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

by Lexie Kite

Self-objectification occurs when people learn to view their own bodies from an outside perspective, which is a natural result of living in an environment where bodies are objectified.

In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” to describe the phenomenon of women being represented in media through the perspective of a heterosexual man, in which they are sexualized and depicted as passive objects of male attention or desire. This is objectification. We then learn to monitor and understand our own bodies from the same outside perspective. This is self-objectification.

We see women, including ourselves, as bodies first and people second.

Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.

From here on out, your job as a discerning consumer is to question everything. Critical questioning is really just a process of prompting you to be aggressively and constantly aware of the forces at play (money, sexism, racism, shame, unquestioned traditions, etc.) that manipulate your thoughts and behaviors.

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.

Self-objectification is the invisible prison of picturing yourself being looked at instead of just fully living.

We stop waiting to become as soon as we realize we already are. —Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology

If you are taking steps to opt out of traditional beauty work, you might need to let people know you’re looking out for yourself right now by prioritizing how you feel over how you look and figuring out how to understand and value your body differently.

Wait—I can feel that I’m picturing myself being looked at instead of just living. It’s so easy to do, but I deserve more than this. It does not matter how I look right now. I deserve to look out and see the sky, the people walking past, and feel the air on my skin. I deserve to breathe for a moment and think about other aspects of my life.

Repeat to yourself that you are more than a body, and you are, in fact, human. A human who reserves the right to have a body that grows and shrinks and changes. A person who will not be dismayed by the consistently inconsistent sizes between one brand of clothing and the next. A person who cannot be defined or confined by jeans that don’t fit right. A person who deserves to be comfortable in whatever size pants is the best fit.

Then tap into your senses to step back into your body as your own. Turn away from the mirror to help you reunite with your body as an insider instead of being an outsider looking in. Close your eyes and breathe. Stretch your hamstrings, your calves, your glutes. Feel the stretch. If you are able, do a lunge and feel the power of your muscles at work. Consider where your legs have taken you lately and express gratitude to them for the work they do. Reflect on memories of fun hikes or bike rides or park outings you’ve been on, and on the privilege of having legs to get you where you need to go. Do anything you can to place yourself and your consciousness back inside your body.

Laura Choate, author of Swimming Upstream, described this well, writing, “If a woman draws her sense of meaning from a spiritual force that goes beyond herself, and provides coherence and purpose to the universe, she will find less need to focus on her weight, shape, and appearance in an attempt to find happiness and life satisfaction.”

Many people are in your same situation as they grow up and realize the comfort they once found at their church or in their spiritual study might also be complicated by teachings that are either no longer useful or outright harmful.

When we begin to see women as more than bodies, the look of those bodies becomes one of the least interesting parts about them.

When our first, natural instinct is to praise a woman’s appearance over anything else about her, we clearly have a limited view of her and what she needs.

hyperspecific dress codes for girls don’t help that cause, and might do more harm than good by inadvertently sexualizing young women as a collection of inappropriate body parts to be hidden.

Just like we need to redefine beauty in ways that are better for our health, we need to redefine health in ways that have nothing to do with beauty.

When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn. —Glennon Doyle, Untamed

As long as our efforts to promote positive body image are focused on feeling positively about how we look, we are still being objectified.

Your body image is not the literal image of how your body appears, or even your feelings about how it appears. It is your feelings about your body—the body you live inside, grew up with, and experience life through.

We believe women are suffering not only because of the ways beauty is being defined; we are suffering because we are being defined by beauty.

But self-care that is truly caring takes care of your whole self, not just your visible self. Self-objectification is not self-care.

Beauty doesn’t make you, so it can’t break you, either.

If we don’t want beauty and body judgment to break us down, then we can’t let it build us up either.