What do beauty standards, the orgasm gap and diet culture all have in common?
They’ve been cleverly manufactured by patriarchy to control women.
Research suggests that the average woman will spend over $70,000 on her appearance over her lifetime. That’s a huge amount of money, and for what?
Women are taught from a young age that our value lies in conforming to society’s beauty standards. From being praised as young girls for being cute, feminine and pretty, to seeing unrealistic beauty standards in magazines and on TV. We read about the dangerous diets celebrities put themselves through to lose weight, praise mothers for ‘bouncing back’ just weeks after having a baby and scroll through photos of models at beach clubs with their ‘perfect’ bikini bodies and airbrushed skin on Instagram as if they were the norm.
We are treated better when we are made up and dressed up. We can feel it in the way others act around us. Conversations amongst friends about botox and plastic surgery are not just commonplace; they are so normalised that we forget we are talking about injecting poison under our skin.
We are conditioned to value youth and beauty, so much so that embracing our natural state and not conforming is seen as an act of protest. Like Pamela Anderson deciding to go to Paris Fashion Week make-up free. When did a woman showing up as her authentic, natural self become front page news?
All of this leaves women with crippling self-esteem issues. In turn, those issues keep us tired and poor, and therefore much easier to control.
We are tired because our brains are working at a million miles an hour thinking about the way we look. Thinking about how much exercise we have done today to see if we can order the pizza or should just have a salad instead. Imagine how much more energy we would have if we prioritised our health and happiness over thinness. Imagine how much more time we would have to be creative and think about the things that set our souls on fire.
The orgasm gap: what it is, why it exists, and why beauty standards are part of it
This low self-esteem seeps into every area of our lives. Nowhere is this more visible than in the orgasm gap.
Women orgasm almost all of the time when we masturbate. But research consistently shows that women orgasm significantly less than men during partnered sex with men. The most commonly cited figure sits around 65% of women reporting they rarely or never orgasm from penetrative sex alone, compared to over 90% of men. And yet the conversation tends to stop at technique.
If you can relate to this, you have probably either been told or quietly internalised the idea that this is somehow your fault. That you are broken, too slow, too complicated, too much. When really, a lot of us are so busy thinking about what we look like and working so hard to please our partner that we have completely forgotten that we are also worthy of pleasure.
We have an organ that exists solely to give us pleasure (thank you, almighty clitoris). And whilst a lot of men barely acknowledge its existence, women also sometimes forget about it entirely during partnered sex. Not because we do not want pleasure. But because we have been conditioned to deprioritise it.
The orgasm gap is not a biological inevitability. It is a cultural one. It is what happens when girls grow up learning that their job during sex is to be desirable, not to feel good. When women spend the entire experience monitoring how they look from every angle instead of actually feeling what is happening in their bodies.
The beauty standard and the orgasm gap are not separate issues. They are the same issue wearing different clothes.
Diet culture and the exhausted woman
Diet culture works on the same mechanism. It takes up space. Mental space, financial space, time. Women who are counting calories, planning their next cleanse, or punishing themselves for what they ate yesterday are not women who have the energy left to ask for what they want in bed, advocate for themselves at work, or simply enjoy being in their bodies.
That is not a coincidence. A woman who is perpetually at war with her body is a woman who is distracted, depleted, and far less likely to cause trouble.
Imagine the collective energy that would be freed up if women stopped using their brains to calculate whether they had earned dinner. Imagine what becomes possible when a woman starts caring more about how her body feels than how it looks.
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So how do we take back control?
A genuinely powerful way to push back against the patriarchal systems that strip us of our money, time and energy is to practise radical self-love. Not the Instagram version of self-love, soft lighting and a face mask. The kind that is actually uncomfortable. The kind that asks you to reject a story you have been told your entire life.
By refusing the idea that we are somehow not enough just as we are, we begin to reclaim our power. Learning to accept, and eventually love, the curves and bumps we are born with, the laugh lines that appear on our faces, the stomach that softens after a baby or a hard winter. From there comes freedom. The freedom to order the pasta because you are hungry and it sounds good. To stop analysing yourself in every position during sex and start actually feeling it. To spend money on experiences that matter instead of products that promise to fix something that was never broken.
A woman who loves herself is a woman who is much harder to control.
Why this is not easy, and why community matters
Pushing back is not a solo project. The world does not take kindly to women who break free from its expectations. We see it when women who enjoy sex openly are called names and told they are less likely to find love. We see it in the press when female celebrities are said to “look good for their age” when they are barely in their thirties, or photographed with cellulite on the beach as if it were a scandal.
This is exactly why sex-positive community matters as much as it does. Surrounding yourself with people who get it, who will lift you up rather than make you feel like an outsider, changes everything. It is harder to believe you are broken when you are surrounded by people who know that you are not.
What working on this actually looks like
Understanding the connection between beauty standards, diet culture, and your experience of pleasure is one thing. Knowing what to do with that understanding is another.
For some women, it starts with something small. Spending time in the body without an agenda. Moving for pleasure rather than punishment. Practising being present during sex instead of watching yourself from the outside.
For others, working with someone helps. A somatic coach or intimacy practitioner can guide you through the process of reconnecting with your body in a way that feels safe, at a pace that is yours. This is not about being fixed. It is about undoing conditioning that was never yours to begin with.
If you are curious about what that could look like, you can explore somatic and intimacy experiences on Sensuali or browse upcoming women’s events to find something that resonates.
Read more about Orgasms on our Blog:
It Might Be National Orgasm Day — But Here Are a Few Things That Matter More
Celebrating your vulva: health, pleasure, and everything in between
Tara Margulies
Tara is a social media content creator who specialises in empowering women to be the best versions of themselves. She speaks about taboo topics like sex, periods, feminism and choosing to be child free over on her Instagram @movewithtara.
