More Than A Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament

by Lexie Kite

The big problem with all of these messages—“you’re more beautiful than you think,” “look better, feel better,” “everyBODY is beautiful,” and “all bodies are bikini bodies”—is that even if they are perfectly effective at convincing us they’re true, we’re still stuck in a rut. Even if we are successfully convinced that we’re more beautiful than we imagined and already have a bikini body, the constant monitoring of our lovely appearance is still a distraction and a detriment to our lives. The well-documented harms of self-objectification remain whether we like our looks or not—and the likelihood is still that most women don’t like their looks, or like only certain parts of themselves temporarily.