How do you experience being female? Do you equate your worth with your sexual attractiveness? Do you enjoy the attention you garner with a pretty face, or large breasts, or high heels and a short skirt?
If you’re a man, do you ogle women? Catcall? Leer? Do you believe expressing appreciation for a woman’s body, any woman, is your prerogative?
Sexual objectification equates a woman’s worth with her body’s appearance and sexual functions. Men sexually objectify women. Women sexually objectify women. We objectify ourselves.
Scientists are beginning to study the psychological effect of sexually objectification.
Just Be Beautiful
I was raised to be beautiful. I’m not saying I am beautiful. I’m saying I knew from very early on that the most important thing I had to offer was beauty — not humor, intellect, drive or productivity.
My father, an otherwise sensitive, kind man, felt entitled to comment on the appearance of women — when they were beautiful, when they had let themselves go, when they were fat. He would mention if I needed to lose weight.
Ah, weight. My genetics are 100 percent Eastern European, built for comfort, not for speed as they say. My mother possessed the 1960s ideal of an hourglass figure with platinum hair. Any money she ever had went to clothes.
She, too, felt compelled to comment on my weight, my hair, my clothes. At 12 years old, I began waking an hour early every day so I could wash, blow dry and curl my hair and do my makeup.
Why? Boys. Beauty. Acceptance.
With the subtlety and elegance of a crowbar, I wedged my way into the popular group at school — the tall, lithe pretty girls. I starved myself, took laxatives, purged, exercised compulsively trying to fit my Hungarian/Russian, wide-hipped, short-legged body into a Barbie template.
My brunette sixth-grade teacher told me she had “always wished she were blonde and blue-eyed” like my classmate, Cathy. My mother went into paroxysms of praise over the prettiness of my eighth-grade blonde and blue-eyed friend, Julie. This is objectification, a standard of beauty — in these cases, “blonde-haired and blue-eyed” — being asserted as more worthy, as the goal.
I was even jealous of the girls at school who were groped and pawed at by the boys. Jealous of sexual harassment.
Did I want to be objectified? Yes. Like I said, beauty was a family value.
But objectification has consequences.
Sexual Objectification Theory and Impact
Sociologists have begun to gather data on Objectification Theory, a framework for “understanding, researching, and intervening to improve women’s lives in a sociocultural context that sexually objectifies the female body and equates a woman’s worth with her body’s appearance and sexual functions.” (1)
The sexual objectification of women is entrenched in our culture, with environments and subcultures, where, as researchers assert, “the sexualization of women is cultivated and culturally condoned.”(1)
Consider beauty pageants where little girls barely out of diapers are painted with makeup and vie against other toddlers to be the most glamorous. Girls in the primary grades in dance squads and cheer teams perform sexualized moves in revealing outfits.
Desirable women serve as purely decorative objects in automobile ads and the covers of men's magazines and even anchoring the news. Watch Gretchen Carlson self-objectifying and being objectified in this Fox News clip.
After watching these clips, would you guess Ms. Carlson is an accomplished violinist who graduated from Stanford University and studied at Oxford? No?
Women’s self-reported experiences of sexual objectification by others have been empirically linked to adverse psychological outcomes in both lesbian and heterosexual women, including:(1)
- Self-objectification
- Habitual body monitoring
- Body shame
- Internalization of the thin ideal
- Lowered self-awareness
- Disordered eating
Researchers have determined several possible negative outcomes of self-objectification:(1)
- Increased anxiety about physical appearance
- Reduced opportunities for peak motivational states or flow
- Diminished awareness of bodily sensations such as hunger or sexual arousal
- Increased body shame
- Increased anxiety about their physical safety, e.g., fears about being raped, which in turn can lead to disordered eating, depression and sexual dysfunction
Beauty's End Game
Valuing beauty above all else has its emotional costs, and is short-lived.
I’m middle-aged now, firmly anchored at a size 14, dyeing my hair to keep up with gray, bleaching my teeth, browsing the makeup aisle at CVS with the same awe and urgency I did when I was 12.
Once in a while, a man over 50 smiles at me at the grocery store. That’s all I got. Exterior beauty is a losing battle that time does not allow us to win.
What is your relationship to beauty? What role does appearance play in your life?
Have you successfully, or unsuccessfully, navigated sexual objectification? Tell us how in the comments below.
Reviewed July 8, 2016
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith