Spectatoring: the half of you that never gets into bed

The advice given to fat women about sex tends to arrive in two flavours. One is a kind of brisk encouragement — confidence is the sexiest thing you can wear — which manages to be both a cliché and a shifting of responsibility. The other is logistical, delivered in the tone of a problem being solved.

Very little of it addresses the thing women actually describe: not the mechanics, and not a shortage of desire, but the amount of attention being spent somewhere other than the room.

The management problem

There is a specific division of attention that shows up again and again. A woman is in bed with someone she wants to be in bed with, and some fraction of her — a quarter, a half, occasionally most — is running an ongoing assessment. Which angle she is at. What is visible. Whether the light is on. What her stomach is doing. Whether the position she is in makes something look a way she does not want it to look.

There is a workmanlike clinical name for this. Masters and Johnson called it spectatoring in Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970 — watching and evaluating yourself from a third-person perspective during sex rather than attending to the experience itself. They described it in the context of performance anxiety, and it has been studied steadily since, particularly in relation to self-focused attention and arousal in women.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Arousal requires attention, attention is finite, and monitoring consumes it. What the research complicates is the intuitive assumption that self-focus alone is the problem: the evidence points more towards the valence of that self-focus — whether what you notice about yourself is neutral or condemning — than towards noticing yourself at all.

What makes it specific for fat women is not that they are uniquely self-conscious. It is that the self-consciousness has an evidence base. Being watched critically is not a distortion when you have in fact been watched critically, in public, by strangers, repeatedly.

Two things that get conflated

Being desired and being fetishised are not the same experience, and a great deal of confusion follows from treating them as one.

The reliable distinction is not what someone finds attractive. It is whether the attraction is attached to a person. Someone who wants you is interested in your opinions, your week, your face, and also your body. Someone for whom your body is the point tends to be strikingly incurious about the rest — and often keeps the relationship out of daylight, out of restaurants, out of their own social world.

Women who have encountered the second version describe a particular flatness afterwards, difficult to explain to anyone who has not had it: technically wanted, and somehow less present than before.

None of this is an argument for suspicion. Most desire is ordinary and means what it appears to mean. But the distinction is learnable, and learning it removes a great deal of second-guessing.

Where the monitoring comes from

It is worth separating two sources, because they respond to different things.

Some of it is generic. Almost everyone carries some version of a running commentary during sex, and it has been documented across body types, genders and orientations for half a century. It is not evidence of anything being wrong with you.

Some of it is specific and earned. A woman who has been commented on in the street, whose body has been discussed by people who were not asked, who has watched a partner’s face change when she undressed — she is not imagining that bodies get assessed. Her monitoring is a rational response to a real environment, which is precisely why telling her to stop being self-conscious achieves nothing.

The useful question is not why am I like this. It is is this person, in this room, actually assessing me — and if the honest answer is no, whether the surveillance is still necessary.

Saying the thing out loud

The most useful intervention is also the least appealing one, which is naming it to the person you are with.

Not as a confession or a warning. As information. I spend a lot of this in my head. It is not about you. Partners generally receive this well, partly because most of them have noticed something and drawn a worse conclusion — that the disengagement was about them.

Practical adjustments follow more easily after that. Light you have chosen rather than light you are enduring. Positions selected for how they feel rather than how they are imagined to look. Being touched somewhere you have spent years hoping nobody would touch, on purpose, by someone who is not flinching.

A note on not medicalising this

Some self-consciousness during sex is entirely ordinary and belongs to nearly everybody at some point. It does not require a framework, a therapist or a diagnosis, and treating a normal degree of it as a condition to be treated tends to make it worse by adding a second thing to monitor.

The threshold worth paying attention to is functional rather than emotional: whether it is persistent, whether it is distressing to you specifically, and whether it is stopping you having the sex life you want. If it is, psychosexual therapists work with this routinely and the approaches are well established. If it is not, it is a Tuesday.

What actually shifts it

The uncomfortable finding is that self-image is a poor predictor. Women who describe themselves as still fighting with their bodies report perfectly good sex lives. Women who are publicly at peace with theirs sometimes do not.

What predicts it better is whether attention is available. Whether the person you are with is trustworthy enough that watching yourself stops being necessary. Whether you can be in the room.

That is not a state you arrive at by liking your body more. It is closer to a decision, made repeatedly, to stop supervising.