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Anhedonia—the inability to experience pleasure, even desire and joy—is often a result of body shaming.

Body shaming didn’t start with social media or dieting fads; it began in primitive times as social comparison.

Catching oneself in the act of self-shaming helps counter the long-standing effects of body shaming.

A friend of mine who was raised in a very Catholic family once told me that her mother used to refer to her vagina as her “icky,” as in, “Now wipe your icky.” This makes it not the least bit surprising that, as an adult, she thinks of her vagina as unattractive. “A weird little organ,” she calls it. “I can’t put makeup on it.”

It’s also not surprising that Sigmund Freud would observe that “the suppression of a woman’s sexuality”—in this case by a mother’s inadvertent body shaming—“leads to a general inhibition of desire and curiosity, a restriction on wanting and knowing that spreads throughout her life.”

Body shaming—criticizing or demeaning someone’s appearance, overtly or covertly—is linked to what psychologists call dysmorphia, an unhealthy preoccupation with your body’s perceived flaws, which tends to generalize to your perception of yourself. In relationships, it often shows up as a lack of intimacy, because you don’t want anyone getting close enough to see those flaws.

Body shaming is also implicated in something called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, since pleasure begins with the body and its senses.

The Origins of Body Shaming

Contrary to popular belief, body shaming didn’t start with the rise of social media, or the "Mad Men" era of advertising in the '50s and '60s, or even the........

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