There I was, sitting in a restaurant, waiting for a friend to arrive. She did, as she always does, in a haze of gloriousness, causing whiplash amongst the other diners, and for one intense moment, the air in the restaurant was rarified because of the collective intake by all the men folk present that dangerously depleted oxygen levels.

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We air kissed, exchanged a few complimentary epithets and settled down to order.

“I really shouldn’t be eating anything,” she hissed, “look at this!” I looked. She was holding a slight roll of fat around her tummy in the kind of furtive manner that would have the restaurant management have us pat down searched for contraband. 

“Tosh,” I replied, elucidating at great depth about how I was giving the Michelin man sleepless nights in true spirit of solidarity and competitiveness. “But, I can’t even have sex with the lights on anymore,” she whispered. “I feel so ugly. In fact, I can’t have sex at all, I just feel so terribly conscious about my body.”

It was my turn to deplete all available oxygen from the immediate atmosphere. This friend, let me explain, is gorgeous on toast. She’s also warm, witty, well-read and in her late forties. She is also, though she refuses to see it, fabulously attractive and in shape, give a little here and there. But I know what she’s seeing in her mirror, because I see it too when I look in mine. A body that has been there, done that and had babies. And though our post forty bodies might be perfectly fine and functional, we see them with critical, magnifying spectacles on, dissecting every perceived flaw and imperfection.

We work out to within an inch of our lives trying to browbeat middle aged spread into behaving like we think it should, we watch what we eat, we go to war on gravity which does unspeakable things to our mammaries after the babies have done their bit in hastening them to ruin. The hyper aesthetic, youth-worshiping messages popular culture keep blaring at us doesn’t help either, and FFS, there is no vile profanity strong enough for how photoshop messes with our self esteem.

Hastening us along to the death knell of libido apart from the angst of the perceived flaws of our post 40 bodies, are the hormones doing their own crazy dance in preparation for the onset of menopause. And of course, there can be a host of other factors adding to the dampener on the libido but body image comes rather high on that list. Then there’s all that negative body self-talk stream of consciousness within our brain which can have a rather direct impact on our ability to have an orgasm.

When the path to “Oh God, I’m coming,” is peppered by an inner monologue of, “Droopy breasts, tummy jiggling, cover quick, switch lights off, damn those handlebar love handles,” reaching the Big O is going to be an uphill road with many detours and some deflated tyres and I’m not talking about those around the waist. Psychologists say a majority of us women obsess about how our bodies look during sex, and this can be an absolute mood dampener to both our own experience and that of our partners, who might be pressured into reassuring us that no, we do look utterly divine.

Solutions? If only it were so easy to take a hammer to the nasty interior monologue and learn to appreciate one’s body, tyres and jiggle and all. But we could always start by befriending the body we have and getting acquainted with it, good and bad. This might mean examining ourselves dispassionately in a full length mirror, something that most of us shy away from and asking our partners what they admire about our body, the answers could be surprising, sometimes the very features we hate could be the ones that get them raring for action.