How to THINK yourself SEXY!
Down in the frumps after watching Love Island? You’re not alone: one fifth of women say body insecurity is ruining their love lives. But, says this acclaimed author, you CAN become an irresistible goddess
I realised the sexiest organ is the brain I felt at my most sexy in tatty, comfy leggings
HOW would you feel if I told you I knew a magic trick that would turn you into an irresistible sex goddess? If I shared the secrets of true lust and offered to transform your body and your sex life?
It’s free, it’s almost foolproof and requires absolutely no gymnastics, battery-operated devices or complicated bras.
So, what is this too-good-to-be true wonder cure, you ask? Well, I believe we can all simply think ourselves sexy. You may well scoff. But when it comes to affairs of the heart, I’m convinced that some of the greatest obstacles holding us back are all in our heads.
I was heartbroken to learn this week that a fifth of women feel their insecurity about their bodies is negatively affecting their sex lives, with three in ten under 40 saying they were very concerned about their partner’s views on their appearance. It’s devastating that, on what can already feel like a skewed playing field, women’s fears are standing in the way of their sexual fulfilment.
Still, I can empathise. I’m 36 and happily married, with no complaints about my sex life, but if I’m having a difficult day, just a glimpse of a trailer for Love Island can plunge me into a gloomy ‘compare and despair’ binge.
‘Perhaps that’s what my husband wants, really,’ I think, looking at the contestants’ bouncy, spherical breasts, tanned skin and tiny waists. (The only thing that cheers me up is remembering that none of the Love Island men are my type, on paper or otherwise – the tiny shorts don’t really do it for me. I’m more of a cardigan girl.)
Joking aside, I think we’re all struggling with a growing problem. Both men and women are constantly being shown bodies that are entirely unattainable. We’re encouraged to aspire to ‘perfection’, but the criteria for this is impossible to meet.
And though we’re led to believe we can ‘fix’ ourselves by changing the way we look – that if we get to a certain weight or size, or if we just have those lip injections or that set of hair extensions, we will finally live the sexually confident life we’ve been dreaming of – the truth is, how we look isn’t the problem.
We can spend all of our time and money investing in a ‘perfect’ body, and still feel scared and stuck because we’ve never addressed the mental issues that make us feel this way in the first place.
As a teenager, I felt desperately insecure about my body. I was convinced no one would ever want me. I struggled with eating disorders, I accidentally turned my hair a shocking shade of orange in the pursuit of blonde ambition and if anyone ever tried to engage me in conversation, I’d reply to the collar of my coat.
At the time, I thought that perhaps the hair was putting people off and if I could just drop one more dress size, I would become magnetic and irresistible. Only now do I realise that my body was not the obstacle – it was my demeanour that was repelling people.
I would have instantly become 100% more alluring if I’d found the courage to stand up straight, look people in the eye and smile.
However, during this difficult period, I discovered the novels of Jilly Cooper and I think she saved my love life. Her books showed me there were plenty of men who found all sorts of women sexy, even if these women were feeling fat or thought none of their clothes looked good on them or discovered a giant spot on their chin before a significant event.
In Riders, libidinous hero Rupert Campbell-Black marries Helen, a very slim woman whose beauty is praised widely. But Helen isn’t sexy, simply because she’s too scared and self-conscious to really enjoy the act of love.
Seeking other women, unfaithful Rupert is more turned on by enthusiasm than anything else.
Now almost 40 years old, my favourite Cooper novels may read like problematic products of their time. Yet I will always be grateful for the way they began to liberate me from the anxieties that had been holding me back.
When I started to write my own novel, Insatiable, about a young woman embarking upon her own sexual awakening, I further realised that sexiness isn’t just about looking good or having a body that strangers will approve of. I realised that the sexiest organ is the brain
– specifically, the part that looks after memory and imagination.
Like me, my heroine Violet has ‘grown up believing a female body was a problem to be solved’.
Like me, she struggles to reconcile everything she wants and yearns for with any confidence in her own desirability. Violet wants hot sex – she just doesn’t believe she’s hot enough to have it.
Then she begins to realise there is nothing wrong with what she sees in the mirror, just with the way she is seeing it. And while plenty of people find her attractive, it’s not just her body that they are responding to, but some ineffable quality she has. A je ne sais quoi.
I was inspired by various friends, who told me about the periods in their lives when they felt unexpectedly sexy. One said being pregnant made her feel confident and constantly erotically charged.
Another told me about a narrowboat holiday, when the sensations of the water lapping the vessel made her feel ‘surprisingly giddy’. Our sex drives are thrillingly complex. Writing the novel allowed me to indulge in a little wish-fulfilment and live vicariously through my heroine’s invented adventures. It also brought about a surprising sexy reset.
When I was working, I submerged myself in an imaginary world where I could focus on what Violet was experiencing and what she was feeling.
Crouched over my desk, typing furiously with my hair scraped back, wearing my comfiest, tattiest leggings and jumpers, I was surprised to discover that I’d never felt sexier in my life. I was even more surprised to discover that my husband was delighted, and in no way put off by the hair or the leggings. Because, like Rupert all those years before, what he was
really attracted to was not an immaculately groomed outer shell, but that inner spark that comes when a woman truly feels at one with herself, not so much an ‘I don’t know what’, but an ‘I know who I am and what I want – and I’m OK with that’. For embracing your own desire is as much a part of feeling sexy as embracing yourself.
Recently, I was invited to speak about sex at the inaugural EA Festival with the wise, wonderful writer Rowan Pelling. As the former editor of The Erotic Review, she had plenty of insights about the nature of desire, suggesting that we struggle to be truly honest about what and who we like because ‘we are so subject to social pressure and always want to be peer-reviewed’.
When we’re young and uncertain, we don’t want to be outliers in our desire, instead pretending to be turned on by the same things, and people, as everyone else.
But in the same way that struggles with body confidence hold us back sexually, so too does lack of confidence when it comes to admitting what turns us on in the first place.
Because when it comes down to it, we often find that the things we think should make us happy are
not always the ones that actually will.
In the year before lockdown I lost a substantial amount of weight, slowly and steadily.
It started when I gave up alcohol for a month, which led me to realise that I had been binge-eating and drinking as a way of self-medicating through a long and difficult period of stress, anxiety and depression.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t ‘on a diet’ – my focus was much more on changing the way I ate, than on what I was eating. However, my body changed dramatically. With a long, complicated history of disordered eating and poor body image, I felt conflicted. A tiny, teenage part of me still clung to the idea that I might feel happier – and sexier – if I weighed less. I proved her wrong.
It was a bit of a shock to discover there was not a Victoria’s Secret Angel inside me, trying to get out. In fact, some days I felt less sexy. I missed my curves and the fullness of my breasts.
But just as I had changed the way I ate, I realised I had to change the way I looked at my body. It was time to search for things to celebrate, instead of scanning for flaws.
As a result, I felt happier, calmer and stronger – and sexier. I realised that my thoughts and feelings about myself mattered so much more than anyone else’s opinions about my body.
The external change had been brought about by an inside job, and if I could think myself happier, I could certainly think myself sexier. What would a Jilly heroine do? She’d drench herself in Fracas – the sexiest scent – and crack jokes until her dream man laughed himself into her arms.
Surely the joy of sexiness is in its variety? We’re all drawn to different people. Even Love Island, which sometimes stands accused of wrecking our confidence, has brought us the excellent expression ‘my type on paper’. The implication is that a person might be technically ‘perfect’, yet not have that certain something a partner might be looking for.
Because sexiness isn’t that simple. It does not get projected onto us. It’s a quality that lights us from within, if only we can work out how to ignite it.
I believe that improving our body and sexual confidence is vital because it’s linked with the conversation about consent. Sex is constantly in the news, but our thoughts on the subject are often steeped in fear and anxiety.
It does not help that when we discuss the beauty standard, women usually seem to be subjected to an extra level of scrutiny, judgment and cruelty.
If we spread the message that all women deserve to feel confident in their bodies and that we can simply decide to feel sexy and gorgeous if we want to, I’m sure that millions of women would feel much more enthusiastic and proactive about sex. As a result, there would not be any question that ‘No means No’ because our ‘Yeses’ would be absolutely unmistakable.
At the moment, we’re at the beginning of an international conversation about kindness. This might not seem like the most obviously sexy quality, but I think that kindness is essential in our sex lives. To be kind, you must be generous, empathetic – and curious. We can’t be kind to ourselves, or to each other, if we assume we know what everyone else is thinking and feeling. We have to listen, ask lots of questions, and genuinely all want the best for each other.
When it comes to sex, our brains are every bit as significant as our bodies. As a novelist and a reader, I’ve had a glorious time discovering just how much fun sex on a page can be and I’ve loved to discover the feeling of freedom that comes from writing about someone else’s adventures.
If we can lose ourselves in sexy stories, I’m confident that we can tell our own, too.
INSATIABLE by Daisy Buchanan (Sphere) is on sale now for €14.99.
Inner spark, not outer shell, is what’s attractive