Objectification & Loving Relationships Are Not Compatible

by | 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.

Save Your Girls From Instagram

by | 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. 

To BE or To Be Looked At?

by | Dec 14, 2011

You are capable of much more than looking hot.

Have you thought about this statement? Do you understand the gravity of it? This phrase gave me goosebumps when I let it sink in. Women are always being looked at. And when we aren’t being looked at, we are too often envisioning ourselves being looked at, as if an outsider’s perspective has become our own. In fact, our PhD work makes one thing very clear: Part of growing up female today means learning to view oneself from another’s gaze.

Ever heard this quote? Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (John Berger, “Ways of Seeing,” 1977).

This insightful man was referring to the idea of “objectification,” which we’ve all heard once or twice. But when we think of the term, we probably think of sexualized female bodies, or sexualized parts of female bodies, which isn’t the whole idea here. When we understand the whole of objectification, we can better grasp the role it plays in our daily lives and the ways it may keep us from fulfilling all we want to do with our days. When we travel around giving our one-hour Beauty Redefined visual presentation, we explain to our audiences that objectification takes on many roles, including self-objectification.

Say you’re walking down the sidewalk on a beautiful day. Someone who has internalized an outsider’s perspective of herself and is self-objectifying will often spend more time adjusting her clothing or hair, wondering what other people are thinking of her, judging the shape of her shadow or reflection in a window, etc. She will picture herself walking – she literally turns herself into an object of vision – instead of enjoying the sunny weather, looking around, or thinking about anything else. If you find yourself thinking and acting like this, you aren’t alone. In fact, you are just one of millions of females growing up in a world that teaches us to survey ourselves every waking moment. Profit-driven media tells us how we can “Look Hotter From Behind!” in fitness magazines, “Look Wow Now!” on makeover shows every hour of every day, “Look 10 Years Younger!” using every anti-aging procedure and product under the sun. Notice the emphasis on looking … Do you find you survey yourself as you move through life? That you ever turn yourself into an object of vision: a sight?artgirl

One way I see self-objectification taking place in rampant ways today is through girls, women, and selfies. You know, those pictures of ourselves we post online at the most flattering angle, with the most flattering photo filter? When I see someone posting dozens of selfies, I think about the ways they are trying to present a perfect vision of themselves to an outside world looking at them. I always want to tell those people and their selfies this true, but cheesy thought:

You are capable of much more than being looked at. Do you know who you are? Have you grasped the powerful role you can play in a world so badly in need of your unique talents, wisdom, and light? Are you aware of your unique mission at this point in your life? You’ve got something great to do, that only you can do. And if you are here to be looked at, to appear, to survey yourself, instead of do an inspirational work that only you can do, you are not fulfilling your mission. Cheesy? Yes. True? Oh yes. More true than you know.
I see objectification playing out in my own life in many ways. When I’m walking past people, I often catch myself imagining what I look like to them – from the front and from behind – and think irrational thoughts about what the people walking behind me or past me think about me. I often adjust my clothing to what I assume is the most flattering position as I walk. I can admit I’ve been known to look at my own Facebook profile to see what I look like to the cute guy who just added me or the friend I just added. I look through my photos and try to gauge my looks from the perspective of someone who is not me. If that isn’t self objectification, I don’t know what is! Unfortunately, I know I’m not alone in doing this.  I am a body image activist and I have a Ph.D. in research on self-objectification, yet I still catch myself envisioning myself from an outsider’s perspective instead of moving on to so many things more meaningful and productive. This just goes to show it’s a constant battle. I am constantly working to remind myself I’m capable of much more than looking hot. My self-objectification is complicated by the fact that I am an identical twin, so in some ways I see a body of a person with identical DNA in real life in a way that most people cannot experience. Unless you have an identical counterpart, your vision of yourself comes from photos, videos, and your two-dimensional reflection.

So let’s talk about mirrors, shall we? Even as I sit in my bedroom typing at 2 a.m., I see a full-length mirror peeking through the closet door, one with hooks hanging all my jewelry, and a centerpiece mirror above my bed. While I don’t think I’m vain or image-obsessed, I spend about 30-40 minutes in front of the mirror every morning, keep a compact in my purse, and apparently have about 100 in my room for safe keeping. I am surveying an image of myself for at least one of the 24 hours in my day, and imagining that image of myself as I move throughout my day. What role do mirrors play in your life? “Women are constantly being looked at. Even when we’re not, we’re so hyper-aware of the possibility of being looked at that it can rule even our most private lives. Including in front of our mirrors, alone,” says Autumn Whitfield-Madrano at her always inspirational website, The Beheld.

The thought-provoking Autumn undertook an experiment I was amazed by: A month-long break from mirrors. Thirty-one days of no mirrors, store windows, shiny pots, spoons, or the dark glass of the NYC subway she rides daily. In her own words: “There’s nothing wrong with looking in the mirror. There’s nothing wrong with sometimes looking to your reflection—even when it is impossibly subjective, and backward at that—for a breath of fortitude, centeredness, and assurance. I just want to see what life is like when I’m not using that image as my anchor; I want to see how it affects the way I move through the world, the way I regard myself and others. I want to know what it’s like to sever a primary tie to one of my greatest personal flaws—extraordinary self-consciousness—and I want to discover what will fill the space that the mirror has occupied until now.” She goes on: “Sometimes I look in the mirror and see myself, or whatever I understand myself to be. Other times, I distinctly see an image of myself. When I see my image reflected on a mirror behind a bar I think, Oh good, I look like a woman who is having a good time out with friends. Or I’ll see my reflection in a darkened windowpane, hunched over my computer with a pencil twirled through my upswept hair, and I’ll think, My, don’t I look like a writer? You’ll notice what these have in common: My thoughts upon seeing my reflection are both self-centered and distant. I’m seeing myself, but not really—I’m seeing a woman who looks like she’s having a good time, or a writer, etc.”

Autumn’s insights echo Berger’s powerful words. Too often, we travel through life with an outsider’s vision of ourselves. We are to be looked at. We watch ourselves being looked at. We become objects of vision: sights. But isn’t there so much more to life than watching ourselves self-consciously stroll through it? Life is beautiful when you live it – really experience it – not when you are concerned about appearing beautiful as you try to live. When you think of your happiest times, were they only when you looked picture perfect? Were you happiest when you were working to appear happy or attractive or beautiful to others? Happiness and beauty come from doing, acting, being – outside the confines of being looked at.

So, today, what will you do to shake off the outsider’s gaze you envision of yourself? Will you do as Autumn has done and experiment with what your life becomes when you spend less time with your reflection and more time doing, acting and being? Will you enjoy the world around you instead of hoping others are enjoying their view of you? Will you do something your self-policing outsider’s gaze kept you from doing before – like speak in front of a group of people? Run without worrying about the jiggle or the sweat? Go to the store even if you aren’t all made-up?

Today is the day to remember you are capable of much more than being looked at. And when you begin to realize that, you can start realizing the power of your abilities and the good you can do in a world so desperately in need of you. NOT a vision of you, but ALL of you.  What will you find you are capable of?

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