Pleasure can be complicated, hunger can feel like a betrayal, but our bodies were built for pleasure and it’s time for you to reconnect with what it means to feel good, to prioritize what brings you delight and joy, and to unpack the old stories that keep you stuck in shame and guilt. My new online course, Power in Pleasure: Reconnecting with Your Hunger, Desire, and Joy, will start enrolling soon, so join the notification list now and get first dibs on the course.

Developing body trust, examining masculinity, and exploring pleasure with Aaron Flores.

This episode is generously brought to you by Casper sleep solutions. Get $50 toward select mattresses by visiting Casper.com/SGR and using SGR at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

I had the delight to hear Aaron Flores speak at the ASDAH conference in August, and while I knew I really wanted to have him on the show, I was even more excited when I learned about his men’s body trust course.

So, how does body trust relate to the sex we have, the pleasure we feel, and the ways we enjoy or police our desire? What does it mean that so many men and boys learn about sex and pleasure from porn? Well, Aaron and I dive into the importance of body trust, how diet culture and toxic masculinity cut us off from our pleasure, and why vulnerability is so crucial to men’s healing.

I had a BLAST talking with Aaron, and I can’t wait to have him back on the show.

Plus, Patreon supporters – If you support the show at the $3 level and above, this week’s bonus Aaron and I dive even deeper into porn, pleasure, and teaching kids about consent. Listen and support the show at patreon.com/sgrpodcast

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

In this episode, Aaron Flores and I talk about:

• Aaron’s experiences through his body trust work and how the book, “Manhood” by Laura Dodsworth helped him challenge his masculinity. Plus, Aaron’s observation of how many men learn about pleasure and sex from porn.
• Why body love and changing our bodies isn’t the first step and what actually is.
• The absence of a safe space for men to discuss the discomfort and the healing around their bodies. Plus, vulnerability and masculinity.
• What made Aaron so uncomfortable around a conversation about the erotic.
• Masculinity myths and how Aaron works around these myths both with body trust and as a parent.
• The importance of pleasure and how toxic masculinity and diet culture divorce us from our desire and pleasure, and why pleasure can nurture the ways we show up for ourselves and our partners.
• Choosing your body story and living a life of pleasure and joy from within that story, knowing other people will tell stories about your body.
• How Aaron models body trust to his kids to show them the importance of giving yourself the permission to take up space wherever you are or how you would like to appear in the world.
• How diet culture impacts our ability to connect with and express desire and pleasure and the many ways that we move around the world trying to limit what we really want.
• The notion that our pleasure is something to fear, police, and control.
• Men policing other men with how their body should look and how it impacts our ability to connect with each other and our desires in an authentic way.

About Aaron Flores:

Aaron Flores is a registered dietitian nutritionist based out of Los Angeles, California. With nearly 10 years of experience, Aaron has worked with eating disorders in a variety of settings. A large part of his career was spent working at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System where he helped develop and launch one of the first Binge Eating Disorder programs to help Veterans struggling with this disorder. Since leaving the VA, Aaron has continued to work in the eating disorder community helping run groups and providing individual counseling to adolescents and adults. He currently works part-time at Center for Discovery and part-time in his private practice in Calabasas, CA. He is a Certified Body Trust® provider, and his main areas of focus are Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size®. In his work, Aaron helps individuals learn how to make peace with food and develop body-positive behaviors. His work has been featured during Weight Stigma Awareness Week, in blogs for the National Eating Disorder Information Centre and National Eating Disorder Association. Aaron is a frequent speaker and has presented at the 2016 and 2017 Binge Eating Disorder Awareness Annual Conference and the upcoming 2018 International Conference on Eating Disorders. Along with his work with eating disorders, he also is a co-host of the podcast, Dietitians Unplugged.

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: Your body was built for pleasure. It was made for it. In fact, your pleasure, your desire and your body – in all of its wisdom – are sources of immense power. That’s why I am now pre-enrolling for my soon to be released online course live called “Power in Pleasure: Reconnecting with Your Hunger, Desire, and Joy.” 

If you want to get on the waitlist to hear more when the course is enrolling, you can do that at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse, all one word – PleasureCourse. Early birds will get a special bonus module that won’t be available anywhere else. There’s no commitment to join and just sign up for the course. This is just so that you can get on that early bird list until learn more about when the pleasure course is released. It’s going to be a multi-week online course done in community with live calls, exercises that make you shiver, quiver and sigh with a delight and so much more. So head to dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse to learn more.

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Hey, everyone! Welcome to this week’s episode. I am so looking forward to releasing that Pleasure Course that you heard about at the top of the show. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for many months. But when I went to the ASDAH Conference in Portland, I talked to so many people who were so hungry for a course that helped people to connect with their pleasure and to find their way to the erotic and to express their desire, especially people who are coming out of eating disorder recovery. So this course is going to be exactly that. I’m so excited. So, again, if you didn’t hear the ad at the beginning you can go to dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse – all one word – and check out a few details and get on the early bird notification list today. 

Dawn Serra: This episode actually comes out of a connection that I made at the ASDAH Conference. Aaron Flores was one of the speakers at the conference. He is someone that I’ve been following for quite a while. I admire his work so much. What really caught my eye is he just launched a men’s body trust course that’s all about helping men to reconnect with their bodies, their vulnerability, their feelings, their pleasure and really confronting the ways that diet culture and masculinity myths and toxic masculinity can impact the body. 

That is so much of what we’ve talked about on this show. I mean, when we talk about sex and we talk about relationships, when we talk about being connected to other human beings and orgasms and masturbation, all of that has to do with how we feel in our bodies. If our bodies aren’t working the way that they used to and we have feelings about that, if we have acquired a disability, if we have shame around the ways that our genitals look or the ways that we achieve orgasm, all of that impacts the ways that we experience pleasure and the people in our lives. 

Dawn Serra: So developing that body trust is such a crucial part of sex and ecstasy and joy and pleasure. And so getting to really talk to Aaron, this week was… Oh, God! It was so good. I could have literally talked to him for hours. As you hear, we get really excited at the end of the show. He is for sure coming back on the show in a couple of months. Let me tell you a little bit about Aaron and then we will jump right in. 

Aaron Flores is a registered dietitian nutritionist based out of Los Angeles, California. With nearly ten years of experience, Aaron has worked with eating disorders in a variety of settings. A large part of his career was spent working at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System where he helped develop and launch one of the first binge eating disorder programs to help veterans struggling with this disorder. Since leaving the VA, Aaron has continued to work in the eating disorder community, helping run groups and providing individual counseling to adolescents and adults. He currently works part-time at Center for Discovery and part-time in his private practice in Calabasas, California. He’s a certified body trust provider and his main areas of focus are intuitive eating and Health at Every Size. 

Dawn Serra: In his work, Aaron helps individuals learn how to make peace with food and develop body positive behaviors. His work has been featured during Weight Stigma Awareness Week and blogs for the National Eating Disorder Information Center and National Eating Disorder Association. Aaron is a frequent speaker, as you’ll hear in this interview, and has presented at the 2016 and 2017 Binge Eating Disorder Awareness Annual Conference and the upcoming 2018 International Conference on Eating Disorders. Along with his work on eating disorders. He is also a co-host of the podcast, “Dietitians Unplugged.” 

So here is my rich, delicious chat with Aaron Flores all about men’s body trust and porn and food and diet culture and so many other things that tie into our pleasure and our experiences of each other.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Aaron. I am very much looking forward to our conversation today. 

Aaron Flores: Oh, me as well. I’m really excited that you invited me on and I’m looking forward to talking to you. 

Dawn Serra: Yay. You do some really awesome work in the world. I had a chance to see you speak at ASDAH and I’ve listened to your podcast and see you on other people’s rad podcasts like Summer Innanen and you work at the nexus of our relationships to food and body and body trust and diet culture. Yeah. You’re having some really important, big conversations. 

What I’d love to start – that I think listeners would be super interested in because I’m really eager to get Laura Dodsworth on the show – is you went through Body Trust Certification, which I start next month for the next cohort– 

Aaron Flores: No way. 

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Aaron Flores: Oh my God. Congratulations. 

Dawn Serra: Thank you. I’m super excited. For one of your assignments, you had the opportunity to look through “Manhood,” which is Laura Dodsworth book that features a hundred pictures of people’s penises and then their associated stories. I’d love to hear a little bit how that was for you to approach the project and what got revealed as you were swimming in this circle of body trust work and then really being confronted by manhood and bodies. 

Aaron Flores: Yeah. Well, so part of the– The Body Trust Certification is a six month… If you do in succession, it’s basically around six months of work of different assignments and different readings. One of the required things to do is to do book reviews. What’s really amazing with Hilary and Dana at Be Nourished, who are doing the certification, is that they want to make sure that you read a book that comes from a marginalized voice within the eating disorder or body image community. 

So I knew I wanted to do a book around men and body image. It took me a long time to find one. Eventually Dana sent me a link to this book, “Manhood” and I was like, “This looks perfect.” It would be something I would be really great to read and it was the very last assignment I did. I kept it on my shelf. Actually, on my dresser. It was on my dresser while I get dressed every day and it sat there. I did everything else. I did all my other book reviews that we had to write, website copy, ethical statements, manifestos – all this other really deep work. I saved this for last. I wish I could say because I knew it was going to be the best thing. I really saved it for last because I was really scared to do it. 

Aaron Flores: When I wrote my book review for them, I basically said there’s a reason this is last. Because I think this book challenge– In my head, this book challenged my masculinity. I felt like, “Could I take this book to Starbucks and go read it?” and “What would people think of me if they look over my shoulder and there’s a picture of a penis.” So there was some shame there that I was experiencing. There was also just like my own shame and bias about, “What does this mean about my sexuality? To read a book about, to look at a penis and to read a man’s story about it?” I mean, it confronted a lot of things for me. And then I finally knew, “Okay. I just got to start doing this or else I will never finish Body Trust Work.” And I wanted to finish the Body Trust work. 

I read the first story and the first story is or first vignette. I don’t know what you want to call them. But first essay is about an older man and what I remember most is he talked about how he considers himself an intersectional feminist. As soon as I read that, I was like, “Oh. This book is right for me.” The other part was I think I’m happy I saved it for last because the book really did culminate and sort of bring to a head so many of the things that I had worked on with Hilary and Dana in this Body Trust work, to help me feel more embodied. I don’t know if I could have challenged my biases as well as if I had done this work earlier, read the book earlier in this work. So I’m very thankful that I did save it for the end and it was an amazing book.

Aaron Flores: What I really am so thankful for is they captured a really diverse group of men and trans men and different disabilities and abilities, different body types, different races, different ages. It was… For a hundred, if you look at sort of demographic-wise, it really captured a pretty representative sample of our society. It was done in England so I think there’s a lot of little language differences for how they slang for the word penis. It’s actually pretty funny. I feel like it captured a lot of what would a representative population for where the book was written.

Dawn Serra: What an incredible gift to be nudged into that discomfort and then to find this was meant to happen at this time and I’m ready to receive what’s in this. I love how you grappled with it. That’s just so real. 

Aaron Flores: Yeah. No, again, it was just it did sort of all coalesced really nicely. I think what was nice as each story or vignette as they had… Some were about men losing their virginity. Some were about how they tie their masculinity to how they perform in bed. Some were more about aging and if they weren’t able to perform sexually as well, what that meant for their manhood or they used to as when they were younger. Some were just about being comfortable with the size or being comfortable with what it looks like or how much body image played into just the discussion of someone’s penis.

It really cut to the core of comparing and judging. And Is this right? Is this wrong? Is it a fit within a norm? Is it outside the norm? Really, just interesting stuff that came up just through a very personal discussion around penises. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. One of the things that I think is so important that you just named is this comparison that all of us are trapped in in one variety or another or almost all of us. And that comparison shows up in different ways depending on culture and gender and a number of other things. But I think, especially for men, so many of the questions that I’ve gotten over the years have been around fear about their penis size and fear about performance and comparing a body to the pop culture edition or the porn edition of bodies. 

I’d love to hear a little bit more. I know you just started your Men’s Body Trust Program last week. By the time this airs, you’ll be a few weeks into it. So can you just talk a little bit about the ways that you see shame show up for men, and then what it means for men to cultivate body trust? 

Aaron Flores: Yeah. Well, first off, what I see for shame when it comes to men is that the pressure to have a body that fits the societal norm is very profound for men. I think the shame comes from two things. One is that norm exists and that pressure exists. Additionally, number two, is that there’s not really a space or forum or it is acceptable to discuss it. Men are experiencing this body dissatisfaction or comparison or feeling like, “My body doesn’t fit the–” “It doesn’t have a six pack.” “It’s not ripped enough.” “It’s not thin enough.” Whatever it is.

But then adding this layer of not being able to have an outlet for it makes that shame even stronger. It makes it internalized so deep that to do any of this work is very challenging on some level because for some men it might not have ever been been really done. So what I’m finding and doing this group, but also just other conversations with men is that the discomfort with the body has been there and for many men, has been there from a very early age. Without a space to process it, it just goes through cycles of internalized stigma that never provide any space for healing.

Dawn Serra: So what for you does healing the relationship with body look like, especially for men?

Aaron Flores: I think it’s a couple things. First off, I think it’s learning to just accept our bodies as they are and not having this… I think we can argue or sort of discuss the need to change the body down the road, but I think, at first, can we just accept this is the body I have? Especially as men age, I think the thing that comes up is, “My body doesn’t perform like it did when I was 18.” If I was at all athletic at that age, I can’t do the same things that I want to do at 45 or 55 or 65 or 35. My body just– Our bodies age. So it’s that acceptance that this is the process of my body.

I think the other part of the healing is understanding that it does not challenge our masculinity to be vulnerable. And so to share our lived experience and be vulnerable to our partner, a friend, a co-worker, someone that we feel is close to us, that to be vulnerable does not mean we are any less of a man. 

Aaron Flores: I would say the third part is understanding that doing this work and trying to sort of… Doing this work so that we can heal how we see our body. And being more comfortable with it does not mean you have to love it. It just means, like I said earlier, it’s about acceptance. It’s about not letting the body image issues stop us from doing important things in our life that help us live wholeheartedly.

Dawn Serra: I think that’s such an important point. I mean, I can’t speak to the experience of men, but I can speak to my experience, which is how many decades I told myself that story of, “Well, I’ll finally do that thing when I’m in a different body.” And just putting life on hold forever and just having this low grade dissatisfaction all the time. Because I wasn’t really pursuing the things I wanted to do because I was waiting.

Aaron Flores: Yup. Absolutely. I think that’s a human experience. I don’t think that matters your gender, your gender identity. I think that’s a human experience. How many of us all put something on hold and wait for something because of… Especially our body and wanting to change our body before we do that thing.

Dawn Serra: So you mentioned masculinity and how being vulnerable is not something that takes away from masculinity. Masculinity myths are rampant in our culture. There have been so many brilliant, brilliant black feminist women who have talked about how the first victims of patriarchy are men and boys. That they’re cut off from their emotions and their bodies and have to perform these very violent versions of humanity often. What kind of masculinity myths do you really grapple with and see? I know you wrote this beautiful letter to your son a couple of years ago, inviting him into this dialogue around expectations and performance of masculinity. So what are some of those myths around upholding masculine identity that you grapple with as you do this work around bodies and being embodied and experiencing self and pleasure?

Aaron Flores: Well, I would say, first off, is personally the things that I struggle with are being able to– I don’t know how to say this. I think doing podcasts like this and talking to people like you, who understand this message and understand this work, is very comfortable. It feels really good to have that connection. What I find is that in my work life, that connection is really consistent and happens on a really regular basis. I would say exporting that into my personal life, it’s hard. There aren’t many men that I talked to about this just on a personal level. 

I think that’s partly because I think socially, some of my friends might not just quite get it on some level. But two, it’s also that vulnerability piece is something I bought up against. I live that, too. It’s funny when I find men that I can have this conversation with, it’s really quite… It’s really precious to me and I know that it’s unique. I know that it might not happen everywhere. But I find that when it does happen, it’s just like this conversation with you. It feels really good and it feels like I get to be seen by someone who is maybe not in the eating disorder community which is nice. And because it’s taking this sort of work and putting it out in my life. So I think that’s– For sure, one thing is just trying to bring that out into my social life and challenge that masculinity myth. 

Aaron Flores: And then the other thing that I think I do see it a lot around my kid. I’ve twins. I have a boy and a girl twin. I definitely just see how there are different influences that come in that they see and that they sort of experience and learning to see, almost deconstruct that and say, “Okay. How can I talk about this experience with both my son and my daughter from a perspective that challenges maybe, the narrative or myth that they’re already learning as kids.” It’s interesting because as they grow up – they’re almost teenagers now – you see it in a much different way than when they were four and five or even younger than that. 

Dawn Serra: What are the– So one of the things that I have found in the work that I’ve been doing is that so much of this work around sex and pleasure and desire and love and the ways we connect with each other really does impact the ways we connect with ourselves and our bodies. And there’s a lot of grief work that has to happen. We have to grieve the stories that we invested in. We have to grieve the ways that we performed and weren’t really present in our life. There’s just grief and sometimes anger and fear that comes up when we really start asking these questions and trying to rewrite stories. What are some of the ways that you see big emotional work happening, especially around men’s body trust? 

Aaron Flores: Well, look… First, let me say you’re, you’re going to love this body trust work already because you’re using all the great keywords that you’re going to learn about. You are definitely finding your people. So welcome.

Dawn Serra: Yay!

Aaron Flores: I think the word pleasure is a really important word. Up until around, I would say about a month ago, I would probably also call it satisfaction. And we actually did– There’s a Body Trust Symposium while we were in Portland for ASDAH and we talked a lot about pleasure. It’s interesting because I think we– Especially men, I think it is interesting how we sort of define pleasure and to define even self-care as pleasure. 

I think one of the– Just to bring back in the “Manhood” book because it relates to this a little bit is what was interesting is that so many of the stories that men wrote involved pornography and involved that is how they learned about pleasure and they learned about sex through through pornography. To me, that was really interesting because that is… Especially now, I mean, I think that is perpetuating rape culture in our young men. So we’re learning about pleasure from a very, almost, violent perspective when it comes to sex. For men, I think learning to distinguish between pleasure, thinking of it as hedonistic to pleasure as what brings me joy, what helps me feel connected, what helps me feel in the moment. 

Aaron Flores: It was interesting. I have some friends that are avid surfers. I always think of surfing as… I think there’s definitely a masculine culture within surfing. Right? 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Aaron Flores: But I also think of surfing as being really connected. Listen, I don’t surf. I wish I could surf. But I sort of see that as being on a wave is really joyful. I think for a lot of men, we struggle with finding what are the things in life that really bring us joy and maybe even changing, again, how we define that word pleasure to say, “This is what helps me feel joy right now.” I think that’s interesting changing definition that I don’t think many men might go for or think of.

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Dawn Serra: I love that so much. That’s so much of the work that I’ve been doing here on the podcast the past couple years specifically, is how can we broaden the definitions and release the reins a little bit that’s forcing so many of us to feel either broken or we’re performing so that we can fit in or feel like we’re doing the right things. And when we can broaden our definitions of sex to include all kinds of erotic exchanges, it gives us so many more entry points as our bodies do change or, acquire disabilities or move through illness or age. 

And the same with pleasure, when we can expand pleasure beyond those decadent meals we have at birthdays and holidays and sex, and maybe one or two other things, to the potential for hundreds of small and big access points to joy and embodiment and just being utterly present, that feels so much more rich to me. But, we have this tendency to cling to so many of the stories that we’ve been given, which is that pleasure is a very specific thing and it’s easiest to get through this one act. I love the invitation of what if we open ourselves to pleasure being joy and presence and attunement and just really, really what does feel good in the moment? I mean, that feels so much more accessible. 

Aaron Flores: Right. Yeah. And you bring up… When you said the word erotic, it reminded me of when I did my body trust retreat, Lucy Aphramor was there and she’s a dietician who is in Manchester, UK. She is also a poet and does amazing work around spoken word. She gave us this two-hour lecture on, I think it was called “The Erotic.” I’m sitting in. I’m the only man in this group and I’m like, “This is going to be the most uncomfortable two hours of my entire life.” I just had visions of what are we going to talk about and just feeling like, again, just really uncomfortable. Like, “Is this going to be a two-hour sex talk and I’m the only man amongst these women?” It’s exactly what you just said. It’s about the erotic is about embodiment and being attuned in all those things. 

I think what I had to challenge myself with – and I think this is what a lot of men have to challenge ourselves with – is turning off the fourth grade mind that we have that needs to giggle at the word. And then giggle at the word and sort of make a joke and then move on because the topic is uncomfortable. I think if we can do that and really open our hearts and bodies and listen, is that– To change that definition, it opens a huge key. I think it just involves, it just requires us to, like I said, challenge that vulnerability, that fear of vulnerability to just be present and listen and experience these things.

Dawn Serra: So, first of all, I adore that so much of like, “Oh, shit. This is going to be awkward.” 

Aaron Flores: Yeah.

Dawn Serra: As you kind of, I don’t know, done so much learning and working with others in this space, what is your relationship to pleasure and the erotic become as your body has changed and as you’ve done all these trainings and you’ve worked with all these clients and created these programs? Where are you now in relationship to pleasure and sensual delights and joy? What’s that like for you?

Aaron Flores: It’s a really good question. I think this is where my dietitian… I want to disclose that this is part of the fault of my training as a dietitian, and the work that we do as dietitians is that we’re not having these types of discussions in our work. We’re talking a lot about what does folate do and blah, blah, blah. Which is important, but I think the reason I want to bring this up is because we’re not trained to do our own work in this area, especially around food and body. 

What I think started with a long time ago reading intuitive eating first and doing a lot of personal work in that area, learning about Health at Every Size, doing some personal work in there, that area, doing the Body Trust Certification and really diving deep into my own embodiment before working with other people is to say that I am a complete work in progress. And through this work in body trust, it really opened up that, “Hey! You need your own space to do this work. And you need to seek out people that you can talk to to help you do this work because unless you are, you’re really just paying lip service to it.” 

Aaron Flores: So I want to say that out loud that I do a lot of my own work in this area and it ebbs and flows. What I find though is that through this process, it’s almost like there are times where I take a mental picture of a moment. For me, it’s not about getting out my phone and Instagramming it or putting it on Facebook. But I want to remember this. I want to file this somewhere in my brain. I want to file what it feels like, what it smells like, what it tastes like. 

What I find is that I look for experiences in my life that lead to those moments. Honestly, a lot of them are around my family. When I get to spend time with my partner and with my kids and we’re doing something, even if we’re not all together but we’re just doing it as a unit, those are moments where I want that mental snapshot. Or a conversation with one of my kids is a mental snapshot. Having a great moment with a client is a mental snapshot. I find that I am trying to cultivate pleasure and things that really make me feel in the moment and really trying to catalog those almost as experiences. I think, again, just to be honest, the things that I really try to work on are, “I’m going to take time out from my family, from work and just do something for me.” It is the struggle. It’s hard. 

Aaron Flores: I will say that this summer was a great experience with that. My wife is a camp director. She was gone all summer. My kids go to summer camp. They were gone all summer. I had two months to myself, pretty much.

Dawn Serra: Woah!

Aaron Flores: Yeah. And I don’t like being alone. So I was actually very anxious about it. But what I found is that it forced me to… There were many days where I was like, “If you don’t get up off the couch, you’re going to sit here all day. And you will have done– You just sat here all day.” I was like, “No. I’m going to go out and do something. And this is where I’m going to go do.” I sort of had these little experiences that they were all just for me and it felt really good. So I think it’s continuing to work on, like saying, “Hey. This is my time and this is what I’m going to do to just for me.” And realizing that it’s not always gadgets that do it. It’s got to be an experience. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. So speaking of experiences, you posted, I believe it was around the Fourth of July, saying, “I’m having some complicated feelings about independence in the United States right now.” But you decided to go to the beach and you wrote about your experience of wearing a tank top, specifically in LA. I come from Southern California. That’s where my family is. So I totally get it. I’d love to hear just a little bit about…. I think we hear lots about women, especially in BoPo spaces. 

You know, I have a story like this too where I didn’t wear dresses for 15 years because I thought, as someone who’s in a fat body, I’m not allowed to. The first time I did, it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. But I lived and now I wear dresses all the time. But those moments of like, I have to push up against stories or fear and you had posted about going to the beach and wearing a tank top. So can you talk a little bit about some other ways that you are really combating stories that were given about bodies and how you take up space and say, “No. I deserve to do that, so I’m going to do this thing that feels a little bit edgy.”

Aaron Flores: Yeah. I mean, I think that is– So that experience was… It was during the summer when everyone’s gone and I would normally have spent that holiday with my family. And there I was choosing to do it alone. I did have other invitations, but here, I wanted to go to the beach. I just wanted to just experience it on my own agenda. 

I think that one of the things that I find is the most overt – I don’t want to say this – overt manifestation of me trying to take up space is to say, “You know, when I swim, I am allowed to take off my shirt and go swimming.” That is something that fights or go butts up against the narrative that a lot of men feel. That if they don’t have the body that fits or is of the norm. That you need to somehow cover it up or people are going to stare at you. I mean, I think that’s my story. People are going to make up some story about me being fat and swimming.

Aaron Flores: For me, the radical moment is to say, “I’m not going to do that. And if I choose to do it, it’s okay.” It’s maybe because “I’ve had a lot of sun and I don’t want– I burn really easily. So, hey, I’m going to put on a shirt so I don’t get some burn.” Or maybe I don’t have the armor today to do that. But it’s my choice. I’m going to make that choice in the moment and feel comfortable with it either way. 

What I find is that there is, especially like… So wearing the tank top or swimming without my shirt on or just sitting in a chair on a hot day without my shirt on and you talk about pleasure, it feels really good. Like, “Hey, I feel the sun on different parts of my body that don’t usually feel it” or “I feel the sensation of wind across my chest or across my shoulders or across my stomach.” 

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Aaron Flores: “I feel it’s cooler. I’m not as hot, which is nice in the summer.” So it’s connecting to… This actually… There’s some sensations that I can connect with that actually feel really good. And then sort of saying, “You know what, whatever story someone is telling themselves about my body is their story. And it’s not mine. So I’m going to listen to my story more than theirs.” 

Then the other thing is, again, modeling for my kid, both of my kids. To model that I can wear– This is my body. It doesn’t make me any different of a father to them or a partner. It doesn’t stop me from doing anything that might be enjoyable with them and that I can be confident enough in my own skin to say, “I’m allowed to be here and I’m I’m allowed to do this, and so are you” What’s interesting is that’s manifested in positive ways for my kids. I think they– Without even it being spoken, I think they see it. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. That modeling is so important. 

Aaron Flores: Absolutely. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I really appreciate that distinction too between the stories that other people might be telling about my body aren’t my story and I’m going to focus on my story right now and that permission. Because I think so many of the men who’ve written into the show before have this intense fear about the story that other people are going to tell about their penis size or their body shape and what that means about their value and recognizing people are going to make assumptions about our bodies. That’s just kind of the world we live in right now because of diet culture and sexism and all the other things. And we get to tell stories about our bodies, too. Then decide how we’re going to behave based on which story we’re choosing to listen to. Sometimes it’s easier than others, but just acknowledging, “Yeah. They might tell a story, but that’s not the one I’m choosing for me right now. So I’m going to be shirtless. I’m going to enjoy this beach. They tell their stories and I have mine.” 

Aaron Flores: You’re absolutely right. I think it goes back to just our experiences as we grow up and as we get socialized about bullying and just not being fit in. Especially for men, I think there’s really intense at both emotional but also physical bullying if you’re anything different than what is deemed as masculine or normal. So anything that deviates at all from that that brings attention to you and if it’s your body, you essentially get mocked and ridiculed for.

Dawn Serra: So thinking about the ways that we are forced into conformity in a variety of ways, whether it’s around our body or performing masculinity or femininity or any number of other things. You do so much work around eating disorders and diet culture and you have this wonderful logo that’s on your business card – Smash the Weightriarchy. There are a lot of people who really get why talking about diet culture and bodies is a crucial part of having a healthy sexuality and having depth and sexual pleasure and connection to other humans. And then there’s some people who don’t quite get it. So I’d love to talk to you about the ways that you see diet culture impacting our ability to really connect with and express desire and pleasure.

Aaron Flores: Oh. It’s a great, great question. Again, I think this is why I’m so thankful to do this work. Because when I became a dietitian and if someone had said, “Oh.you’re going to get this question about pleasure and sex and diet culture,” I’d be like, “Okay. That’s not what I’m trained for.” I am so happy I’m here today. 

Dawn Serra: Yay!

Aaron Flores: Okay. So here’s what I think, is that diet culture does something very impactful when it comes to pleasure. What I think it does is it tells us that experiencing pleasure, especially from food is wrong and that if you experience too much pleasure from food, you will gain weight, you will be fat and you are bad. So diet culture reinforces maybe what I would consider a puritanical view around sex and says anything pleasurable is bad and that we must do anything in our power to limit our pleasure around food. Because if we don’t, we are inherently uncontrollable. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Aaron Flores: This goes back to Sylvester Graham and Graham crackers. Sylvester Graham was a pastor, I think in the 19th century, who talked about… He basically thought that we needed to eat bland crackers to prevent hedonistic behavior. And that’s who Graham crackers are named after – Sylvester Graham. Even for hundreds of years, we’ve been taught that or just have this notion that pleasure is bad and pleasure from food is something that we need to have limits on. We need to have structure around to limit ourselves. It basically erodes our own trust in our hunger and fullness and satisfaction cues. It says we are just– We are weak. We are susceptible to pleasure, that if as soon as we get a taste of any little bit, who knows what will happen to us. So I think diet culture reinforces this notion that we are not allowed to experience anything fun or pleasurable.

Dawn Serra: So much of what I’m hearing and that I’ve experienced on a very personal level too is the ways that diet culture really reinforces that we have to constantly be monitoring and measuring, controlling, earning. Then when those things become too hard, we binge in some way, or just have this big pendulum response. And then we feel guilt and shame and we double down and we’ll do more controlling and more measuring and feel more guilt and just other ways that it keeps us trapped and separate from actually just experiencing who we are and what we want and allowing the natural ebb and flow to happen because we’re just so focused on the control. 

Aaron Flores: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Dawn Serra: I also think it’s really interesting to just think about the ways that diet culture has indoctrinated pretty much all of us in Western culture into eroding that trust, as you mentioned, around our views. I think that that’s a really important thing to think about, both within the context of food that we have gotten to a place where we’re terrified of just eating when we’re hungry and eating what sounds like it would be good in that moment. Because we have that terror of loss of control and hedonism and how that ties to. Ultimately, that takes us very quickly to unlovable, alone, forever dying. 

Aaron Flores: Right. 

Dawn Serra: Also, the ways that then ties to the ways we connect with other human beings with our bodies. If we don’t know how to listen to our hunger cues and what we’re hungry for, it’s pretty hard to also listen to our desire cues in other ways. What are the ways that I really want to be touched right now? What are the ways I want to relate with you? What are the ways we might get endlessly creative about the possibilities of where we overlap? And instead, doing that performance of, “I should do this and this is how it should unfold and I’m performing so I can be good.” 

Aaron Flores: Absolutely. I think the key word there is hunger, for me. Because there’s like… It’s not just hunger for food, but it’s hunger for so much in our life. And, yeah, the diet culture tells us hunger is something that you should not feel and that the first sense of hunger cues, for so many people who’ve been in diet culture for so long, it’s fearful and it’s scary. The last thing I want to feel is hungry. So I’m going to eat in a way or restrict so much, so that those cues are either gone or I never experienced them at all because to feel hunger is inherently scary. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Aaron Flores: When we have hunger, we have hunger for so many things, as a metaphor. I think we need to embrace that hunger and really listen to it. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And that hunger is such a– I mean, I imagine that hunger as the center of a wheel with all these spokes that go out of like, hunger for food, hunger for touch, hunger for connection, hunger to be seen, hunger for feeling, and being able to feel openly and have that met. And then when we get to each of those things, they butt up against so many of these big cultural myths we have around things like masculinity. If I’m hungry for touch, but masculinity tells me to be touched by certain people and in certain ways, means I’m failing as a man, that I’m going to cut myself off from that “I’m still hungry for touch.” But there’s a lot of pressure now on these very few ways that I can get it. 

Aaron Flores: Yup. Yeah. Absolutely. 

Dawn Serra: So I have one last question for you and it’s kind of a heady one. I love that you’re doing all of this work, specifically around men and body trust because that is such a missing piece of the conversation within body positivity and diet culture talk and fat activism. It’s pretty much about women and queer folks. And so we need more spaces for men to be able to talk and process and experience and feel when it comes to all the ways they’ve been cut off from their bodies. 

And there’s also a very real experience that, for so many women, the violence that they experienced because of diet culture, which is so tied to sexism and misogyny, is perpetuated by men upholding masculinity. So I’m wondering how you navigate that space of inviting men in and at the same time, having eyes wide open about the very real impact of the privilege that comes with masculinity. 

Aaron Flores: Well, I think you just touched on it right there. That’s being able to name privilege and to really pull out and zoom out. I think part of the reason that, especially someone like me – who’s a straight, white, cisgendered man – might have trouble coming to this work is because it might be the first time we’re acknowledging the privilege that we have in this world and that we’ve navigated this world in a way where we’ve never been challenged and we’ve never been really uncomfortable and we’ve never really known what it feels like to be marginalized, in any way. So as soon as we feel something that’s uncomfortable, like confronted with misogyny, sexism, patriarchy – any of those things – we automatically put up, maybe, some defense mechanisms because we don’t know what it feels like to be confronted in that way. 

I think it’s important to discuss what privilege is and and bring in these topics when it comes to bodies. I don’t think you can do body image work without talking about patriarchy and without talking about sexism and without talking about race and without talking about social justice. I think we can all do it in different ways, but I think it has to be a part of the conversation somehow. What I find is that by being able to name part of it, or all of it, in this work and why it might be hard for us, some men, to do this work is important. I think being– I can use my privilege to talk about these topics maybe in a way where it might be more accessible to men, so that I can maybe bridge the gap on some level and make these topics more accessible. That’s my hope. But I do think we need to address our privilege and we do need to address how toxic masculinity is a part of our society and the role that it plays. 

Dawn Serra: The role that it plays in not only creating so much violence against women and queer folks and especially trans women, but also the violence against men themselves like you mentioned earlier. All the bullying that happens that’s toxic masculinity in a large part. Boys policing each other in order to feel like they’re living up to all the things that they’re swimming in. 

Aaron Flores: Yup. Absolutely. Again, that’s– Listen to this, whether you’re a teenager who’s experiencing it or an adult, I mean, that is heady work. I think that is maybe the challenge for some men is diving in and saying, “This is going to be heady. We are going to talk about topics that are challenging. But when we do and we sort of process them, it’s going to reap huge rewards in terms of body image.” 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Aaron Flores: And the relationship that we have with others. 

Dawn Serra: Exactly. Yeah. I think it might have been Sonalee Rashatwar that really connected the dots for me first, a couple of years ago, where she was talking about racism happens to our bodies. And the violence of patriarchy, it happens to our bodies and lack of access for folks with disabilities, it prevents our bodies from being in spaces. These big systems of oppressions exist by the ways that they impact our bodies. And then, at a very personal level, the way that I moved through my life, the way that I experienced sex, the ways that I experienced touch and love and pleasure, that has to happen with my body, They are so intimately linked. Being able to really start seeing all the ways that those impact each other, I think, gives us so many more opportunities for connection in depth because we start understanding the ways that all of us are moving through the world in such complicated ways.

Aaron Flores: Perfectly said. It is complicated. It’s nuanced. And there are a lot of intersections there and we need to look at all of them.

Dawn Serra: Well, I could literally talk to you forever. But in the interest of respecting your time and the listeners time, I’ll just have to have you back another time. So for folks who want to stay in touch–

Aaron Flores: I would do it. You just tell me when, I would do it.

Dawn Serra: Okay. Good. I’m in. So for people who want to learn more about the work you do, maybe keep an eye out for the next time you’re running your men’s body trust program down the road, how can they find you online?

Aaron Flores: Well, so you mentioned my new logo. I actually bought that URL. So you can now find me at smashtheweightriarchy.com. You can also find me on Instagram, @AaronFloresRDN. That’s my same handle on Facebook and Twitter. I’m probably less active on Twitter these days. More on Instagram and Facebook. But those are probably the best ways. And then I also co-host a podcast called “Dietitians Unplugged,” that is on iTunes and Stitcher, Google Play and every place you would listen to your podcast.

Dawn Serra: Excellent. Well, I will have links to all of those places in the show notes and at dawnserra.com for this episode. Aaron, thank you so much for being here with us and geeking out with me. 

Aaron Flores: Oh my God. Thank you for having me. I think I want to come back on your show, if that’s okay, when you’re done with the Body Trust work and your course and we can totally, totally talk. 

Dawn Serra: Heck, yes. I would love that. To everybody who tuned in, thank you so much for being here with us. If you have any questions that you’d like me to field on the show down the road, please go to dawnserra.com and use the “Send a Note” link. 

Of course, Patreon supporters don’t forget if you support at $3 and above, you get weekly bonus content. You can go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to either support the show or to hear the bonus content. Aaron and I are about to go record that bonus chat just for you. So until next time. This is Dawn Serra with Aaron Flores. Bye!

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?