Bodily appearances often seemed to be experienced as a source of anxiety by young people. I will begin this section by discussing the experiences of Rosie, who I introduced in chapter three. I will illustrate how Rosie appeared to experience her body as defined by its appearance, and how this complicated and limited her possibilities for sexual pleasure. Rosie was 16 years old at the time of the research, and was in the final year of her GCSEs. She had only attended her current school for two years. Rosie stated that she had come to this school because she had been excluded by her friends - the “popular crowd” - at her previous school. Whilst now she did not consider herself to be popular, she said that she was “happy” in her new school. She had a boyfriend, who she had been going out with for a year, and some good friends. However, whilst being “a size 8 to 10”, she felt that she was “too big”, and her interviews were dominated by her anxieties about her weight. She talked about how she felt unable to stop counting calories and that for her the most significant moments of pleasure were those when she discovered that she had lost weight. She began and ended each day by standing on scales. After finishing school, Rosie aspired to become a therapist, so that she “could help others with eating disorders”. Rosie spoke at length about how her concern with her weight affected her sexual encounters with her boyfriend Rich. In the quote below, Rosie describes the sensations she experienced within many of these encounters:
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Rosie: I'm worried about it, like, I'm kind of having to juggle both things, like, try to enjoy it but try not to think about [...] I wouldn't want to be [...] doing something in a certain way that would make me look bigger [...] we could be doing something sexual and it will just pop in my brain, like, oh my God, what do I look like, and I'll just look down and be like, ok, suck in type thing, or something and like, just like judge myself from looking down. Like sometimes we do something sexual and it doesn't come in my head once and it's just like completely not there but others, it's like all I can think about and then like that limits, like that makes me wanna stop doing anything sexual then because it's just not what I, I don't feel like, relaxed and comfortable, I feel like minging. I just want to go to sleep and wake up and then I don't wanna, I just wanna like not think about anything.
JA: So does that sometimes happen, like, you get that and then you just wanna stop?
Rosie: Yeah there has been times when I've let Rich know, like, I can't do it. I wouldn't say, oh, I don't wanna do it because I feel fat [laughs] because he might just be, like, what are you on about, like, you're not fat. Like I would just make up an excuse, I dunno what I would say, just like, ‘oh, I've got work to do’, or ‘I'm tired’, or, you know. […] Not like always, like, every time we do something sexual I'm not always thinking about it, but most of the time. The majority of it I am thinking, I'm either looking good today, I'm looking bad today. JA: And does that affect how turned on you are and stuff?
Rosie: Mmm, yeah definitely, it affects everything. […] I hate it so much, I find it so, like, I dunno, I hate it with a passion, I would do anything to get rid of it.
JA: What, you hate that you're kind of always looking at yourself from the outside?
Rosie: Yeah, I hate that I'm feeling, like, you know, that I need to lose weight and stuff, and that I'm fat and stuff. I hate it, but there's nothing I can do about it. I've just got it in my brain that it's always gonna be there, so, but there's no point me worrying about it, cos I'll feel exactly the same when I'm like fifty [laughs].
Rosie’s quote touched me immensely. When listening to her in her interview, Rosie’s narratives of frustration and stuck-ness, and the affects which circulated in the research encounter, created a sense of sadness and stuck-ness in myself. While in the interviews I tried to focus on pleasure, Rosie kept returning to her anxieties about her body weight. She repeatedly spoke about her disappointment about not feeling able to move beyond these anxieties. She appeared to feel caught within a longing to be thin, and this seemingly limited her capacities to feel connected with her
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boyfriend, to feel turned on, and to “enjoy it”. The quote suggests that for Rosie pleasure tended to emerge when she did not feel “minging”, and perhaps when she experienced her body as at least moderately attractive (also see Wiederman 2000; Pinquart 2010). Her desires, as well as her capacities for sexual pleasure, may perhaps be viewed as captured by a market economy that objectifies young women’s bodies and that thrives on their bodily insecurities (Fine and McClelland 2006).
While Rosie contended that she feels that “there’s nothing [she] can do” about her concerns with her size, at the same time she stated that she felt unable to share her experiences with her sexual partner, and that she “tr[ies] to enjoy it”. She appeared to feel a sense of pressure to experience pleasure. As I argued in chapter one, while within contemporary Western culture young women’s bodies, and increasingly young men’s bodies, continue to be objectified and commodified (McClelland and Fine 2006; Gill 2008), this objectification is complicated - perhaps transformed into ‘subjectification’ (Gill 2008) - by the image of the powerful and independent woman who performs both ‘sex’ and sexiness for her own pleasure (Evans et al. 2010). This pleasure imperative appeared to assemble with discourses that emphasise bodily appearance (especially size), as well as the materiality of Rosie’s body and that of her boyfriend, to produce affective flows which registered in Rosie’s body as passivity, anxiety, and “hate” towards her feelings. Rosie stated that for her, change seemed almost unimaginable and that she will “feel exactly the same when [she is] like fifty”.
Appearances also tended to feature heavily in other participants’ narratives. Young women, in particular, often spoke directly about how anxieties relating to their appearance limited their capacities to connect with sexual partners and to feel pleasure. Erin, for example, who described herself as “big”, spoke about the ways in which she experienced her bodily capacities during “intimate” encounters as limited. Erin was a young white middle-class woman aged 17, who stated that she “hate[s] [her]self”. While Erin contended that she had good friends, she spoke in detail about her sense of inadequacy, insecurity and of being unloved. This was the case not only in school, but also in her home. Erin lived with her parents and a sibling, who Erin felt was “prioritise[d]” by her parents. Erin “could not wait” to leave her home town and
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go to university. Reading and writing were the two main practices which provided an escape for Erin from her sense of unhappiness (see chapter five for further details). In the following quote, Erin speaks about her anxieties around sexual encounters:
Erin: I'm very worried, especially when it comes down to bein' intimate with someone. I've never taken off my shirt to have intercourse with someone, ever! […] I've never taken off my shirt, because I'm so worried that they won't like what they see. I'm always constantly worried that I'll disappoint them and they'll leave me for someone else.
In this quote, Erin speaks about how during “intercourse” she continually worries about her appearance, and how this prevents her from “tak[ing] off [her] shirt” within such scenarios. Erin’s use of the word “intercourse” is interesting here, because it may be viewed as producing and reproducing penetration (especially penile-vaginal penetration) as the sexual norm. Given the dominance of this phrase in SRE (Ingham 2014; see chapter one), its emergence in the research may be viewed as linked to the school environment, myself (as an older adult), and Erin’s robust relationship with these entities. Her use of the word “intercourse” is perhaps particularly interesting since Erin defined her sexuality as “bi”. It may be then, that Erin is referring specifically to her experiences with men. Erin’s quote suggests a sense of responsibility not to “disappoint” her partner, and to maintain her relationships. Her experiences are reminiscent of the have-hold discourses reported by Wendy Hollway (1984; 1989; see chapter two), according to which women must act as gatekeepers of male sexuality. We can recognise here how Erin’s body emerges as always in danger of being objectified and judged. This makes her “letting go” (of concerns about her appearance and about taking her clothes off) risky.
Erin’s worries about her appearance extended to other encounters with young people, and seemed to be especially pronounced in relationships she regarded as “sexual”. In the following quote, Erin speaks about the ways in which she felt restricted when she went clothes-shopping with her former boyfriend:
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Erin: I was so self-conscious that he'd find out that I was like a size 16 and leave me because he can get better girls. I always thought to myself, that was niggling in the back of my head, they could always find someone better than you. That was what I thought every single time I was with a guy or a girl.
Erin’s narrative points to a belief and fear that much of her sexual value is determined by her appearance and her body’s conformity to definitions of beauty that are constructed around dress size. As the research progressed, it surfaced that these fears seemingly emerged within an assemblage which included not only relations between her body, sexual partners and gendered discourses, but also past social experiences. For example, Erin spoke about how her fears had become more intense following a scenario in which a young man had refused to dance with her at a nightclub because he considered her to be “fat” (see chapter six for further discussion of this event). As I indicated in chapter one, within the mainstream media, young women’s lack of confidence is often pathologised and there tends to be an implicit assumption that it is their responsibility to work on their insecurities. However, Erin’s example shows that the affects which registered in Erin’s body as fear, insecurity and inhibition were indeed produced through the complex relations of her social world.
In the previous example, Rosie stated that she “always think[s] about” the way she looks, no matter what specific practice she is engaging in. However, for Erin it seemed to be especially scenarios in which she was “intimate with someone” where affects emerged which registered in her body as anxiety. Similarly, Casey, a young white working-class woman aged 17, stated that she is “more conscious about [her] body being perceived by [her] boyfriend more than anyone else”. Like Erin, for a long time, Casey would not “take [her] top off” when engaging in sexual practices with her long- term boyfriend. It seemed like it was their sexual body in particular that these young women experienced as risky and prone to judgement, and which consequentially limited what they could do (also see Wiederman 2000; Pinquart 2010).
As has been reported in previous research (e.g. Coffey 2013), anxieties around appearances emerged much more frequently in relation to young women than it did
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in relation to young men. Given the limited ways in which young women are able to legitimately talk about sexuality in positive ways (Tolman 2002; Ivinson and Renold 2013), as well as the gendered patterns in the media surrounding the topic (Gill 2008), this may not seem surprising. However, anxieties also emerged when some young men spoke about their appearances, albeit sometimes after they initially denied such concerns (also see Allen 2002). One such example surfaced in an interview with Mark, who I introduced in chapter three. Mark was a young white working-class man aged 16, who throughout the research was very open about his feelings. He contended that he is very social, and that, unlike his academic achievements, his friends are of utmost importance to him. On several occasions, he indicated that his popularity with other young people, and his sexual appeal to young women, were intrinsically enmeshed with his sense of identity and wellbeing. He noted that he had had several girlfriends, and some one night stands. In the quote below, he talks about the sense of anxiety that registered in his body when he undressed in front of a girlfriend for the first time:
Mark: Like at the start I never really, I never really knew her that well. I was conscious then cos I didn’t know what she’d think of my body. Throughout the research, Mark talked in detail about his desires to be perceived by his peers and sexual partners as “manly”. For him, having a toned body was a prerequisite for this. Mark’s anxieties relating to his body shape are reminiscent of previous research with young men, which has attributed the potential for such anxieties to an increase in the visibility of toned male bodies in the media (Allen 2002; Gill 2008).
However, some participants’ narratives suggested that within encounters with other young people, including those they defined as sexual encounters, anxiety-invoking affective flows were sometimes momentarily ruptured and dispersed. At times this deterritorialisation appeared to extend beyond the immediate encounter. In the quote below, Sam, a young working-class man aged 16, speaks about his experiences of his “first time” with his girlfriend:
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Sam: I had some really, really bad issues with taking my top off, taking my clothes off, like before, like in a pool I wouldn’t take my top off. JA: What were you insecure about?
Sam: I guess just like the shape of me, I didn’t like anyone seeing underneath my clothing at all […] and [when we were having sex] I just got up, I didn’t care, honestly […] there was the mirror […] So I saw myself, and I was thinking, hang on, how am I doing this? [laughs] I’m seeing [my girlfriend] and myself in the mirror and I’m not getting all depressed about it.
In his interviews, Sam spoke about his own and his father’s wants for him to be “manly”, as well as his excitement about having fallen “in love” and gotten together with his girlfriend. As I will discuss in chapter six, Sam was a keen climber, and liked having a toned body. We can understand Sam’s body in everyday life as somewhat striated by gendered notions of attractiveness, and this appeared to register in his body as anxiety. However, within the specific encounter he is describing here, his body seemed to emerge in a different way. Here a sexual encounter (and perhaps sexual pleasure) seemingly offered up a line of flight from the normative territories that his body inhabited. Here his appearances became irrelevant and he “didn’t care”. This process of deterritorialisation seemed to open up new possibilities, for example of comfort, for Sam. However, it is worth noting here that Sam’s body was male, white, slim and toned, and that he stated that he very much “trusted” his girlfriend. These specific conditions seemingly opened up possibilities for change. I will return to this point later on in this chapter.
Some young women also hinted at the potential of certain practices to rupture their investment in appearances. Often these were practices that are not normatively defined as ‘sex’, and indeed commonly involved being physically removed from other human bodies (a point I will return to in chapters five and six). However, certain sexual encounters also appeared to produce the conditions necessary for such moments of deterritorialisation to emerge. In the example given below, Jade, a young woman aged 17, who was from a strict Afro-Caribbean Christian background, speaks about how being with her boyfriend affected her preoccupation – what we may understand as the territorialisation of her body – with appearances:
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Jade: I was very self-conscious about my body […] I'm fine now, I can run around naked […] [sex with my boyfriend] kinda takes your mind of things.
Jade spoke about how her parents disapproved of sex outside of marriage, and how she kept her sexual relationship with her boyfriend secret from them. She also noted how good she felt around her boyfriend. In the quote above, Jade expresses how sexual encounters between her and her boyfriend seemed to take her “mind off things”, and how this allowed her to become less “self-conscious”. Sam’s and Jade’s examples exceed and extend findings reported in previous research on young sexualities and appearances, which has focused on the ways in which bodily insecurities limit young people’s capacities for sexual pleasure (e.g. Wiederman 2000; Pinquart 2010). These examples highlight how ‘sex’ and sexual pleasure can sometimes positively affect young people’s relationship with their bodies, and increase their bodily capacities.