Anorexia and Female Sexuality

According to a feminist, Naomi Wolf, there is a very tight connection between anorexia and women sexuality "Fat is sexual in women to ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality" (Wolf, 193). Moreover, women develop eating disorders, anorexia in particular, as a manifestation of their sexuality denial.

For the majority of women who suffer from anorexia sex and their own sexuality becomes a forbidden topic. Anorexia affects female sexuality for variety of reasons.

The most fatal and destructive effect of this disease can be observed on teenage females, whose sexuality hasn't developed yet. Young females with anorexia don't take enough calories for their sexual development; therefore it slows down or even stops completely.
Eventually, it leads to a hormonal mis balance and a perverted perception of sexuality

Anorexia is linked to a fear of becoming a 'sensitive adult', unwillingness to take responsibility for their own lives.

Due to their way of thinking anorexics don't find sex attractive, because they don't want let anything affect their life. An anorexic woman takes her sexual desire for weakness and if she follows her lust, it will be a sign of her being not completely self-sufficient. She thinks if she doesn't need food, she doesn’t need sex as well.

Limiting food is a kind of extreme control, same thing happens with her sex life. She sees her body as a "sacred place" and furiously watches everything that gets 'in'. Anorexics want to keep their bodies from any outside affection, for the reasons that here they can have their total control.

Pleasure also seems very threatening for them; instead they get satisfaction from avoiding pleasure. Their pleasure centers atrophy, making them unable to enjoy both food and sex. It becomes almost the same for anorexics, because restricting food is similar to avoiding sex, as this mean taking nothing into your body.

Another season why anorexic females avoid sex is the fear of intimacy. But sex involves intimacy by definition, because it makes two people experience the moments of very close connection. It can be a bad or a good experience but this experience is intimate. Yet anorexics subconsciously want that intimacy, they will never dare for such a frightening challenge.

People with anorexia need help to feel themselves sexual. This is a long process that should be started by a professional sexologist or a psychologist. The main objective here is to trust, when anorexic woman starts trusting you, it’s a sign that she may accept communication with another people, food and her own sexuality.

In conclusion I would like to add that I used to suffer from anorexia while being a teenager myself, and I know how hard it is to fight this disease. Never refuse help from people who offer it, be patient. It takes lots of time and huge efforts. But if I managed to succeed, you can do it too!

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