're the problem. And I had learned that like before I was 10 years old. So I just, you know, tried to like, low key be like, oh, I'm being healthy. Oh, I'm just going to

cut out this or I'm just going to cut out of that. And, you know, it's, it just got more and more extreme and it was never enough. And I think the thing as well, but anyone who's experienced a restrictive eating disorder knows is that it does, it does give you a similar thing. feeling to what an addiction would and it does give you those kind of chemical highs like extreme hunger can give you this kind of like floaty feeling and like yeah I can do anything because I can you know I have so much willpower and I can restrict so well and so it can become incredibly addictive and it's never enough I think you described it's so poignantly and perfectly there because fundamentally you're kind of chasing an ideal of kind of perfection that has that isn't real

that it's no, because there's no amount of losing weight makes you happy. That's the thing you realize. And I wrote about, reflect on eating sort of recently and wrote about it as that it's kind of you build this mental cage and all the steps that you go through when you begin to restrict some food, then you begin to hang out with your friends less because they feel actually quite uncomfortable hanging out with you because you no longer look the way you did. And then, you know, you stop going out as much. Then perhaps you're, you know, at school you withdraw a little bit.

And in this process, it's like kind of you put up these pillars in your mind. And then one day, I remember so clearly I feel like, you know, I looked up and I had no idea how to get out of this cage, which I'd built for myself. And I was so young. And I thought that I was gaining control over my unruly body and my, you know, unruly life. And I thought that if I could just tame my disobedient body, then I would be free. And what I didn't realize was that I'd lost all my freedom. and I was in this metal, metal, well, felt metal, mental cage that I could no longer get out of. So the way you described that, I think, just resonated so much there.

What then did, what did losing weight, like, represent for you at the time? It just didn't feel optional. It just, there was, the voice of my eating disorder was so loud and so convincing, but I just didn't feel like I had a choice. And we've spoken about this before, you know, it's, the fact that when you slip into that eating disorder, it's not like you're making the conscious choice because it almost feels like it's not you. I had a friend in recovery who told me that she literally felt like another person was following her around and like covering her mouth every time she tried

to eat. Like it's, you feel just so not in, not in control. And yet the eating disorder is telling you that you are in control because you're doing really good and you're restricting and you're listening to the eating disorder and that's really good. And it's all just, it's all this illusion. and I think that's it it's that oh I think this might have gone off Jay has it gone off yes

can you still hit me at the back yes you can't okay yeah it's going on and off yeah I think we're back in oh make a chance well don't worry

hopefully yeah there we go that's perfect oh it's going to cut in now okay fingers crossed this will yeah there we go I liked the enthusiasm

of your reaction to that thank you my friends always say I've got an outside voice rather than an inside voice so if push comes to shove I'll just project in a really in a really projecting way which none of you really want oh okay

she's got all the tools okay but okay so where were we so I think yes in terms of that idea is that you kind of feel like you lose control and it becomes kind of a non-optional thing anymore and you're kind of in this mental cage. Can you take us back then to, I know you got professional help for what you were going through

at the time and I guess on a outside perspective got better as they would be describing in a kind of medical sense when you go through, they went through something similar, you kind of tick a few boxes essentially from the perspective of medical professionals and so you got better as I described, but it was quite a few years before you were then able to, before you found the body positivity movement and the kind of mental shift really happened. Can you tell us a bit about what your relationship was like to your body during those years? It's a strange one because the medical system, and I think to an extent our cultural understanding of eating disorders and recovery is still so determined by weight.

And if you have an eating disorder and you lose some weight, then you can get help. And then if you put it back on, you're fixed. Like, you're better. It's all done. There's no real awareness that this was a mental illness. There's so much onus on just what your body looks like. Even if we talk about, you know, who can get help or what a valid eating disorder is, quote, unquote, because there should be no weight. There should be no weight requirement, weight criteria to get support and get help.

help, but there is. And I think as soon as I then weight restored, they were like, oh, few, she's fine. Off you pop. Have a nice rest of your teenage life. Jesus. Teenager is so hard. It's so difficult. So hard, especially when you go back into it. And, you know, so I spent two years in and out of hospital. I spent some time in a like psychiatric facility for young people. And then I was just back in the real world in a body I didn't recognize because in my recovery, once I had kind of committed to my recovery, I went all the fuck in. I was like, I'm not spending another day in this hell. I am getting weight restored and I'm going back to my life. And it kind of, it happened so much quicker in my body than it did in my mind. I was not ready for it. So I was

there, you know, back at school with all my friends in this body that didn't feel like. like mine felt like this like alien thing that I was just like kind of carrying around and just trying to avoid everywhere I went you know I would put towels over the mirrors in my house when I when I took a shower because I just couldn't be faced with myself I was so terrified and I felt like I could feel like I could feel my flesh on my body like I would sit there and I would feel like I can feel I can feel I hate it I hate it um so yeah it was just a completely disconnected really disorientating relationship and I think what you described there so perfectly is such a reflection of the way our society to your point deals with

eating disorders as though they are a malady of their body and not a malady of the mind and it means that during recovery I had the same thing I got professional help and it was a tick box like oh you put on you put a bit of weight off you go then and no work had been done to do the kind of mental work that needed the unbuilding of the cage hadn't happened at all did you know that one of the first treatments for eating disorders I think it was in like maybe the 1700s they would literally just wrap up the patient in cotton wool

they would like you'd be in hospital and they would just like pack cotton wool around you and that was the treatment because they thought it's oh the body is like so weak what was the success rate of the cotton wool met something tells me it wasn't too effective

work that well but it's it's so true and I think that's still I've interviewed quite a few therapists and kind of somatic practitioners around eating disorders and then and connection to sex. And so many people have said the same thing to me that we still have this almost kind of commitment to kind of Kantian duality when we see body versus mind as though they're not inherently connected, which of course they are. So you were in this kind of phase of feeling like you were not existing in your body. So there's this, I guess, a separation of mind versus body.

You then discover the body positivity movement and where professional treatment had, you know, they'd done something, had kind of helped you on a physical perspective, perhaps, but not that kind of inner kind of mental work that was so needed. What was it about the body positivity movement and the people that you found in that space and the messaging that you found that space

that proved to you so cataclysmic to your recovery? So this was, I want to say maybe 2015, and I was using Instagram to follow Kardashians and fitness models. I don't know if anyone's still doing that. Don't recommend it. A bad time. A bad, bad time. Befores and afters.

Yeah, we've all moved on, hopefully. And I literally like accidentally, through some hashtag or other, stumbled across this small group of people of all shapes and sizes saying, I'm not dieting anymore. I don't hate my body. I'm okay with the word fat and I'm going to live my life. And I had never heard someone seriously saying that. There had been, you know, like fat sidekick characters in films or like a joke, like a fat moniker, basically.

But there was never an example of like, no, no, no, I'm not thin and I'm actually happy and I'm not actively changing that about myself. So that was the first time. And I hated it at first. I was so repelled because at the time I was on like the final big diet. I was on like the I'm nearly at my goal I'm nearly at the weight where I'm going to be happy forever and everything's going to be perfect and then I stumbled across that fucking

like a bunch of fat people saying they were happy and I hated it because I was like no you can't be right look at how much I've like look at how hard I've worked I'm finally nearly at that number so what I actually did was ignore that body positive movement and I just tried to keep on dieting and then I hit the holy grail weight and I vividly remember like standing on my bar

scale looking in my bathroom mirror and thinking well I still fucking hate myself that didn't work and then the pictures just kept coming back to me and there was one specific woman like plus size woman wearing a bright red bikini and she just kept like flashing up in my mind and I thought to myself well shit what like what if she's right like what if there what if there actually is another way to feel about myself and to do life and I couldn't I couldn't shake it so then I went back and I followed these people and I started kind of taking in what they were saying and then I started reading the books that they were recommending or like listening to the TED talks and you know and I just it changed it changed everything it changed the trajectory of my whole life

and you said before I think that you felt that for the first time within the body positivity movement you felt that you were discovering people who understood your experiences in a way that they hadn't been understood previously. What did you mean by that specifically? I think it was the first time I'd ever seen anyone openly talking about fat phobia as an issue. Because I think even sometimes within eating disorder recovery, we dance around the issue of fat phobia. Because often, you know, if you've gone through an eating disorder, like essentially being fat as your worst fear, like I was absolutely fucking terrified. I couldn't, if someone said the word fat to me, I would like have a bodily.

reaction, it was visceral. What, what did, what was that from? What did you fear around fat and our cultural depiction of fat? I mean, I think, was, can I just say, who grew up in like the 90s, early 2000s? Like, who remembers? Like, we weren't in some kind of fever dream. It was awful. Like, the things that we were consuming every day were, like, abhorrent, like the level of fat phobia, the lack of representation, the crash diets, the, the Kate Moss, nothing. taste as good as skinny feels, the freaking super size versus super skinny on TV. Like, it was a never-ending barrage of fat phobia. And so, of course, we all absorbed the messaging that being fat is the worst thing you can

be. We did not see fat characters who were happy. We did not see romantic storylines or sex, sexual storylines of anyone who was above a size eight. So, of course, we absorbed that. And I was just, yeah, I was terrified because to me, fat equals failure. yeah um and then and then when i went into body positivity and there were people like unashamedly just saying yeah i'm fat and what like i'm fat and i'm beautiful i'm fat and i'm not any of these

stereotypes that people think about fat people so suddenly it was realizing it's not the this kind of end of the world that had been depicted as but actually another pathway of living a really joyful life yes and it can just be a neutral descriptor like i'm tall or i'm I'm brunette or I'm fat, you know? And as soon as you say that and as soon as you recognize that, it just highlights how these notions are imbued with meaning because of our culture. Like it's not, nothing is inherent the good or bad about any of these descriptors, fat, thin, beautiful, these are these are, these kind of subjective ideal,

like subjective ideas, it's culture that imbues them with meaning. And it's quite liberating when you realize that because I think especially when you've grown up to your point, whether you've grown up and you can sort of all just in the toxic era of the 90s. It's actually really easy to just take these things as default that we have, there is a very specific kind of version of beauty that we have narcissistic.

And that's what it means to be beautiful and successful. And I think it's worth pointing out as well. In this specific time, that is what we are taught. Like it has not always been the case throughout history that the body ideal for women is slim. I mean, if you go back 200 years ago, just go and look at some freaking art, man. Like, softness was revered.

Softness was adored, and it is literally because of industrialization and how food was more easily accessible to people who would lower incomes back in the day, that thinness was then raised to this height of superiority. So there's always something about class in there as well. Generally speaking, if the higher class women are the ones who prize looking, I guess, the most rare.

So at that time in history, back in the day, it was rare to be bigger. Because if you were bigger, that meant you could afford. You had food. You had feasts. And that was, yeah, that was prized. That was the beauty standard. And then it all changed when a wider sway that people got access to more food.

And that's how fickle it is. Now, in the last 100 years, even if you go back decade by decade, you can literally point to different beauty standards. standards. You had the flappers in the 20s. You had the Gibson girl in the 40s. You had Marilyn Monroe in the 50s. You had Twiggy in the 60s. Then you had the stronger kind of supermodels in the 80s. And then you had Kate Moss in the 90s. And every single decade, it changes what we're supposed to be, what the standard is. And it is not an accident. It is completely intentional because it makes a hell of a lot of money for the biggest industries in the world to tell us that there's always something different to be turning ourselves into. so perfectly put. Who here is read the beauty myth? I feel okay. So everyone needs to go home after this talk

and read the beauty myth because it's so brilliant and I think what you're saying echoes so much of a kind of the core at what was said in Naomi Wilfs. I'm sorry about the beeping, guys. Sorry. But it's such a powerful piece of writing basically argues

that throughout history we've seen, and particularly in the kind of the latter half the 20th century, we've seen a very specific notion of beauty of what women should look like, get kind of, you know, promoted within kind of magazines and kind of popular culture. And it's in order to get people to feel shit about themselves so that they buy products. It's a really good marketing tool. And women have been the ones who end up being on the kind of, you know, the wrong side of this. We want to get punished. I just think if you create an idea in women specifically,

people generally, that you're not enough. You'll then we're kind of put into this frame of mind in which we're in this perennial state of becoming, we're always chasing this thing that we're not. We're always chasing. As what we said before, you know, if I'm a little bit thinner, when I'm a little bit more beautiful, then life will begin, which really, from a kind of capitalist perspective, it's when I've bought this one more thing, when I've got this new diet pill, and I've got this new gym membership. And as you've articulated in your own story and it definitely resonates with mine, you never get there. And so I think the state of being, therefore, to be a woman in a perennial state of becoming is to not be living in your body, to be completely

disembodied, to be living. There's a brilliant line in Mistress America in which Lola Kirk's character says to the psychic, well, if I'm not in my body, then where am I? Terrible accent. And she's like, well, psychic says that you're five feet to the left and unhappy. And I always remember that lying. I thought, fuck, I think I've been five feet to the left and unhappy for a lot of my life by virtue of not living in my body. And what a goddamn waste. Megan, you've been doing this work within, since you discover the body positivity movement, you don't do things in half measures. You went in and you became, you went on the front line and you've become just an incredible force to be reckoned with within this space. And I've obviously

through that met a litany of women who I know I've shared their experiences at various points with you. What have other women told you about their relationship to their own bodies? And what do you think this tells us about our kind of broader kind of cultural state when it comes body image. I think what's been really interesting and like horrifying is that there's kind of no age limit, there's no specific, you know, where you grew up or like, we're all messed up. Like this has, this has reached all of us to some degree or another. And you know, I have women who are like in their 60s and 70s messaging me and saying,

oh, I've been struggling with this since I was 20 years old, but we didn't have anything before. Like we didn't have any body positivity movement before. So this is really great that this is a thing now. And I just think, that's like 50 years of your life. That is, you've been robbed. Like you have literally, you've, you've had your life stolen by industries and by a culture that cares more about making money and making you feel bad about yourself than like letting you live a full life. And that is, that is horrifying. So I think, yeah, the overriding thing is that, you know, this really is a communal experience. And I think that also means that it has to be a communal solution.

I think we have to, we have to cultivate this feeling of like solidarity and like, oh, we're all going through this. And, you know, that can be tricky to do because I think especially amongst women, it's much, much easier to fall into the culture of competition because we have been taught. We have been taught to see each other's competition. particularly when it comes to beauty because we've been fed this idea our whole lives that like beauty is a really scarce resource. If there is only one way to be beautiful, one way right up here at the top, then you've got to battle for it. Like you've got to climb all over

everyone else to get to the top. And if someone's doing better than you, then oh, like, she's the enemy. And let's think badly of her and let's put her down so that we feel better about ourselves. It is so easy to fall into that. And it's really, really hard to resist it. But I think one of the most effective ways of resisting it is thinking, okay, you're actually, you've been going through the same stuff that I've been going through for my whole life and you're just coping the best way you know how. You know, whenever I find myself getting that little like, little like envious demon voice in my mind of like a woman that I find very beautiful, I'm like, oh, actually you'd look like that, but there's a good chance you still feel shit about yourself

because you've absorbed everything that I've absorbed and we're not, we're not in competition. We're actually should be on the same team and we should be fighting against the same thing. And that's a really fascinating point. There has been, which I want to dig into a little bit more, because there has been some, I guess, backlash within the body positivity movement around who is saying what and who should be saying what within this space. And I know it's been accused at some points of whitewashing and specifically kind of on social media and also of kind of being co-opted by women who aren't fat to be. put it, to put it bluntly. And years ago, Lizzo came on, post a video that went viral on TikTok, I don't know if anyone remembers, in which she said the body positivity movement has been co-opted by all bodies. And that was a problem because the women who created this movement,

namely a group of fat, queer, black women in the 1960s, where she said, still getting the short end of the stick. They're still being shamed, ridiculed and memed. Who do you think the body positivity movement is for? And can we have this? What does it? inclusivity look like in this movement? Because it's a thorny question because on the one hand I do think to point, we need to all be on side. But it's a very legitimate question. We can't just have a movement that's then co-opted by thin white women. You're right. I mean, this is tricky and I'll answer really honestly. Because also, like first of all, there have been many people over the course of like the 10 years that I've been doing this who have said that I shouldn't be speaking about

this because I'm like on the small end of plus size just about and you know I am I guess to a lot of people not too far away from the physical beauty standard which affords me many privileges and literally means that people listen to me more which is messed up and I think it is so important for anyone who does have a platform who talks about body positivity to be aware to be aware of their position and the privileges that they have and to use that to continue to like amplify other people obviously and look back and recognize where this comes from because you know no one who's talking about body positivity me included have made it up you know this work has been going on four decades like as i said um the fat underground were a radical group in the u.s in the 1960s who used

to do things like crash weight watchers meetings um and like with like signs and like rebel against the system and such a great image just yeah it's incredible um and yes a lot of people trace the roots of the body positive movement back to them so we should absolutely be you know giving reverence and learning learning from the people whose shoulders we are standing on um for me body positivity i think coming in from a space of having had an eating disorder can't just just be for um fat people it can't just be for thin people there has to be room for different perspectives and different conversations so i tend to define body positivity as how having two parts to it. There is the personal, which is body image, which is how you feel about

yourself, which is subjective. And then there is the political, which is let's talk about cultural fatphobia. Let's talk about patriarchy. Let's talk about systemic racism and how this impacts the way that different groups of people feel about their bodies. And I think when you bring those two together, that encompasses body positivity. And I think if you have one without the other, it's lacking. And I think to your earlier point creates the sort of of divisions within women's movements that we just really don't need that actually it's how do we get everyone to feel on side and be using their voice in kind of whatever way where they can Megan this is obviously sex talks so we have to talk about sex so all have we um fucking

let's get let's jump let's jump in to fucking no um um we're gonna do it like kind of serious body which way. No, we've reflected throughout this conversation on, I guess, the disembodiment that occurs for so many women, arguably for, I'd say most women, because of the narrow, restrictive beauty ideals that our society has. And as I said before, if you're, if we as women are constantly chasing something that we're not, we're not living fully embodied in the body that we have. We're living by beat the left and unhappy. And I've been doing a lot of research recently into what that means for our connection to sex. And there's been quite a lot of fascinating, well, not enough, but some research in the past of two decades looking at the connection between

body image issues and sexual dysfunction. That can be issue around orgasm, loss and desire, aroused issues, etc. And there's a body image issues are found to be just as much of a contributing factor to sexual dysfunction as performance sex. performance anxiety, which makes perfect sense. If you hate the body you're in, it's quite hard to be present when you're having sex. Sex is, lest we forget, a pretty embodied activity. I did forget that for about 20 years. To what extent, Megan, has your relationship to sex and to sensuality changed as your

relationship to your body has evolved? Oh, massively. So I started having sex just as I was coming out of the other side of my eating disorder. And like I said, I was kind of plunged back into this like world with all my friends and it was like school teenage years and everyone was like having their first experiences. And I was like, I need to catch up. I need to do all of this immediately. Let me find the first boy who's even remotely attracted to me and let me try and validate myself through his wanting me. So I kind of, I dove right in and it was not good largely because I wasn't present.

I fully just believed that sex was a performance and in order to do sex well you just had to make the male person there happy and then tick you've done great you are sexually desired you can take that validation home to the bank but it doesn't last long like it really doesn't last very long and then you realize oh I feel kind of empty and I don't know if I actually enjoyed that

did I even really want that or did I just want to feel wanted and that's a really sticky thing. I did that for a really long time and I would say I've only been unlearning that and maybe like the last five years and a lot of that has also come from having more sex with people who aren't men. I don't know, I highly recommend it guys.

Not the first time that's been said on the Sex Talks podcast, it must be said. But I guess what you're saying there, again, if you've grown up feeling not at home in your own body because you felt at war with your body. It's something that you associate with pain, with shame, with all the negative feelings that come with body image issues. How on earth are you going to turn up in the context of sex and be able to own your pleasure and be able to advocate for your pleasure when pleasure is kind of anathema to the way

you've seen your body previously? When I did sex therapy a few years ago, which was off the back of having eaten disorder for many, many years. It was the first thing my sex therapist said to me, she was like, if you are at war with your body, you will struggle to enjoy sexual pleasure. And it was when she said that, something like clipped, because I was like, that's so obvious, but I just completely neglected to think about that area of my life because sex is so pleasure focused. And I think pleasure can be something that you can kind of fear when you have an eating disorder for many years. Because it can be kind of scary and overwhelming, especially if you associate pleasure with food and then maybe with not having losing control over food when you're in, it can just be, you can have a difficult relationship to pleasure. Staying on pleasure, you just mentioned that your relationship to sex and sexuality has evolved and changed and not sleeping with men has been a contributive factor to that.

Tell us about your relationship to pleasure. So after I came out of my eating disorder, I really, it took me a long time to, first of all, heal my relationship with food and get back any kind of enjoyment from food because I equated food with morality in a big way that a lot of us do, you know, like those classic phrases like, well, I can't eat that because it's bad. oh i've been so good this week i deserve this or that or the other we um we literally like how we see ourselves whether we are good or bad people is dependent on on what we eat which is so messed up and um i had to try and reclaim an element of pleasure through eating which by the way there's nothing wrong with i think we have this really bizarre idea in our culture that eating is just like fuel your body and be on your way no food heal is contributing to this I think.

Oh, fucking out. Don't get them started. Stephen fucking Bartlett. Seriously, food is meant to be enjoyed. It's one of the most wonderful things

that we have in our human experience and its culture and its community and it's like a beautiful ritual. And also, like, it just, it's good. Like, it's just fucking good. Has anyone ever tried cookie dough? Like, it's just delicious.

And I think I had to heal that relationship with food and allow myself to feel that pleasure without thinking that I was a bad person, to then allow any other avenue of pleasure into my life. And I'm not going to lie to you. I think this is something that I am still unlearning now, this idea that you have to do something to be worthy of feeling good and that you can, like, you can't just have a day where you just feel good things and that's okay because, you know, you didn't work hard enough. You weren't productive, like you didn't get your list done. Like, you know, there's always a reason.

There's always some reason why we don't deserve to feel good in our bodies and enjoy things. And I'm starting to think that that is just capitalist patriarchal nonsense, but it's really hard to unlearn. It's so deeply ingrained. Yeah. Even in the context of sex, you're like, oh, I've got to give you loads before I couldn't get fingered. But no, no, no. You can just receive.

I mean, God, yeah, and God bless sex toys. God bless sex toys for teaching us that, yeah. It's all about pleasure, babes. This could be all about you and all about your orgasm again and again and again. And then one more time for luck. Maybe not an appropriate question for this forum. What's your like max out number? Go on, show off.

Wait, do you mean setting on a vibrator? No. I was like, I'm like, I don't know how fast it goes. I quite like the low setting because it allows me to have a more, you know, mindful engagement. Yeah, that's fair. I meant number of orgasms. Oh, I'm really bad with multiple.

Yeah. I'm a kind of one hit one day. You're a one and done. I'm a one and done. I'm a one and fall asleep. Oh, wow. At this stage of my life. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I'm a one and, no, I'm a one and continue, but it's not going to happen again. Okay. But like, you know, joy's still happening. Still want to be there. Still, they're happily participating. But feel like, you know, I, I was actually, you know, it's so awful. I was about saying I feel like I earned. my heat which is like it shouldn't be about earning it was but enjoying it but i have to say on that

it has taken me and i'm still navigating that now and i've been through sex therapy i run a platform called sex talks and i'm now 32 and i still struggle in the context of sex partnered sex specifically to allow myself to feel just to feel pleasure and to know and i can feel at points that kind of control mechanism comes into my mind of like of the control of like have I showered am I is my body gross am I quite a lot of negative things voices come into my head that are a reflection I think continually of just that body shame that is so rooted in the eating disorder and it will just latch on to something do I look you know you know is this an unflattering angle is this there's just some I'm looking for something to fixate on to worry

about and it's always in relation to how the other person is perceiving me and although now I can kind of override that and be like he's so lucky to be here you know you're a goddam goddess and i have to go through my like mantras but that that negative voice is is still there because i think as you said it's really hard to unwire ourselves from this programming that was instituted from such a young age i mean what's that what's that really famous quote i can't remember who said it um something like men watch women and women watch themselves being watched is it John Berger in ways of seeing

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes so men get to look at the world or like look at women and take it in and like enjoy it but we are just constantly conscious of how we're being perceived and that is so apparent in sex like I think for the majority of my sex life I have just spent the entire time just projecting and just thinking what do I look like from where they are how do I how should I maneuver what noise should I make

What would be the most pleasing for them? That's not good sex. It's performativity. Because you brought it up, do you feel the pressure of the male gaze to be absent when you're not sleeping with men, but you're participating in partner sex? Not entirely. I think it's, look, it's really dependent on the person that you're sleeping with. And also, I think, how much work they've done on themselves, because let's be honest,

we've all internalized misogynistic bullshit around booty stands and how we look and we can project that on to anyone that we're with. I think it's easier it's easier to detach from it. There's definitely less of it. And I think the biggest difference is that like sex, for me, like sex with a woman is just fun. Like it's less attached to ultimate outcomes. I mean, like, great. We can like come for days and that's wonderful. But also we can just have a jolly time.

And if one of us is like, you know, we can move on now. That's fine. It's more playful. There's more laughter. There's more ease. You know, I don't spend any time, like, sucking my stomach in. I don't, like, shave anymore. And that's, like, absolutely fine.

Because guess what? We have mammals and we all grow hair. And, like, that's just another money-making scheme convincing us that that's a flaw and that's not sexually desirable. Raises Ross Fass is all I'm saying. They do. It's, I think that it's almost like they're made to. So you have to buy another one.

Exactly. I'm on a constant ways of purchasing spree. So yeah, it's very different. And I don't think, you know, there's no, this is not me saying like, have sex with women and you'll never feel bad about yourself again because, you know, everyone's different and everyone's at different stages of their own learning. But it's been a game changer. Can I just ask with that?

Did you feel it was having sex women early on quite confronting in that it revealed that it revealed to you how you were having sex before. Or showed you parts of how you were having sex before. Yes. Yes. And also my, so I, um, I had sexual relationships with women when I was a teenager. Um, but there was always a man present. Uh, and I just told myself, you know, this is all for his. This is all for the male gay. Is there nothing gay about this? I can lick a vulva. It's nothing gay about that. And obviously, there was probably something to inspect there, you know.

It was probably something to think about. But at that time, like, I just couldn't, I couldn't open that up as a possibility. There was just no way I saw myself as the straightest person in the world. So, yeah, it took a while. And I would say that now, now I'm with a woman who is so, so wonderful, so wonderful. And she's also very blunt. So she's autistic. And she has ADHD.

So she just says whatever comes to her brain. And when we started dating, she would kind of gently call me out when she sensed that I was performing for her. And she would be like, okay, you're like, you're wonderful and you're beautiful. I'm not a man. And I was like, oh, okay, good point. Maybe I can, maybe I don't have to, maybe I don't have to do that so much. And we were like, we were just having conversations before this started about lingerie.

Yeah, lingerie. It's wonderful and wonderful and lovely. But I used to have like this giant huge collection of lingerie that I used to bust out like every time I went on a, on a date with a man. I was going to say a first day. Yeah, sometimes a first day with a man just like underneath my clothes. It doesn't matter how uncomfortable it was. If I like went home and had like welts on my body, I just thought that's part of the gig. That's part of the performance because he's going to really, really enjoy that. And now I just have this giant drawer of lingerie that I just, I haven't worn in like a like a year. girlfriend was like um oh babe am i like so do you not am i doing something wrong that you don't like you don't want to like wear this anymore and i'm like no it's fucking wonderful that i feel so free that i don't feel like i have to like strap myself into some like lacy contraption every single time in order to feel sexually empowered occasionally now and then it's nice um but no it's just freeing not to how do you feel in your body now then um um I feel at home and I don't think about my body that much. Like unless I am actively like writing something, you know, getting dressed maybe, it's not

something that consumes my day to day. And I think that ultimately is the goal. I think there's a misconception that, you know, like, like body positivity is, it's all about like loving your body and thinking you're like smug and whole all the time and it's it's just not it's actually just giving yourself the freedom to live your life without putting your entire value and all of your resources and all of your energy into monitoring your body and thinking about what your body looks like it is granting yourself the knowledge that you are more and that is that is the most liberating thing and that's why a lot of people I think gravitate towards body neutrality more so than body positivity which is fine I'm interchangeable as far as I'm concerned

But yeah, I feel at home and I feel fine. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't change my body. And it's this wild thing because I spent, you know, so many years of my life thinking I would do anything. I would give anything. You know, as soon as I'm old enough, I'm going to save up my money. I'm going to get so many surgeries. I'm going to change everything. And I can sit like, I can sit here and genuinely say to you, if someone gave me a magic button and was like, press that and you look like Kardashian, I'd say, no, thanks.

I'm actually good. I'm actually like, this body, like, bless her. she has stuck by me like this body has showed up for me every single day regardless of all the horrible shit that I have put her through I have hated her I have punished her I have starved her and she is still here every day trying her best to allow me to experience this life and that at the very least is deserving of some respect if you can feel nothing else for your body you don't have to love your body. You don't have to think your body's wonderful. You don't even have to, you know, think, yeah, this is the body that I want. But at the very least, our bodies deserve some

kind of respect because they are doing their best up against a culture that has been made to convince us to hate them, to turn us against them, to make us think that our body is the enemy when our body has always been our home. Oh, God. What a round of applause, Megan. That was what I needed to hear today and every day of my goddamn life. That is so true and that is so beautiful. And my sex therapist said to me, you know, early on, she said, you get one. You've got it. You got the one body. You won't get another one. Like, guess what? You don't get kind of an upgrade or an update at, you know, a certain point. You're not going to say, you get one body. So she's like, you can choose, Emma. You can pick. You can stay at war with your body for the

rest of your life. You can stay fighting it, hating it, in a battle with it. and miss out on all the things it can give you. Or you can decide to befriend that body. You can decide to make that body as you so articulately put it there. You can make that body your home and you can delve into the depth and breadth of pleasure it has to offer you. And when you put it like that, like that, I was like, great.

Bought myself a vibrator, turned up the notches, and thought, let's go. Megan, you're fabulous and you radiate joy and you have made my evening and I'm going to have little snippets in this conversation as my morning mantras. So I want to thank you for that. Thank you for radiating your joy and for letting other people experience. I go come on this journey with you as you mend and heal your relationship to your body and allowing us all to be a part of that and to benefit from it too. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone.

at the Sex Talks podcast. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Before we go, I just want to give a special thanks once again to Fenwick for hosting us at their Kingston department store. The newly redesigned lingerie and night department there is stunning, and definitely worth checking out if you haven't already been. Also, if, like me, you have no idea what size bra you wear most of the time, they also do a fitting service there too, which is super handy. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, I hope you did. don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on, as apparently it helps others to find us. Have a wonderful day.