by Lindsay Kite | Jun 22, 2021
Between the viral tweets about girls at summer camp being required to wear T-shirts over their swimsuits (while the boys go shirtless) and the dozens of messages we receive weekly about how to handle double-standard dress codes for girls, we decided to share a brief guide.
As you see double-standard dress code rules being enforced against girls and women, keep in mind that we live in a world that sees girls and women as bodies first and people second. When you see someone as a body first, you are likely tempted to try and regulate and monitor that person’s body, which often happens at their expense. The more we teach girls that they are here to be looked at, the more we keep them at a disadvantage. The more we value and devalue other women based on how they look and what they’re wearing — too fat, too thin, too covered up, not covered up enough — the more we keep them, and ourselves, at a disadvantage.
Here are some guiding questions and a script you can modify for your own use:
So, you feel uncomfortable at the dress code provided by your kid’s summer camp, school, or outdoor activity. Ask yourself why. What about the clothing rules raises a red flag for you?
- Do you feel like the guidelines are sexually objectifying your daughter — treating her as parts to be covered?
- Do they position her body as a threat to onlookers?
- Do they make the girls uncomfortable (T-shirts while swimming, long pants in summer heat) to prioritize the boys’ or male leaders’ comfort?
- Do they require girls to cover up parts that the boys can expose? Is it the double-standard of it all?
Then say that. Use your knowledge of your child and your status as their parent to relate to the leaders as a peer and caregiver. Try saying:
- I want my child’s safety and comfort — not their appearance — to be prioritized in this activity. She will be wearing a swimsuit approved by me that she can be comfortable in and move freely in and out of the water. She will not be required to wear a T-shirt over it because this is a safety hazard, a discomfort, and a distraction to her.
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I want my child to understand her body is an instrument for her use, not an ornament to be looked at, including while swimming or playing. Long pants in the heat, extra clothing over swimsuits, and other rules that position her body as a sexual object to be shielded from others’ view is in opposition to the instrumental value I am working to instill in her understanding of her body.
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I want my child treated equally with all the other children regardless of gender or appearance, including their dress code requirements. Just like boys, girls’ stomachs, backs, shoulders, and legs are not sexual and are not threats to anyone.
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I want my child to know that they and everyone else are accountable for their own thoughts and actions, regardless of how anyone presents themselves. If anyone in proximity to my child has trouble seeing my child as a human and controlling their own thoughts and actions, that person’s misguided beliefs should be dealt with, not my child’s clothing. And kids should be taught it’s perfectly natural to be attracted to other people — no need to feel shame about that — but those people are not to blame for our thoughts and behaviors.
Please let me know if these expectations can be met, and if they can’t, please help me understand why not. I would love for my child to attend this activity, but excessively detailed dress codes for girls and not for boys sends the message that girls’ bodies are sexualized and threatening while boys’ bodies aren’t. This prioritizes heterosexual boys’ and men’s potentially objectifying views of girls’ bodies over the girls’ comfort, safety, and healthy body image. 
I am prioritizing my child’s well-being and self-worth by helping her develop a healthy relationship with her body from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I hope this camp/activity will be aligned with our family’s values in this respect, but if not, I will seek other opportunities for my child.
If you’d like to learn more, I’d be glad to share my copy of More Than a Body by Lindsay and Lexie Kite, PhD, which has been a great resource for helping me better understand the importance of positive body image for everyone and how to break down some of the invisible barriers girls are up against in seeing themselves as more than a body.
Thank you!
by Lindsay Kite | Sep 29, 2020
Our first book, More Than a Body, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is available everywhere!
Get your copy today! Find it anywhere books are sold, including every retailer linked below:
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Book Description:
Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.
- How do you feel about your body?
- Have you ever stayed home from a social activity or other opportunity because of concern about how you looked?
- Have you ever passed judgment on someone because of how they looked or dressed?
- Have you ever had difficulty concentrating on a task because you were self-conscious about your appearance?
Our beauty-obsessed world perpetuates the idea that happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on how we look, but authors Lindsay and Lexie Kite offer an alternative vision. With insights drawn from their extensive body image research, Lindsay and Lexie—PhDs and founders of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined (and also twin sisters!)—lay out an action plan that arms you with the skills you need to reconnect with your whole self and free yourself from the constraints of self-objectification.
From media consumption to health and fitness to self-reflection and self-compassion, Lindsay and Lexie share powerful and practical advice that goes beyond “body positivity” to help readers develop body image resilience—all while cutting through the empty promises sold by media, advertisers, and the beauty and weight-loss industries. In the process, they show how facing your feelings of body shame or embarrassment can become a catalyst for personal growth.
Reviews:
“An indispensable resource for women of all ages, this is a guide to help us better connect to ourselves, to love ourselves, and ultimately, to be ourselves. —Chelsea Clinton, author, activist, and vice chair of the Clinton Foundation
“More Than a Body is a welcome salve for those who are weary of the internal war with their body. Through their groundbreaking body image resilience model, Lexie and Lindsay offer many practical ways to make peace with your body, showing how body image disruptions can be a pathway for healing, rather than provoke a descent into a shame spiral. Ultimately, readers will find real solutions to reunite with their whole, embodied selves.”
—Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, co-author of Intuitive Eating
“Loving yourself is easier said than done. I’ve been trying for years. There’s more to it than following a bunch of body-positive Instagram accounts or saying nice things to yourself in the mirror. Thankfully, Lindsay and Lexie have written a step-by-step guide on how to dismantle self-objectification and develop a positive body image. This is the perfect book for someone who wants to change their outlook but doesn’t know where to start.”
—Nikki Glaser, comedian, TV host, and host of the podcast You Up with Nikki Glaser
“As an expert immersed in this field for decades, it is rare that I come across writing that causes me to reflect differently on my own body—but More Than a Body does so powerfully. The Kite sisters’ work is not trite self-help or body positivity clichés; it is masterfully crafted research and real-life experience that represents a crucial step forward in our culture’s understanding of bodies and beauty ideals. The world needs this book.”
—Lindo Bacon, PhD, researcher and author of Radical Belonging, Body Respect, and Health at Every Size
“Lindsay and Lexie are the wise, thoughtful, patriarchy-smashing older sisters that every girl and woman needs in their life. In More Than a Body, they meticulously dissect the deluge of messaging that says we should tie our worth to our appearance—and then they blow all of it apart. They inspire us all to imagine what more we can be and what more we can do when we are able to take up all the space we need in this world.”
—Virginia Sole-Smith, author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America
“Lindsay and Lexie have a way of weaving you back through your own experiences, but this time, with an entirely new lens on the why. Packed with facts, science, and the truth about the distortions in media, this book brought me feelings of purpose, safety, and the good kind of desire to fight when it comes to existing in a body in today’s world. Lindsay and Lexie tell stories many of us could have written ourselves and unpack just how good and okay we are and have always been.”
—Sarah Nicole Landry, writer, The Birds Papaya
“This book could save your life. In a lively and engaging style, Lindsay and Lexie discuss the grave harm caused by self-objectification and offer remedies that encourage resilience. A most welcome addition to the literature on body image.”
—Jean Kilbourne, feminist activist, media critic, author, and creator of the film series “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women”
“This necessary and compassionate book offers something like armor to women of all ages against the pervasive culture of objectification. We can’t escape it, but the strategies in these pages will help you develop a resistance to it and, ultimately, get back to living a life that isn’t limited by how you look.”
—Jessica Knoll, New York Times best-selling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and The Favorite Sister
by Lindsay Kite | Apr 28, 2020
By Lexie Kite, Ph.D.
One of the biggest barriers many women face when working to improve their body image and heal their relationship with their bodies is the judgment and rejection they fear from their romantic partners. This seems to be particularly true for women in heterosexual relationships who have grown up viewing and monitoring their bodies through a sexualized male perspective. When women are objectified and valued primarily as things to be looked at and consumed (visually or physically) in media and among people around us, it is not only men that learn to view women as parts and judge those parts according to carefully prescribed standards — we do the same to ourselves. This distances us from not only our own healthy body image, but also from our partners.
We all learn to objectify ourselves (through self-objectification, or monitoring how our bodies appear) and to objectify others from the time we are very young, from a massive variety of people and messages. If you are a fan of our work at Beauty Redefined, there’s a good chance you have undertaken the incredibly hard but rewarding work of developing body image resilience. As you work on your relationship with your body and begin to experience your body through our life-changing mantra — as an “instrument, not an ornament” — your whole life opens up. You can see the way you have held yourself back and been held back from happiness and health and confidence because you felt defined by your body and wasted years living to be looked at instead of really living.
Whether you love or hate the way your body looks, you’ve probably also realized how hard it is to thrive in your life and your relationship — and even enjoy your most intimate moments — when you are fixated on how you appear at all times. Seeing yourself and being treated as MORE THAN A BODY is essential to your own well-being and to having healthy romantic relationships. So many of us have been trained to think that having a happy, healthy sex life depends on fitting a prescribed idea of what “sexy” looks like. The truth is: You can have a healthy, happy sex life regardless of how you look or how you think you look. You can learn to take back your sexuality as your own, from the inside, because it is something to be experienced firsthand, not viewed or appraised from the outside.
Here’s the deal: Everyone wants to feel attractive. Everyone wants their partner to be attracted to them. A big deterrent to feeling confident and attractive is shame. It’s REALLY hard to take good care of yourself when you are embarrassed and disgusted by your body and/or your partner is, too. It’s really hard to want to be intimate with someone or maintain a loving bond with a partner when you are embarrassed and disgusted by your body and/or your partner is, too. That shame propels you toward unhealthy extremes, whether that be compulsive overeating or overexercise, restriction and starvation, abusing diet pills and laxatives, being totally sedentary, etc. In other words, feeling shame and disgust for your body is the quickest path to self-destructive and relationship-destructive beliefs and behaviors.
As you work to see yourself as more than a collection of parts to be viewed, fixed, ogled, and rejected, you realize how imperative it is that your partner sees and values you for more, too. In past or present relationships, you might have felt the sting of objectification in your interactions — maybe in the way you were viewed and treated by your partner, but maybe also in the ways you have viewed and treated your partner.
For many women who have reached out to us over the years, learning to see themselves as more than a body is complicated by having partners who knowingly and unknowingly see them as bodies first and people second. Here are three examples shared with us by women we will keep anonymous.
“My husband has said unkind things about my appearance many times. Usually, leading up to a big ‘talk’ about my weight, he would also give me the cold shoulder for days at a time. I feel like those thoughts are always in the back of his mind and I’m always self-conscious around him. It’s been the biggest issue in our marriage. I want a husband that makes me feel beautiful. Not one that makes me want to turn off the lights during sex or cringe every time he accidentally touches my stomach. Even when I’ve been thin, he will still comment on my makeup or he’s said that he would be okay spending the money for me to get a boob job. I honestly believe no matter what I looked like it wouldn’t be enough—he’d never be satisfied.”
“My husband and I have been married for more than 20 years and I was obsessed with my weight for the first half of our marriage, and was thin as well. Eventually, I reached a point emotionally where I couldn’t diet even one more time and I started gaining weight. The bigger I got, the more obsessed with his own weight and body my husband became. For the past five years he has gotten into body building a bit and has gotten increasingly restrictive with his diet. He makes little side comments to me in judgement of my food, health and fatness. I’m the only fat person in the house, so he definitely gets his point across to me through the things he says about others and the things he says to the kids around me. This makes him sound really bad but he is wonderful in many other ways. This is just a tough area for both of us as he feels very right in this area.”
“I feel like every time I get close to accepting myself as-is I remember that Dr. Laura says ‘Don’t you dare gain weight’ and that my mom taught me to keep yourself sexy for your man. Typing this out, I realize how horrible this all sounds. My husband is a great guy but he does love my skinnier body more than my larger one for sure. He still loves me and wants me and all but there is a difference in his level of praise, etc. I want him to keep wanting me for years to come but cannot keep wasting my life trying to lose twenty pounds.”
If your partner withholds intimacy, kindness, or affection because they are unhappy with your body, that is a sign that you might be in an unhealthy relationship. If they make rude comments about your body or punish you in any way because they don’t approve of your body, that is a sign that you might be in an unhealthy relationship. Objectification is at the heart of these unhealthy relationships. When someone objectifies you, whether knowingly or not, they dehumanize you. They might view and value you as parts to be used, looked at, evaluated, rejected, and fixed. They might feel entitled to your body. They might prioritize how you look over how you feel. Objectification pushes away love. It is hard to fully love and respect someone you see through such a narrow lens. It is hard to be compassionate and kind toward someone whom you expect to uphold beauty ideals that may well be hurting her health, happiness, and well-being. It is hard to fully love someone else or feel their love when you know on some level that their love might be contingent on you looking a certain way.
That doesn’t mean a relationship where objectification is present is destined to fail or can’t be fixed, but it does mean that both you and your partner have some work to do if you want to progress.
Healthy romantic relationships are founded on love and respect. If you are in a healthy relationship, then sexual appeal is much deeper than just the visual. Yes, the visual, physical sexual attraction is there, but there is also love, chemistry, bond, touch, connection, communication, shared history and experiences. It is giving as well as taking. If your partner isn’t sexually attracted to you because your body has changed, they must learn to see the objectifying ways they have dehumanized you and uproot it. You are human and human bodies change for reasons in and out of our control. We age, grow, shrink, get sick and injured, give birth, face mental and physical challenges. If you are in a relationship with someone who is only committed to your body, they aren’t actually committed to you.
If your partner objectifies you by feeling entitled to your body looking a certain way or degrading your appearance or asking you to change, please know that you can’t escape that harmful dynamic by changing your body. You can’t outrun it. Any increase in warmth, affection, care and concern you earn through “fixing” your body is guaranteed to be temporary and always at risk of being withdrawn. That is a temporary and tenuous solution to a problem that will not go away. You won’t always be able to live up to those expectations, for a huge variety of reasons you can and can’t control. In a committed partnership, love has to be bigger and deeper than that.
Seeing and valuing yourself as more than a body will allow you to identify whether your relationship is healthy and founded on love and respect. You deserve nothing less. If you feel your primary value lies in the way your body appears, every rude comment, judging glance or withheld intimacy or kindness can be blamed on you and your body. Every ounce of rejection and coldness will feel deserved, and will hold intense power over you because you might even agree with it. It reinforces the very pain and shame you have learned to feel about yourself and your appearance — never good enough, never in control, never right. We have all been trained to blame ourselves for the love we don’t receive, but we can’t turn against ourselves. We can turn against objectification.
In some circumstances, you may have unknowingly helped teach your partner how to treat you and value you in an objectifying way. You may have started out your relationship very fixated on your body and spent time asking your partner if you looked fat, how you looked, if you should change this part or that part. You may have asked for and required a significant amount of praise and attention directed toward your body just to feel OK in your relationship and assured your partner was happy. You may have been on a strict diet or workout and asked for help to stay “on track,” only to wallow in self-loathing and annoyance when you got off track. As you’ve gained weight or your breasts have changed with age or children, you might have withdrawn physically and demonstrated lower confidence and less interest in sex.
If that is the case, your partner learned what you needed and validated you accordingly. He may have seen how happy and confident you seemed when you were losing weight or toning up or practicing intense restriction around food, and he also may have witnessed how depressed and self-conscious you seemed when you gained weight or lost muscle definition or stopped dieting. He may have internalized the idea that you are happiest and most confident when you are at your thinnest, when that isn’t actually the case. You have now learned the truth — you are actually happiest and most confident when you see yourself and others see you as more than a body to be looked at, judged, and fixed. When your self-worth and happiness each day isn’t dependent on how you do or don’t look or what you do or don’t eat. When your confidence and fulfillment is based on experiences, actions, and feelings, it is much more sustainable in the long run. It is self-determined and self-directed, not earned or appraised based on how others look at you.
Marriage is a commitment to and partnership with someone. It is not a contract to work forever to keep the same body you had on the day of your wedding. You don’t owe anyone your body. You really don’t. That is a degrading, dehumanizing ideal that way too many of us have grown up believing and perpetuating. It is incredibly sexist, because no one expects men to maintain their teenage bodies and faces their whole lives, and men aren’t tasked with maybe the most physically burdensome job of all time — growing and birthing babies. In our culture, men get to proudly age and embrace those outward changes, but women don’t. Men get to show signs of humanity like facial lines and wrinkles and grey hair and baldness and natural body hair without judgment or ridicule, but women don’t. Men get to live with their bodies as they are, while women are asked to implant and inject certain parts to be more plump and lipo, laser, and shrink other parts. Men get to be praised and valued and powerful for many reasons beyond how they look, while women are rarely granted the same luxury unless their looks are also deemed acceptable.
If you are in a committed relationship, having a partner who values you as more than a body is crucial to your well-being. You do not deserve to be in a relationship with anyone who attempts to diminish you and divide you against yourself, keeping you at odds with your own body. You are whole. Surround yourself with people who encourage you to remain that way. If you are in a relationship with someone who insists upon you meeting and upholding certain physical ideals, it is up to you to weigh the pros and cons of being with that person. When necessary and possible, this could lead to distance from people who aren’t supportive of your pursuit to understand your body as an instrument rather than an ornament, or who don’t care to try and understand your perspective.
If you feel safe enough to confront your partner and you believe your relationship can be healed, there are a few strategies you can use to prompt positive changes:
Be vulnerable. Share your feelings. Tell them what you’ve learned about the harms of objectification and how it has impacted the way you feel about your body and yourself. Tell them about experiences in your past when you have held yourself back, felt pain and shame, and missed out on opportunities because of judgment, embarrassment, or ridicule. Tell them about the ways feeling like an object has impacted your relationship. Has it caused you to withdraw, hold back, disconnect, hurt yourself, fixate on your appearance or food or exercise at the expense of your life, happiness, and health? Let them know that they are hurting you by doing things or saying things that feel objectifying. Give specific examples. Share how you felt in those moments and how it pushes you away from your partner and your own self-worth.
Ask for what you want. Ask them to refrain from commenting on your appearance or others’—for the sake of yourself and those in earshot. Ask them to help you stop obsessing about your weight or appearance. Ask them to support you and help you feel more confident as you are right now so you can stop being driven by shame and self-objectification in ways that hurt your well-being and your relationship. Ask them to consider the impact of their own media, entertainment, and friend choices, and how they might not only reflect harmful, narrow, sexualized ideals of women in general, but perpetuate them in your home and daily life. Inform them about the negative impact their harmful comments and actions have on your life. Ask for compassion and understanding.
Encourage them to be vulnerable. Ask them to open up about their own insecurities, whether they are body-related or not. Ask them how you can support them and build up their confidence. This will build trust and intimacy, which will strengthen your relationship. Encourage them to seek therapy to dig deep into how and when they learned to objectify people and how they can correct their thinking and heal their relationships and their own body image. Offer to work with them as you both learn healthier ways of seeing and relating to each other and your own bodies.
Reclaim your body as your own. The best thing you can do for your relationship is to not spend one more day fixated on losing weight or planning cosmetic procedures or fighting off aging to change your body for your partner’s approval. That is an unsustainable, short-term plan for what you need from what should hopefully be a lasting, loving relationship. You are more than a body, and you are doing your absolute best living inside a dynamic, growing, changing body. Your relationship with your partner, your kids, and yourself is hurt when you fixate on your body, as you ride the roller coaster of emotions and self-esteem that goes up and down by the minute depending on what you ate, how much you worked out, how you look, etc.
Your relationship with others and yourself will deepen and grow as you heal your relationship with your body. As you learn to see yourself as more than a body, you can be more present, confident, and fulfilled in your relationships because you will have the security of knowing your worthiness to be truly loved is not dependent on how you appear. You won’t blame yourself for anyone else’s perception of you or their unrealistic and exhausting expectations of your body. You can take better care of yourself because you value yourself as more than a decoration. You can experience more connection and pleasure during sex and intimacy, which is not possible if you are monitoring and evaluating your appearance from the outside. You can live each day knowing that you are worthy of love and respect and kindness no matter how you look. Once you know that truth, you won’t accept anything less.
If you want more guidance on this stuff, we worked for years to develop and test our online Body Image Resilience course that is available to individuals 14+. Through an in-depth 8-week video course (that also includes full text, graphics and audio), participants can learn how to 1) recognize harmful messages in media and culture about female bodies; 2) reflect on the ways those ideals have impacted your life; 3) redefine the ways you think about beauty, health and individual worth; and 4) develop resilience through your own path that utilizes four sources of power.
by Lindsay Kite | Oct 5, 2018
By Lexie Kite, Ph.D.
Aunt Lindsay, 2-year-old Logan, and Mama Lexie
Some of the most frequent questions we’re asked about body image revolve around teaching and raising young girls. The reasons why are obvious: It is extremely difficult to live in a female body, let alone raise girls growing up in this wildly objectifying world. Far too often, girls grow up being taught that they are to be looked at above all else. It doesn’t always happen so explicitly, but it happens consistently and implicitly if your eyes are open.
We talk to little girls about their pretty dresses and hair. Their toys and favorite characters have idealized and sexualized bodies and faces. We give them dress-up kits and makeup and play vanities. Most diet pills and weight loss plans are targeted directly at women and they see their moms, aunts and sisters on constant diets. In the top children’s and family movies, male characters outnumber female characters 2:1 in leading and supporting roles and speaking time, and female characters are three times more likely to be shown in sexually revealing clothing and to be verbally objectified. On social media, girls see that the most popular influencers bare their bodies — often framed as “fitspiration,” “body positivity,” or empowerment. With a cell phone in hand, girls are undoubtedly pressured by boys to send sexy pictures in exchange for male approval and attention or to avoid being insulted and rejected.
No wonder rates of eating disorders have skyrocketed, with hospitalizations for little girls 12 and under doubling during the last decade. Rates of cosmetic surgery increased more than 137 percent since 2000, with 92 percent of those voluntary procedures (mostly liposuction and breast enhancement) performed on women – many younger than 18. And the constant body monitoring of self-objectification we know so well is leaving even the youngest of girls and the oldest of women with fewer cognitive resources available for mental and physical activities, including mathematics, logical reasoning, spatial skills, and athletic performance. No wonder women and girls face such immense pain and shame in their bodies. If we listen to the profit-driven lies in the world, we are bodies to be looked at, judged, and constantly in need of fixing.
Click here to see Lindsay’s incredible TEDx talk
Our work at Beauty Redefined illuminates that pain that comes to just feel like a normal part of girlhood and womanhood, but it also shines a light on the ways difficult experiences and feelings about our bodies can work for us instead of against us — giving us opportunities to push back on discomfort and objectification. Our game-changing approach to body image resilience explains the way we can become stronger because of our shame and painful experiences — not in spite of them. So many of you who are raising, guiding, or working to be a good example to young girls ask us how on earth you can help them navigate the pitfalls of objectification, and we want you to know that we believe in your power to do this successfully. It is your job to shine a light on the soul-sucking messages from real-life people, online people, media and companies that reinforce the lie that we are bodies to be looked at first and humans second. We are counting on you to call out those lies and replace them with the TRUTH.
We are more than bodies. We have work to do, and the world is desperate for every one of us to understand our purpose beyond our looks so we can lead fulfilling lives and contribute good to a world that needs us — not just a pretty vision of us, but all of us. Let’s teach and demonstrate this truth to the girls in our lives.
Raising Girls with Positive Body Image: FAQs
What do I do if she asks, “Am I pretty?”
Of course you think she’s adorable, and she should know that. But, more importantly, she is more than pretty or cute or adorable. Tell her who she is – smart, loving, curious, energetic, creative, articulate, compassionate, talented, etc. “I see the way you include those kids that no one else talks to. You are so kind and compassionate.” Or “You are an incredible artist. You have a gift that helps people feel happy!” Or anything else that helps her see her PURPOSE that extends far beyond how well she decorates the earth. When she can find her many purposes, she will feel less need to look to her beauty or her body to find purpose, love, and acceptance.
Follow us on IG at beauty_redefined for more of this inspiration.
What do I do if she calls herself or someone else fat or asks if she’s fat?
Respond without putting a value on fat. It’s not good or bad, it’s not mean or nice, it just is. “Our fat keeps us warm, protects our insides and our bodies use it as energy. Isn’t that cool?” or “You are so lucky your body has fat on it – that means you’re alive and well.” Talk openly about how some bodies have more fat than others, for lots of different reasons, and that isn’t a good indicator of whether someone is healthy or not. We only need to worry about ourselves, and we should avoid talking about other people’s bodies. The second you respond to her calling someone fat by telling her “that’s not nice,” you are teaching her that fat is bad. Be a champion for body diversity.
What do I do if she wants to go on a diet or is restricting food?
Let her know that many people and companies in this world try to convince little girls and grown women that they should shrink and take up less space, but it’s a mean lie. This lie is intended to get girls to spend money and time worrying about their bodies instead of living and leading and serving and taking up space doing good in the world — and, too often, it works. Talk to her about how our bodies need and want food for lots of reasons, including for fuel and enjoyment, and that by paying attention to how she feels when she eats, she can take better care of her body and trust that her body will lead her toward choices that are good for her and that have nothing to do with her body size or shape. Let her know strict diets hurt our bodies and almost never lead to sustained weight loss. (Tip: Read the book “Intuitive Eating” and if you want more personalized help with all this complicated food stuff, find a non-diet dietitian.)
Do I need to stop putting on makeup in front of her since I want her to know she doesn’t need it to feel good about herself?
You don’t necessarily need to stop wearing makeup, but be real with her. Show her (and yourself) that you can live without makeup, and that you are YOU without needing any extras. Go to the store without mascara. Swim and workout makeup-free. Show her your reality so that she can appreciate her own. When your daughter is old enough, start talking to her about how hard it is to justify wearing makeup when you want her to know she’s perfect without it. Talk to her about how women and men are held to different standards where women have to decorate themselves – just to look “normal” – in ways men are not asked to do. Tell her about how billion-dollar industries are set up to make sure women are self-conscious of their eyelashes and the size of their pores and the shape of their brows and the color of their hair and all hair below their eyes and the size and shape of their breasts and behinds. Help her make choices for her own body that aren’t based in shame or feelings of needing to “hide” or “fix” in order to feel OK. Keep an open dialogue and challenge her to resist giving into profit-driven beauty ideals as long as she possibly can. It’s much easier to never start wearing makeup, getting eyelash extensions, waxing, dying hair, etc., than it is to stop once those things become your “normal.”
Lexie with her 2-year-old, Logan. Click here to grab an “instrument not ornament” shirt, decal or sticky note pad for yourself!
Should I even talk to her about her body at all?
A popular answer in recent years has been to skip body talk entirely. But we disagree! Don’t pretend like her body doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Instead, teach her how incredible her body is, regardless of her appearance or ability level. Talk to her about how her body is an instrument, not an ornament. Encourage her to think of use her body as an instrument for her own benefit and experience in all the ways she feels called to do – as a soccer player, a violinist, an artist, a singer, a gymnast, babysitter, a club president, a swimmer. Treat your own body the same way so she can see that you are first and foremost a woman that knows her body is good for much more than being looked at. Swim even when you are so nervous to be seen. Run after that frisbee even though you might sweat and jiggle. Raise your hand in that meeting even though it makes your heart pound. She will need to learn to push through her own self-consciousness that creeps in with age, especially for girls, and especially during puberty. Any thought or outside message that tries to tell her she is an ornament can be successfully challenged by reframing her perspective and reclaiming her power as an instrument for her own use, experience, and benefit.
What do I do when other people consistently compliment her for her beauty or thinness?
We recommend being firm and explicit about avoiding these comments whenever possible. When appropriate, let them know you are working to make sure she (and all girls and women!) know they are so much more than decorations, so you and she are working to notice and compliment people on more than their outsides. Work to change the conversation to illuminate the fact that she is more than her body. “Did you know she has been learning Spanish?” or “[Insert name], do you want to tell them about the book you’ve been reading?” Let them know it’s hard, but so worth it to remind girls and women of their value beyond their looks. It can be helpful to illuminate your reasons for avoiding body talk. For example, if a loved one has struggled with disordered eating or self-consciousness, consider telling the commenter about that problem and explain that you are working to avoid those problems in any way you can. When thinness is explicitly complimented, try something along the lines of, “We’re actually working together to get rid of the ‘thinner is better’ mindset since we’ve seen how much it has hurt people we love.”
In summary: You’ve got this. Don’t be down on yourself for past mistakes or when you feel like you’ve messed up in your actions or messaging toward the kids in your life. Learn all you can about body image and resilience, and do your very best. Make sure the girls in your life feel your love and admiration regardless of how they look — that alone will improve their chances of developing positive body image. We are all more than a body.Once we can see more in ourselves and everyone around us, we can be more!
If you want more guidance on this stuff, we worked for years to develop and test our online Body Image Resilience course that is available to individuals 14+. Through an in-depth 8-week video course (that also includes full text, graphics and audio), participants can learn how to 1) recognize harmful messages in media and culture about female bodies; 2) reflect on the ways those ideals have impacted your life; 3) redefine the ways you think about beauty, health and individual worth; and 4) develop resilience through your own path that utilizes four sources of power.
by Lindsay Kite | Jul 10, 2018
By Lindsay Kite, PhD
How did wearing a bikini become the gold standard for demonstrating body positivity? Yes, every body is a bikini body if that’s what you really want to wear, but why are two-piece swimsuits (and posting pictures of ourselves in them online) now the ultimate signifier of female confidence? Why have so many of us bought into the idea that wearing a bikini equals loving your body and loving your body equals wearing a bikini?
We would argue it’s the same reason so many of us struggle with low self-esteem and negative body image in the first place: we are defined by our bodies. To be more specific, we are defined by the looks of our bodies. For too many women, our looks are everything: our greatest source of shame or pride, our lifelong fixer-upper project, and the only thing about us that matters in lots of circles and situations. This is objectification. We learn from childhood that women are objects for other people’s visual or physical enjoyment and we learn to judge ourselves through that same external view. We become outsiders looking in at our own bodies.
When we are defined by the way we look and when the standards of good looks are perpetually out of reach, of course we are ashamed of our bodies. Of course we learn to seek confidence and power and validation through “fixing” or sharing our bodies. Our objectifying culture (and economy) depends on that! Of course we learn to define and think of our complex, incredible bodies almost exclusively in terms of how they LOOK, and we believe the falsehood that loving our looks is the same thing as loving ourSELVES.
We might even believe wearing a bikini in public is the ultimate test of true body confidence and empowerment. Later, we might even learn to reject those “bikini body” ideals and come to believe that our vulnerability at exposing our skin for the world in a bikini, even (and maybe especially) with all its “flaws” is proof of total self-love and body confidence. The internet will back you up on that idea, too. Compare the likes on any woman’s swimsuit pic to the likes on basically any other pic she has posted. Body-baring pics win every time.
When our looks are the MOST important thing about us and when body confidence gets minimized to simply embracing the LOOKS of our bodies, it makes sense that bikinis — the most revealing of all publicly acceptable attire — take on other-worldly power in our lives. We’re calling this #bikinityranny. Why tyranny? Because no item of clothing can or should have that kind of power over us — for good or evil. For so many years, bikinis have been put on a pedestal reserved only for the “hottest” among us. In recent years, with much-needed body positive activism, women have worked to shatter that pedestal holding all the bikini body ideals to help people of all sizes feel comfortable enough to wear one.
But do bikinis really deserve to hold that power? Do they really hold the keys to our body image liberation?
Sure, wearing a bikini might make going to the bathroom easier during a day at the pool. It might prevent the painful groin and shoulder strangulation of a one-piece that is too short in the torso. It might allow for a much nicer tan. It might look awesome.
But … it might also spark constant monitoring and tugging and adjustment if you’re moving around much, let alone trying to play or swim. It might expose too much sensitive skin to the sun (hi melanoma) and sand and saltwater and hot chairs. It might be impractical and uncomfortable and trigger you to constantly think about your appearance. That last piece is extremely likely, whether you love the way you look in a bikini or hate it or somewhere in between. The mental state of thinking about how you look while you go about your life is called self-objectification and it is the absolute worst. It creates constant body anxiety and steals away our mental focus and physical capacity. Body-baring clothing is known to spark self-objectification, even if no one is looking at you.
Please keep in mind that some of the people posting their bikini shots on IG are still suffering from negative body image and constant fixation on their appearance. Some are so fixated on getting great photos that they don’t actually make it to the pool, or spend the entire time pulling and tugging and adjusting out of discomfort or trying to present their bikini bodies in the most photo-worthy and appealing manner as possible.
You might wear a bikini because you love the way it looks or feels. You might even wear it to push back against beliefs about your body being sinful or being someone else’s property. Awesome. We love seeing body diversity in media and at the pool or beach. Representation matters and everyone deserves to swim.
But please be cautious of the pressure to wear a bikini simply in order to prove to the internet and to yourself that you love your body and are a confident woman. No one asks men to prove their confidence by posting Speedo pics on IG. We hope that continues. However, an objectifying culture that only values women for our bodies THRIVES off you believing that revealing more of your body online is the truest path to liberation and empowerment, and that bikini pics are the best way to demonstrate self-love and confidence. In this female body-obsessed world, isn’t it interesting that wearing a bikini is both the problem and the supposed solution to our body image woes?
We’d like to offer an alternative view.
Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it’s knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.
Wearing a bikini and posting the proof online doesn’t give you body confidence and it doesn’t prove your body confidence. No amount of likes or follows or external validation can do that. Why? Because your body doesn’t exist to be looked at. We have got to stop privileging an external perspective on the incredible bodies we’ve had since the moment we were born. You have grown up in this body and experienced every second of your life in this body, and yet we judge and define our wonderful bodies by how we feel about how they look in a swimsuit? That thought should be laughable.
Wearing a bikini does not mean you love your body any more than wearing a hat means you hate your head. Lots of gals in bikinis hate their bodies and lots of gals in rash guards and board shorts love their bodies. Let swimsuits be swimsuits! Not badges of honor or tests of courage or proof of pride! Just swimsuits. Can we take back some of that power now? Can we end the bikini’s reign of terror or triumph? We’re over the bikini tyranny that dominates discussions of body ideals and body positivity. Your swimsuit proves nothing about your body image and IT SHOULDN’T HAVE TO. It’s just a swimsuit.
So, if wearing a bikini proudly isn’t the solution to body image issues, what WILL get you closer to experiencing and demonstrating real, lasting body confidence? One hugely important step is understanding that your body is an instrument for your use and experience, not an ornament to be admired. Even though I grew up as a competitive swimmer, I refused to swim from ages 15-21 because I hated the way I looked. It was only once I recognized the body shame that had been drowning me for years and chose to swim against it — literally — that I was able to develop body image resilience and use my body as an instrument to change my whole life. (Full story in my TEDx talk here.) Putting on a swimsuit even though I was ashamed did not help me love my body. Putting on a swimsuit even though I was ashamed and SWIMMING helped me love my body.
We can’t give swimsuits the power to make or break our body image. However, your choice of clothing and swimwear can help increase your body confidence when it allows you to feel comfortable and confident DOING and LIVING and BEING. Wear whatever you believe will enable you to experience and appreciate your surroundings, your situation, your capabilities, and what it’s like to live inside a body that is good for a lot more than being looked at. Until we shift that focus, we’ll be stuck in the same cycle of self-objectification that keeps us focused on how we look in a swimsuit instead of who we are and what we can do.
You are more than a bikini body. When we see more in ourselves and everyone else, we can be more.
Illustrations by Michelle Christensen, commissioned for Beauty Redefined.
Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and build the resilience to take on what holds you back from positive body image with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Resilience Course for girls and women 14+. It is an online, video-based (plus full text and audio) therapeutic tool that can change your life, developed and tested by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, PhD.
by Lindsay Kite | Jun 27, 2018
By Lexie Kite, Ph.D.
I know a 12-year-old girl who is the embodiment of our famous Beauty Redefined mantra: My body is an instrument, not an ornament. She is kind, innocent, active, and largely free from the burden of living to be looked at that is placed upon women’s shoulders around the age of puberty. Today, that girl joined Instagram.
When I think about her scrolling through the explore page, I envision her being shoved from childhood into adulthood, sinking in a pool of dehumanizing lessons with every scroll:
You exist for others’ viewing pleasure. Your happiness and self-worth is directly connected to your ability to command increasing likes, follows, and DMs. Your beauty is defined by specific ideals set constantly out of reach and ever changing. You joy will come from documenting perfectly posed, styled, and edited images of your experiences – not the experiences themselves. Your looks are your most valuable asset. Your body will earn you love, popularity, and self-esteem.
These are messages girls and women are taught every day – through media, but also through the ways we talk to them, the toys they play with, the ways they hear us talk about other girls and women, the ways other girls and women receive validation and respect, the ways we define health that are dangerously conflated with beauty, the girls and women that receive attention from love interests, etc. But as a media and body image expert, I can unequivocally state that a young girl’s access to Instagram is like a master class in objectification. Taught by influencers and peers with more power than any teacher, parent or advocate, she will learn at the speed of light that she is her body, and that her body is her ticket to happiness, fulfillment, power, and love.
Research echoes what our own real-life experience as women with bodies and access to social media makes very clear: Social media use – especially Instagram – is associated with high anxiety, depression, negative body image, bullying, loneliness, and envy. And the more time spent on social media, the more likely she is to experience these negative outcomes. Parents, even if you spend lots of time on IG, you have no ideas what kids are really exposed to. They are savvier than you are, targeted with ideals and messages you aren’t, and you can rest assured you are hugely underestimating the harm that social media can do to your child.
Get this: when girls hit puberty, they are TWICE as likely to experience depression as boys. Much of this is connected to the fact that we live in an objectifying culture that teaches society that girls and women are most valuable for how well they decorate the world and they need to spend precious time and energy evaluating and controlling their bodies in terms of their sexual desirability. It’s called self-objectification and it’s sucks the life out of most girls and women. It is *very* likely your daughter already monitors her body by picturing what she looks like to other people more than you or she realizes. She thinks about what her thighs look like in her seat, she adjusts her clothing as she walks, she wonders if the person she’s talking to thinks she looks good. She sits out of PE when she doesn’t want to get sweaty or red for her next class.
Research shows us that when we live “to be looked at” in a perpetual state of self-objectification that overtakes most girls and women throughout their lives and is made exponentially worse by social media, we are left with fewer mental and physical resources to do what can really bring happiness. We perform worse on math tests, logical reasoning tests, athletic performance, we have lower sexual assertiveness (the ability to say “no” when needed), and we are left anxious and unhappy. It is so disheartening to think of how this holds girls and women back from a world that needs them.
If you are a parent or caretaker to a child, you undoubtedly face the burden of giving them access to social media. We are here to promise you that the burden of objectification that will be placed upon your daughter’s shoulders is much, much heavier than the burden you will carry by encouraging her to stay off Instagram. Even if everyone else is on.
The crushing weight of objectification heaped upon girls that scroll through Instagram is intense, and they learn to carry that weight as a natural part of womanhood. Most parents don’t quite understand the gravity of what girls encounter online. She will bear the weight of:
Every appetite suppressant and flat tummy tea and waist shaper sold by her favorite celebrity influencers (we’re looking at you, Kim Kardashian, and the millions of other influencers like you that prey on teen girls).
Every bikini and workout picture from influencers who rack up likes and follows from body baring photos – (those get the most likes and engagement on IG).
Every gym-going woman posting photos from the locker room, twisting herself unnaturally to highlight a tiny waist with a fashionably rounded backside to show her “fitness” progress or her sad-to-glad “before and after” transformations.
Every lifestyle and fashion blogger posting casual pics of themselves emphasizing their thinness and/or curves, products and procedures they’ve had done and are selling through sponsored posts, underwear and bikini pics that are supposed to represent elevated causes of body positivity, fitness, or empowerment, etc.
Every beauty influencer posting makeup tutorials for facial contouring to help women rid themselves of “flaws” like pores, lines, wrinkles, hairs, or other signs of life.
Every ad snuck in between photos her friends have posted, targeting her insecurities and selling her aspirations designed to look attainable but always out of reach.
And on and on and on.
Based on all of this overwhelming evidence against using Instagram, I’m going to talk to this 12-year-old girl and her wonderful parents. We’ll chat about why it might be best for her to hold off on scrolling for a while. The right age to join Instagram is different for everyone, and the conditions for using it or avoiding it all together are up to you, but at Beauty Redefined, we recommend you seriously rethink joining Instagram. Let her experience life as more than a body as long she can, because logging on Instagram marks the day when that could end for too many girls.
When your kid comes to you asking to join Instagram, why not take the opportunity to talk with her about what peer-reviewed, legitimate research and self-reported feedback from her peers brings to light with a pro and con list:
Pros
- You’ll be able to interact with your friends online.
- You won’t be left out of what is happening on Instagram.
- You will be exposed to other messages and ideas and images you might not see otherwise, like body positivity, activism in all its forms, and people doing good in the world.
- You’ll be able to express yourself through posting pictures and captions.
Cons
- You will be more likely to experience increased loneliness. Instagram is isolating and leads to feelings of FOMO, or fear of missing out. While you might like the interaction from likes, follows, and DMs, in the long run you are left feeling more alone.
- You will be more likely to experience depression and anxiety, and the more time you spend on social media, the worse these symptoms get.
- You will be more likely to compare yourself to the girls and women you see on Instagram, and self-comparison causes you to feel less love and unity toward those you are comparing yourself to AND it makes you feel worse about yourself.
- You will be more likely to be preoccupied with your looks (self-objectification). Your clothes, your angles, your skin, your hair, your shape, your size will all be front and center in your mind, and it’s very difficult to focus on anything else, whether you like the way you look or not. This hurts your schoolwork, your relationships, your health, your mental and physical capabilities, and your happiness.
- You will be more likely to experience negative body image (feel bad about your body) because you will be more sensitive to how you appear to others as a result of seeing so many idealized photos, ads, and highlight reels.
- You will be more likely to be exposed to harmful messages and ideas and images you might not see otherwise, like rampant objectification, pornography, self-harm, pro-anorexia (pro-ana) messaging, digital manipulation of photos, influencers selling you aspirational ideals that lead to feelings of shame and self-consciousness, and beauty represented in very narrow, unattainable ways.
- You will be more likely to become desensitized to the messages that hurt you – that cause you to think about your body and your looks (self-objectification), and make you feel shame about your body. After only a short time, those things that once make you feel uncomfortable become your new “comfort zone” that is very uncomfortable.
If your daughter decides to join IG despite the cons she learns about, or already spends time scrolling through social media (especially IG), please help her practice self-care. Instagram can be used as self-help or self-harm, and every user must make that continual choice for themselves.
The following questions are an excellent media literacy resource to help her (and you) look out for herself with the following critical questions as she scrolls:
- Does this image/account encourage me to fixate on my own or other women’s appearance?
- Does this image/account spark body anxiety or feelings of shame?
- Am I engaging in self-comparison as I view these images?
- Does this account seek to profit from my insecurity by selling solutions to fix my “flaws?”
- Are these images promoting or reinforcing distorted ideals of what bodies and faces should look like – either through digital manipulation or featuring only one body type or “look?”
- Would men who think women are only valuable as sexual objects enjoy viewing these images?
- Does it encourage me to see women as bodies first and foremost?
If the answer is yes to any or all of the above, consider unfollowing, unsubscribing, limiting, or otherwise avoiding this type of content.
On top of being a critical media consumer, we suggest a few very important rules for your kids to follow if they do use Instagram:
- Make your profile private and NEVER allow anyone to follow you that you don’t know and interact with in real life.
- Only follow people you know in real life.
- Never scroll through the explore page – it’s just not safe. It allows users access to every public post, and molds itself to the user’s interests, which for girls and women are often body-focused, looks-oriented, and objectifying.
- Set a time limit: Only spend X number of minutes on Instagram each day – the less time spent on social media, the better for the user’s mental health and well-being.
- If the content you are viewing doesn’t pass the media literacy test above, unfollow immediately.
Because we are taught through so many cultural messages that our bodies and looks are our primary source of power, value, and happiness, we get confused about what confidence feels like. We believe this major lie that feeling confident in ourselves equals feeling confident in our looks, and we leave it at that. We believe our bodies define us, and our self-esteem is dependent upon how good we think we look to others. Instagram makes this problem worse. It heightens our awareness of our bodies and our looks and teaches us that we are our bodies, and that our bodies are our key to beauty, power, love, popularity, and happiness.
Our work at Beauty Redefined is based on the premise that positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good, it’s knowing your body *is* good regardless of how it looks. Your ability to experience positive body image frees you from the prison that locks you up decorating yourself, isolated, and missing out on purpose and power and real happiness. We don’t want one more girl stepping into womanhood with the added pressure of living her life on Instagram before she is old enough to realize her purpose, power, and worth beyond her body. She is more than a body, and you can help her see more and be more. If you or your daughter want more expertise in how to boost your body image, our online body image resilience course will do the trick. Check it out here.
If nothing else, take it from one of thousands of teens who have reached out to us to tell us about how social media (and taking much-needed breaks from social media) effects them:
Illustrations by Michelle Christensen, commissioned for Beauty Redefined.
Lexie Kite, Ph.D. and Lindsay Kite, Ph.D. are the co-directors of Beauty Redefined, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that aims to help women redefine the meaning and value of beauty in their lives through body image resilience.
Do you need help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome self-consciousness and get on to bigger and better things? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, PhD.
