Women's Body Image Self-Consciousness During Physical Intimacy With a Partner - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2000 by Michael W. Wiederman

Others have well documented that women in Western cultures are objectified to a greater degree than are men, in that women's bodies are looked at, evaluated, and sexualized with greater frequency (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Wolf, 1991). Previous authors have proposed that this cultural objectification of women's bodies is problematic for individual women to the extent that it is internalized and the woman is consequently prone to heightened awareness of how her own body appears to others, particularly men (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; McKinley & Hyde, 1996). One potential negative ramification of internalized objectification is sexual dysfunction (Dove & Wiederman, 2000). That is, to the extent that one is cognitively removed from one's sensual experience during sexual interaction, one is vulnerable to problematic sexual functioning (Masters & Johnson, 1970; Walen, 1980).

Despite the fact that links between women's sexuality and body image make conceptual sense and are supported by everyday observation (Daniluk, 1993; Wolf, 1991), this has been a topic infrequently studied. The purpose of the current set of studies was to examine the extent to which young, heterosexual women in this culture are self-conscious of their own bodily appearance during physical intimacy with a partner, and how this body image self-consciousness is related to sexual experience. I conceptualized body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner to be based on concerns over appearing fat. Although there exists a small minority of men who prefer large women (Goode & Preissler, 1983), males in the United States generally find thin women most sexually desirable (Harris, Walters, & Washull, 1991; Spillman & Everington, 1989). Larger women are stigmatized (Crandall, 1994; Harris, 1990), especially with regard to sexuality and courtship (Sobal, Nicolopoulos, & Lee, 1995; Regan, 1996). Indeed, women's general body dissatisfaction is typically measured according to perceptions of being too heavy or having particular body parts that are "too large" (e.g., Garner, 1991).

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is not an extant measure of women's body image self-consciousness during physically intimate interactions. Creating such a measure then became an initial focus of the current research. A subsequent focus was investigation of relationships between women's body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner and women's basic heterosexual experience and self-views as a heterosexual partner. I hypothesized that such body image self-consciousness would be related to less heterosexual experience and more problematic experiences regarding sexual interaction with males.

STUDY 1

In developing a scale of women's body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner, I needed to demonstrate key psychometric properties (Wiederman, in press). For example, I needed to show that the new measure was internally consistent and that scores on the measure were related to scores on previously established measures of body image (i.e., demonstrate convergent validity), yet not to such a degree that the new measure was redundant with existent measures. Specifically, women's body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner should be moderately related to actual body size as well as general body dissatisfaction, self-perceived bodily attractiveness, and degree of social avoidance due to body image concerns. At the same time, scores on the new measure should not be substantially related to scores on measures of unrelated constructs (i.e., demonstrate discriminant validity), such as self-monitoring of expressive behavior (Snyder, 1987).

Scores on the new measure also should be predictive of heterosexual experience and self-views as a sexual partner, or sexual esteem, above and beyond any effects related to actual body size or other more general measures of body image (i.e., demonstrate incremental validity). Otherwise, the new measure would be of little use and the concept of body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner would add little to our understanding of relationships between women's body image and their sexual experience. Specifically, I expected body image self-consciousness with a heterosexual partner to be greater among women not currently in a partnered relationship with a man as well as among those who have not had heterosexual experience. The reasoning is that such self-consciousness might prohibit women from entering into dating and sexual relationships with men and, without such experience, they would not have the opportunity to become desensitized to their body image concerns in this arena. Similarly, I expected those women with the greatest body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy with a partner to view themselves most negatively as a sexual partner (i.e., have low sexual esteem), given that many young women in this culture have internalized their objectification as sexual objects (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; McKinley & Hyde, 1996) and may view their sexual desirability as synonymous with their bodily thinness.