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.

When we are self-objectifying, our identities are split in two: the one living her life and the one watching and judging her. We become our very own self-conscious identical twin, an onlooker to ourselves, monitoring how we look rather than how we are feeling or what we are doing.

We live,

and we imagine how we look as we live, adjusting and contorting o...

Our feelings about and perceptions of our bodies—our body image—become warped into our feelings about how we appear to ourselves and others. We learn that the most important thing about women is their bodies, and the ...

Women who feel positively about their bodies because of how they look often fall even harder into negative body image and shame when they no longer live up to the ideal, whether because of aging, illness, pregnancy, or any other cause. When your main source of confidence and validation isn’t producing the same results it used to, that loss stings.

The descriptions women give us of how they feel about their bodies, whether fearing or fawning, also reflect distance and detachment, as if the women are outside observers of their own bodies.

Women are privileging an external view of their bodies over their own internal, first-person perspective. It’s as if we, as women, exist outside of ourselves—as if our bodies can be understood only through someone else’s eyes.

We see women, including ourselves, as bodies first and people second. Boys, men, and people of all gender identities are not immune to the phenomenon of self-objectification, but it is particularly rampant among girls and women or those presenting themselves in a traditionally feminine way.

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

But experiencing and valuing yourself as a whole, embodied human means making sure you aren’t prioritizing validation from others above your own well-being, health, and happiness, and not prioritizing an external perspective of who you are.

You are more than a body, and you knew that once.

Many of us bond over that shared, normal discomfort with our bodies—what we hate, what we’re trying to fix, how guilty we feel for eating or not exercising, and recruiting others to join our new plans for surefire success.

The solutions to your body image woes are advertised as being readily available in beauty fixes and straightforward diet plans, but the problem is always you—your weakness and lack of willpower. So you have grown comfortable with being uncomfortable. You hate your body instead of hating the expectation that your body fit a certain mold. You hate your weakness and lack of discipline instead of hating the profit-driven solutions that are designed to require a lifetime of purchases but still leave you short of perpetually out of reach ideals.

These all too prevalent riptides in the waters of objectification represent prejudice and bias against people who don’t fit the ideals (fatphobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and classism) and dehumanization of women and girls that contributes to widespread violence and abuse. These invisible undercurrents shape our culture and make this environment much less safe and enjoyable for some than others.

Many of us deal with disruptions to our relationships with our bodies by numbing ourselves from having to feel pain or embarrassment, and when the distraction or numbness wears off, we are left in deeper pain, worse off

The second path people take in response to a body image disruption is to try to “fix” their bodies. These quick fixes—such as buying new makeup or clothes, going on a liquid cleanse for the weekend, or making plans for or going through with cosmetic procedures like face fillers, lip injections, liposuction, or fat freezing—might temper your anxiety for a moment but don’t offer lasting solutions. They alter the surface in an attempt to fix the “flaw” while simply postponing the necessity of dealing with your deeper body image concern.

When we keep attempting to fix an internal, mental problem with outside, physical solutions, those quick fixes will never really solve our problems, nor will they prepare us to respond effectively to future body image disruptions.

“As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.”

My body was never the problem; my perception of my body was the problem.

Every time I feel tempted to hide or fix, that lesson reminds

me that I can just be and do instead. I don’t watch myself live—I live. I rise with body image resilience.

Most media messages about women’s bodies are based on the idea that our happiness, health, power, and relationship status depend upon our consumability—how good we look to others and how irresistibly sexy we are. Media

Women are prime targets for this type of unexpected direct marketing via social media, and the types of products being peddled often reflect that.

Advertising targeted at girls and women largely relies upon us believing two things: 1) 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.

Take a moment to consider the products that women sell each other online or in person. How many of them, at their core, rely on women’s anxiety about our bodies

and beauty in order to drive sales? So many of these products are female centric and focused solely on appearance, though often under the gui...

From head to toe, we have been trained to understand every part of our bodies as a potential problem to be solved, regardless of how common, natural, and unproblematic each “problem area” really is. None of those supposed flaws would be of concern if we valued those parts of our bodies for the function they serve and how we experience them from inside ourselves. All of those supposed flaws and the pressure we feel to fix them are purely the result of evaluating our bodies (and being evaluated) based on how we appear.

Do I feel better or worse about myself when I see this?

Would the people in my life feel better or worse about themselves after seeing this? Does it spark body anxiety or feelings of shame? Does it cause me to engage in self-comparison?

Who profits from me believing this message? Who is advertising here? (Look for ads, commercials, and product placement, and you’ll see who is paying the bills for your favorite media messages.) Does this message seek to profit from my insecurities by selling solutions to fix my “flaws”? What kind of audience is this message trying to target? Do they have roles that move the plot forward in a meaningful way? Are they valued for their talents, words, personality, or character, or just their appearance or sexual appeal? Does it encourage me to fixate on my own or others’ appearances? Does it prom...

Without this never-ending stream of biased, profit-driven, idealized, manipulated, filtered, self-promoting messages and images (even well-meaning ones from friends and family), you give your mind the opportunity to become more sensitive to the messages that shape and reinforce your body image map. Focus instead on what you see, feel, and experience in real life, in your own body, face-to-face with others.

Intermittently fasting from media will also give you the 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. You can see how your life is different and how your feelings toward your own body are affected. You

A good rule of thumb is to consider each of your posts from the perspective of the most vulnerable person in your friends list or potential viewer—like the girl who is struggling with an eating disorder or self-harm who is ashamed of a body that is less “ideal” looking than yours (and is crushed by your comments about trying to lose weight before summer), or like the woman who shares your body type or skin condition or hair texture and is too self-conscious to leave her house without extreme measures to cover/hide/style/fix it (and would be emboldened by seeing you represent your reality without apology or announcement of your bravery). As you reconstruct your ideas of what makes you worthy and successful, the fleeting validation from others in response to your photos will hold less weight than it used to.

implement regular media cleanses to rid yourself of ideals and ideas that prey on your shame, incite your insecurities, and profit from your loss. Once you unfollow, unsubscribe, mute, and opt out of those media choices that send you on dangerous, expensive, unfulfilling excursions, you’ve got a lot more room on your map and time in your day to chart a new course.

One of the greatest challenges we all face is how to navigate social media without drowning in self-comparison, objectification, and the insatiable desire for validation. Kids need to be spared from facing these challenges for as long as possible.

With social media, your voice can make a greater difference than ever before. Being more discerning and careful about the messages that make up your body image environment is a foundational, transformational strategy that will help you rise with body image resilience.

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

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.

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?

Here’s the bottom line: self-objectification is a serious threat to your ability to see more in yourself—who you really are and what you’re really capable of as a human, not as a body to be admired.

As adults, our imagined goals in life often include our goal bodies, and many of us can’t envision our happiest, most fulfilled future selves without also imagining ourselves looking different (“better”) from how we do now. It

This is hard, and I hate feeling this way. What I am experiencing is unfair, but I am okay. I am doing my best. I can always improve how I react to the difficulties of my life, but I am alive. I am breathing. I have come this far. I am not alone.

We can change and grow and react differently because we respect and care for ourselves—not because we hate who we are and are trying to punish ourselves.

In a piece for NBC News, superstar musician Lizzo opened up about the complexities of self-compassion and acknowledging when you need help to feel that love. I don’t think that loving yourself is a choice. I think that it’s a decision that has to be made for survival; it was in my case. Loving myself was the result of answering two things: Do you want to live? ’Cause this is who you’re gonna be for the rest of your life. Or are you gonna just have a life of emptiness, self-hatred, and self-loathing? And I chose to live, so I had to accept myself . . . I want people first to understand that there are levels to loving yourself. To an extent, choosing not to hate yourself can be a choice, but, at a certain point, people can develop mental health issues from self-hatred, from bulimia or anorexia to depression. Sometimes, you need therapy to help you learn to love yourself. I know that therapy is some privileged sh**, and the fact that I’m financially able to afford it, and that I was also in a place where I could accept the fact that I needed it, is incredibly fortunate . . . Self-care is really rooted in self-preservation, just like self-love is rooted in honesty. We have to start being more honest with what we need, and what we deserve, and start serving that to ourselves.

When you can feel on a deep level that your reason for living isn’t to be decorative, but that your existence has meaning, life opens up.

What if your pain could point you toward your own personal path to gaining more compassion, more empathy, and more knowledge of your world, your capabilities, and yourself? You can use the very pain that was designed to hold you down to find purpose you could have never found otherwise.

Society sets rules to regulate the ways female bodies are allowed to appear with the intention of protecting the male bodies and minds that apparently need to be externally (and not internally) controlled.

Girls learn the most important thing about them is how they look. Boys learn the most important thing about girls is how they look. Girls look at themselves. Boys look at girls. Girls are held responsible for boys looking at them. Girls change how they look. Boys keep looking. The problem isn’t how girls look. The problem is how everyone looks at girls.

Girls with more curvaceous, mature bodies often bear the brunt of dress codes that less developed or less curvy girls don’t have to experience.