For many women, the relationship with the body has not been a simple encounter, but a constant negotiation. The mirror stops being just a reflection and becomes a tribunal. Clothes do not always accompany: sometimes they judge. Intimacy, which should be one of the few territories of rest, ends up infiltrated by comparison, insecurity, and the persistent idea that something would have to be different. Our co-founder Ursula Pfeiffer poses it with a phrase that condenses a widely shared experience: “for many of us the relationship with our body is complex”. And it is not difficult to understand why. That complexity, she says, is born from “the constant comparison, the ideas of how we should be and look”, a pressure that not only leads us to criticize ourselves in front of the mirror, but also in social situations and even in intimacy.
The question, then, is not why so many women feel uncomfortable in their bodies, but at what point that discomfort began to seem normal. And perhaps even more importantly: who benefits from a woman living observing herself as if there were always something to correct. Ursula proposes a decisive turn when she asks: “what if we discover that the problem was never our body, but the story we were told about it?”
That shift in focus matters because it displaces attention from the defect to the narrative. If the problem was not the body, but the story built around it, then the type of work needed also changes. It is no longer just about feeling better about a part of the body, but about questioning the entire framework that taught us to perceive it as insufficient, inadequate, or correctable. From there it makes sense to look more carefully at a phenomenon that has expanded silently: the aesthetic industry that revolves around the female body, even in its most intimate areas.
Ursula introduces this topic with an uncomfortable and necessary question: “did you know that there is an entire aesthetic industry around female genitals?” The question opens up a territory that for a long time was covered by silence and shame. Today there is talk of labial whitening, vaginal tightening, laser, radiofrequency, surgical and non-surgical procedures that promise to improve self-esteem through the modification of the intimate body. The promise seems modern, sophisticated, and even empowering. But beneath that surface persists an older logic: that even a healthy area of the female body can and should adjust to an ideal.
The figures Ursula shares make it clear that this is not a marginal trend. In the United States, she points out, aesthetic gynecology generates billions of dollars a year, and if non-surgical procedures are included, the figure exceeds twelve billion. Facing that, she formulates the question that should accompany any serious conversation on this topic: “how did we come to consider it normal for our bodies to be adjusted, modified, corrected, often with expensive and painful processes with the promise of improving our self-esteem?”
One of the answers she offers, leaning on the ideas of Emily Nagoski, is especially illuminating: normal only serves when it is used as a synonym for healthy. Outside of that, the word normal can become a tool of pressure. Ursula summarizes it this way: “There is no one way our bodies, our breasts, or our vulva have to look”. And she adds another fundamental idea: “all of us, each one of us has the same parts, they are just arranged differently”. That difference, instead of being read as a flaw, should be understood as natural variation.
What is often presented as an anatomical defect is not born of biology, but of a culture that needs to produce insecurity to turn it into consumption. Ursula says it with precision by pointing out that the idea that there is a single correct form of the female body responds to “a culture that turns insecurity into necessity and necessity into a market opportunity”. That phrase explains a lot. First, doubt is installed. Then the correction is offered. Finally, emotional relief is sold in the form of a procedure.
But the problem does not end with aesthetics. It also crosses female sexuality and the way it has been interpreted for decades. Ursula takes up one of the central ideas of Nagoski to explain that female desire works through two forces: “accelerators and brakes”. Some stimuli awaken a sexual response; others inhibit it. And in that system, she insists, “context is everything”. A caress can feel desired in a moment of connection and totally out of place in the middle of stress, haste, or overload. The important thing here is to recognize that female desire does not exist in isolation from context, as if it should appear at will or always respond in the same way.
That point helps to dismantle another very harmful idea: that when a woman does not feel desire at the expected moment, the problem is necessarily in her. Sometimes nothing is broken. Sometimes what there is is fatigue, fear, tension, distraction, or a deep disconnection from one’s own body after years of criticism and surveillance. That is why Ursula also introduces an especially important concept: “non-concordant arousal”, when the body responds to a stimulus without there being a mental or emotional correlation. She even names the extreme case of an involuntary orgasm during a rape and makes clear something that should not need to be repeated, but still needs to be said firmly: “nothing that happens in the body justifies the aggression that a woman has suffered”.
From there, the text becomes even more incisive by reviewing three messages that continue to shape the female experience. The first holds that one of the woman’s responsibilities is to sexually please the man. The second presents female sexuality as a medical problem when it does not adjust to the pace or expectations of the partner. And the third adds an apparently opposite but equally invasive pressure: it is no longer enough to be demure; now one would also have to be intensely sexual, multi-orgasmic, always available and perfectly self-confident, as if female desire had to perform according to foreign trends. Ursula calls this a “modern media neurosis”.
All this flows into a wound that many women recognize without having named it: the moment they stop inhabiting their body naturally and begin to manage it under surveillance. Ursula expresses it clearly: “there is a breaking point between childhood and puberty when many of us women stop appreciating our body”. Suddenly, monitoring of weight, shapes, behavior, even ambition appears. And that rejection, she warns, “is one of the greatest brakes when it comes to enjoying sexuality”.
Faced with all that, the final invitation is not naive or decorative. It is not about imposing a perfect self-esteem on oneself nor about replacing one demand with another. It is about interrupting the habit of criticism as the only form of relationship with oneself. Ursula proposes something more radical and more human: “Instead of criticizing ourselves, let’s try to celebrate ourselves”. And she finishes with an idea that functions as a compass: “let’s stop criticizing ourselves”, because that constant criticism “only generates stress and that in turn limits us”.
Perhaps that is where a freer relationship with the body begins: not when it finally fits into an ideal, but when a woman stops accepting without question the story she was taught to believe about it. This search for reconnection, respect, and presence dialogues naturally with Yuriyana Club’s mission to accompany women towards a fuller life at an emotional, physical, and sexual level through knowledge and connections that enrich.
You can find the complementary video to this article here: https://youtu.be/bQR4JaIO1vg
