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

by Lexie Kite

Women control more than $20 trillion in worldwide spending, and 75 percent of women are the primary spenders in their household. The

because her very value is built upon being decorative—you’ve got her attention and investment for life.

Why do media makers insist on representing only certain types of women as beautiful, successful, and worthy of being loved?

Why is social media filled with young, thin, heavily made-up “influencers” flooding their feeds with aspirational ideals that always happen to be #sponcon (aka sponsored content)?

Digitally slimming and emphasizing parts of women’s bodies and removing signs of life like pores, cellulite, and wrinkles aren’t just casual decisions based on the aesthetic preferences of a few editors—they are profit-driven decisions to create false ideals for us to endlessly chase after.

our happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on our appearance; and 2) it is possible to achieve physical ideals—and thus become worthy of happiness, health, and love—with the help of the right products or services.

How many of them, at their core, rely on women’s anxiety about our bodies and beauty in order to drive sales?

We are easy prey in a world built upon and reliant upon our literal and figurative buy-in to our own objectification.

As women, we are taught to deconstruct ourselves into parts in need of fixing, and every part has several fixes available for the right price.

We are asked to be aware of, fix, change, and maintain every inch of our bodies, from the roots of our hair down to the tips of our toes.

Many of us haven’t ever stopped to question or consider the time and energy we’ve spent on our eyebrows, eyelashes, and body hair removal over the course of our lives. When it comes to eyebrows, many of us know the pain (and eventual numbness) of plucking, waxing, filling, lining, threading, tattooing, and microblading.

Is your skin acne-prone, scarred, rough and bumpy, discolored, too dark, too pale, dry, saggy, drab, lifeless, blotchy, and uneven in tone? Does it have the audacity to have visible pores, stretch marks, veins, moles, freckles, spots, or lines and wrinkles? It likely has most of these qualities, and so does the majority of everyone else’s, yet you probably feel abnormal for having them.

if a woman over fifty is being featured in a positive light or advertising something appearance related.

Most people take for granted that thinness is the key to beauty and sex appeal. Yet it is a contemporary social construction—one that has been carefully curated and upheld by industries that depend on our allegiance to this idea. Our inescapable thin ideals aren’t simply a naturally occurring, ingrained, universal truth.

Thinness is still an imperative, only now other attributes that aren’t typically associated with thinness—large, firm breasts and smooth, rounded bottoms—are also required.

from questioning how we look to questioning how we’ve been trained to see ourselves. When you notice that you are divided against yourself, observing and judging parts of your body as if they are objects to be admired, remember that your environment taught you to take on that limiting view.

Choose a time period—three days, a week, a month, or whatever you can feasibly pull off—and avoid media as much as humanly possible. All of it. Do your best not to view or listen to any TV, movies, or magazines or use any social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, or Facebook. Even some books, music, and podcasts can be riddled with objectifying body ideals, so cut those ones out.

opportunity to recognize the reasons you turn to media that you might not even be aware of—escape, boredom, avoiding more important things, self-punishment, anxiety, etc.

walked into school thinking about the way I want to be to people, instead of how I simply want to seem to people.

Are you capturing and sharing an idealized version of yourself in hopes that others will see you the way you hope to see yourself, somewhere closer to the body ideal you’re pursuing? For most of us, the answer is yes.

Where did you get the idea that your skin shouldn’t have the detail and dimension it has in the original photo or video? Who taught you that your thighs have to have a space in the middle that might not naturally appear? What convinced you that the roundness of your arms or stomach or face or hips needs to be slimmed out? Where did you learn that the smallness in your breasts or backside is a flaw to be stretched and rounded out? The answer to those questions is: the same sources that warped your body image in the first place.

What messages help remind you of your worth and power beyond your body? What inspires you to be more? What expands your vision, your hope, your knowledge and skills? What lights you up and motivates you?

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. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing

As self-objectification creeps into your life, your identity is split in two. Instead of your whole, embodied, thinking, feeling self, you become a distant observer.

wonder what the person on the machine behind you is seeing as you run.

You are detached and self-conscious during intimate moments with your partner rather than being present and passionate, regardless of how positive or enthusiastic they are about you. You slip outside yourself, observing your body from afar countless times each day.

1952, the scholar Simone de Beauvoir described this concept by saying that as a girl grows up, “she is doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she also exists outside.”

Social psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts first named this concept “self-objectification” in the late ’90s, which they defined as “the tendency to perceive one’s body according to externally perceivable traits (i.e., how it appears) instead of internal traits (i.e., what it can do).”

If you think back to our metaphor of existing in a sea of objectification, self-objectification is like wearing a pair of heavy, soaking wet jeans while trying to swim.

They make it hard to swim, tread water, float, row, stretch, pull yourself into a life raft, concentrate on anything or anyone, comfortably relax, get dry in a reasonable amount of time—anything, really.

The wet denim of self-objectification holds you back literally and figuratively by placing an invisible burden on your mind and self-perception. A portion of your valuable energy is always being dedicated to dealing with that heavy layer of distraction.

The same is true for real-life self-objectification—women have been shown to perform worse on all of those tests and activities when they’re distracted by or self-conscious about how they look, even if they’re alone in a room in some cases.

One of the most insidious consequences of self-objectification is that it fragments our consciousness, disrupting or even preventing us from reaching peak motivational states, or a state of “flow,” as it is termed in positive psychology. Flow is a mental state in which you are fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in an activity. If you’ve ever been fully absorbed in a task and lost that “doubling” of your identity that self-conscious body monitoring demands, you’ve known a state of flow. It happens when you are concentrating, creating, moving, writing, and living outside your fears of being looked at. Research shows us that constant attention to physical appearance saps your mental and physical energy, making it nearly impossible to reach or maintain a flow state. Research points to the fact that, as early as grade school, girls’ activities and thoughts are more frequently disrupted by critical self-awareness and self-consciousness than boys’. Your quality of life and well-being are at stake when your identity is split in two. What are you—and the world—missing out on because the soul-sucking posture of self-objectification keeps you from doing, being, experiencing, contributing, and achieving in every area of your life?

When you live as the surveyor and the surveyed, the watcher and the watched, you come to believe that you are your body ...

Over time, that passive, appearance-obsessed state starts to present itself as a mental task list—an ongoing stream of thoughts that remind us to pull up our pants so no belly rolls are visible, cross our legs when sitting in those chairs so our thighs appear thinner, suck our stomachs in, keep our chins up (not in pride, just double-chin patrol), hold our arms away from our bodies to make them look less round, blot our oily faces, and tame unruly hair. Even when we are alone, we body check our appearance in the car mirror, our cell phone camera, or the store window’s reflection, or otherwise simply picture ourselves living instead of just living.

82.5 percent of women stay home from events or activities, or sit out of opportunities, because of their appearance anxiety. That statistic—eight out of ten women—tells us too many women live in a near-constant state of body monitoring.

negative body image, preoccupation with appearance, disruption of mental and physical performance, shame, anxiety, and depression—and means for coping—disordered eating, self-harm, substance abuse, decreased sexual assertiveness (including not saying no when you want to and not discussing or using contraception), physical inactivity, perpetual dieting, and more ways we “hide” and “fix.”

Although I know I’m a beautiful person on the inside, with a lot to offer to those around me, I still have a very hard time believing I’m beautiful. I find myself hiding behind my clothes. I also never go swimming, even though I LOVE the water, because that would mean I would have to show myself to others in a swimsuit.”

have to gather all my courage and thoughts and just get out there and live life. It takes so much time that I sometimes end up running out of time to

And as you do the work of constantly decorating and “improving” yourself, you are rewarded. You are validated by friends and strangers alike who see your looks changing and shout your praises—“You look amazing!” “I’m so jealous!” “You’ve never looked better!” “Keep it up!” You are validated by the heads you turn and the second glances, the more-interested romantic partners, the new likes and follows, the people looking to you as an expert and asking you about your secrets to success.

Even if they earn you more attention from romantic prospects, they don’t guarantee you can keep it or be fulfilled by it.

The truth is, being defined by our appearance is the real problem, and the endless beauty work we do to improve our confidence and body image is just a symptom of the problem, not the solution.

But looking through your selfies and evaluating your beauty to remind yourself of your value is the perfect illustration for describing the harmful state of self-objectification.

What is most frightening to us is the idea of putting “their best face forward,” which really means “putting a different face forward” and “changing their faces to fit ideals they’ve been trained to perceive as the best.”

been taught to be our entire lives: images to be looked at.

And what have girls and women been taught from day one brings them the most value? Looking good.

Selfie-objectification (noun): the process of presenting oneself as an object for viewing through a selfie that is shared with others online, which manifests itself in three steps: capturing photos of yourself to admire and scrutinize; ranking and editing those photos to generate an acceptable final image; and sharing those photos online for others to admire and validate.

They aren’t captured and forgotten; they are captured and analyzed over and over again by the photographer herself, who’s looking at her face and body and imagining how other people perceive her.

After our selfie taker has examined and evaluated her photos, she selects the perfect shot for public viewing.

If she’s like the majority of social media users, she’ll edit her image before posting. One