Hugo Schwyzer

The new issue of Ms. Magazine hits the stands tomorrow. Of particular interest is an article by Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at nearby Occidental College: Out-of-Body Image: Self-objectification—seeing ourselves through others’ eyes—impairs women’s body image,mental health, motor skills and even sex lives. (It’s not available online; you will need to splurge for the magazine, which is well worth doing. A subscription is better. Ms., Bitch, and MakeShift are the three indispensables of feminist publishing.)

Heldman:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions
of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and
girls’ perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been
recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—
viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the
male gaze. Like W.e.b. DuBois’ famous description of the
experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a
state of “double consciousness…a sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

In my work as a youth minister and as a women’s studies professor, I’ve seen this phenomenon grow seemingly worse in recent years. Paris Hilton’s remarks about sexualiy and her own self-objectification resonate; in 2005, she remarked that her titillating image is a product of her sexy sense of style, and in reality her boyfriends have commented on her less than rampant libido. She says, “I’m sexual in pictures and the way I dress and my whole image. But at home I’m really not like that. In other words, her sexuality is largely performative, almost entirely a response to an outsider’s gaze and not an expression of her own inner longing for anything other than validation. I’ve brought up this insight of Hilton’s with some of my students, and seen a variety of reactions, ranging from surpise to vigorous nods of recognition.

In her Ms. piece, Heldman marshals compelling and troubling evidence that “self-objectification” (a term first coined as recently as 1997) has a measurable and deleterious impact on the lives of girls and young women:

Self-objectification has also been repeatedly shown to
sap cognitive functioning, because of all the attention devoted
to body monitoring. For instance, a 1998 study
asked two groups of women to take a math exam—one
group in swimsuits, the other in sweaters. The swimsuit wearers,
distracted by body concerns, performed significantly
worse than their peers in sweaters.
Several of my own surveys of college students indicate
that this impaired concentration by self-objectifiers may
hurt their academic performance. Those with low self objectification
reported an average GPA of 3.5, whereas
those with high self objectification
reported a 3.1.

While this gap may appear
small, in graduate school admissions it
represents the difference between being
competitive and being out of the
running for the top schools.

The bit about the “swimsuits” and “sweaters” rings particularly true; one of the first posts I wrote that attracted a fair amount of commentary was on a related subject: Sisterhood is Easier in Winter. It’s also a reminder that it’s dangerous for those of us who care passionately about the well-being of young women to ignore the very real, measurable impact of poor body image on academic performance and personal happiness. Simply telling girls “don’t worry about yourself so much” is an insufficient response, as it ignores the degree to which this not-infrequently obsessive self-objectification is beyond the power of an individual young woman to control.

Heldman also notes the “Hiltonization” of young women’s sexual experiences:

One of the more stunning effects of self-objectification
is its impact on sex. Nudity can cause great anxiety among
self-objectifiers, who then become preoccupied with how
their bodies look in sexual positions. One young woman I
interviewed described sex as being an “out of body” experience
during which she viewed herself through the eyes
of her lover, and, sometimes, through the imaginary lens
of a camera shooting a porn film. As a constant critic of
her body, she couldn’t focus on her own sexual pleasure.

On some level, of course, this isn’t new. Nearly four decades ago, cultural critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing offered a powerful feminist analysis of how the male gaze distorts both our understanding of art and the self-understanding of those who are gazed upon. (Do women’s studies majors read Berger anymore? It’s one of those books that I read in college that still impacts how I think.) What’s new about Heldman’s analysis is that this sense of the self as an object has ceased to be a theoretical concern. Heldman’s research backs up what we already know anecdotally: far too many young women are disturbingly pre-occupied not only with their appearance, but with the sense of themselves as objects.

A century ago, major feminist leaders were eager to transform young women’s self-image. Joan Brumberg, writing about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, notes:

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns,” (Cady Stanton) pronounced pointedly, in a manner characteristic of her lifelong struggle to make women independent, rational actors rather than decorative objects tied to the whims and fortunes of men.

The most-sought after adjectives of an earlier era might have been “demure”, “ethereal”, “lovely”; from our age, they might be “hot”, “fine”, and so forth. Stanton’s plea to young women to regard themselves as nouns (and perhaps, as verbs) rather than adjectives is depressingly relevant. A century and a half on from the beginnings of the feminist movement, far more progress has been made in winning women rights than in transforming self-image and self-perception. Clearly, this is one fight that deserves a greater degree of attention than it has already received.

Though I liked Heldman’s article very much, I wince at the term “self-objectification.” I understand it, and it’s not inaccurate. But I worry that it places the blame for this tendency towards desubjectification on girls themselves rather than the broader culture. It implies a degree of willful complicity on the part of young women in their own oppression, as if this is something that they are rationally choosing to do to themselves — and could choose to stop doing if they “really wanted to.” Hence the tiresome pleas to “just stop reading those magazines” or “stop buying the make-up” or “just don’t think about it.” While it’s true that each of us has options about what we buy or look at, young women are as impacted by the cultural decisions of their peers as by their own private choices. The danger in a term like self-objectification is it places the burden for change on the individual, and it allows us to dodge collective responsibility for transforming the culture.

To be fair, Heldman is aware of the potential for feminist action to parry the devastating impact of a media culture on young women. She notes

An example of women’s spending power, and the limits
of our tolerance for objectification, can be found in the
12-percent dip in profits of clothing company Victoria’s
Secret this year—due, according to the company’s CEO,
to its image becoming “too sexy.” Victoria’s Secret was not
the target of an organized boycott; rather, its increasingly
risqué “bra and panty show” seems to have begun alienating
women, who perhaps no longer want to simply be
shown as highly sexualized window dressing.

That’s good news, of course, but it’s only a start. The real value of articles like Heldman’s lies in the potential to start honest conversation. So many young women who push through life with a constant sense of an internalized audience judging their actions and appearance imagine that this is a problem unique to them. Time and again, I’ve seen how startled some girls and women are to discover the radical ubiquity of this self-objectifiying phenomenon. In that moment of recognition, and in the conversations that follow, feminists have a key role to play in suggesting individual and collective strategies to help each of us move towards Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s dream of a world of nouns, not adjectives.