Women’s Bodies: From the Outside Looking In

What is objectification, and how is it related to self-objectification?

In many ways, society is obsessed with the appearance of women’s bodies, and images of their bodies are constantly on display. As a result, girls and women can become preoccupied with their appearance, viewing their bodies as objects to be gazed at and enjoyed by others. When this happens, the internal qualities that make a girl or woman unique can get ignored, and instead, her body and appearance become the primary source of information about her (Bartky, 1990). This process is known as objectification—the viewing of a person as an object to be looked at rather than as a human being inhabiting a skin (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Objectification is generally framed as the female body being an object gazed at by others. Those others are typically thought to be heterosexual men, and therefore the male gaze is central to the understanding of objectification. While men also experience objectification, it’s a far more common experience for women, and the consequences of living in a culture of objectification are more severe for women (Calogero & Thompson, 2010). In fact, art critic John Berger (1972) summed up the dominance of the objectifying gaze toward women when he stated that “men look at women” and “women watch themselves being looked at” (p. 47). The gaze can occur in everyday interactions—for example, a man can be at a bar checking a woman out, or a woman can walk down the street, and a man may oogle her or catcall.

However, the gaze is more complicated than these examples of everyday interactions suggest. Media images of women, for example, often put the observer in the position of the gazer. The iconic lineup ad in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty was primarily intended for viewing by women (the target market for Dove’s products). Of course, these ads were also viewed by men, and some men even made critical comments about the women’s bodies. Perhaps most prominently, film critic Richard Roeper said, in a Chicago Sun-Times editorial, “I find these Dove ads a little unsettling. If I want to see plump gals baring too much skin, I’ll go to Taste of Chicago, OK? I’ll walk down Michigan Avenue or go to Navy Pier. When we’re talking women in their underwear on billboards outside my living room windows, give me the fantasy babes, please” (Roeper, 2005, p. 11). However, the ad wasn’t primarily designed for men to look at women. Essentially, everyone who saw it was the gazer, seeing the women from behind the camera. Placing the “audience” in the role of the gazer isn’t unique to this ad—or even to advertising in particular. Even decades ago, before the psychological study of objectification began, it was documented as a common strategy when displaying women’s bodies in art (Berger, 1972), movies (Mulvey, 1975), and advertising (Goffman, 1979). More recent research has shown that not only does this pattern persist, but objectification has actually increased (Thompson, 2000).

Given the extent of attention on women’s bodies, it isn’t surprising that many women also gaze at and “check out” other women’s bodies. This practice isn’t simply about sexual desire. If that were true, only heterosexual men, lesbians, or others who are attracted to women would gaze at women’s bodies. In fact, researchers find that women’s bodies are examined and evaluated both by women and men and by people of all sexual orientations (Gervais, Holland, & Dodd, 2013; Strelan & Hargreaves, 2005). The Dove ads, however, were aimed at women—the consumers most likely to purchase Dove products. Female viewers were essentially invited to objectify the models, compare themselves to the models, find themselves lacking, and decide to buy a Dove product in order to remedy that situation.

Objectification theory addresses how living in a culture that objectifies women is harmful to women. According to psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts (1997), the developers of this theory, women “internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves” (p. 173). Essentially, they turn the objectifying gaze on themselves in order to evaluate the extent to which they conform to societal standards of beauty. When people do this, they’re engaging in self-objectification. It can occur in many situations, and in certain contexts it’s considered normal, expected, and even beneficial. For example, when trying on new clothes in a store, it’s normal to consider how we look in them. In the moment when we look in the mirror and consider our appearance as another person would, we are self-objectifying.

However, some people spend an excessive amount of time thinking about how their bodies look. While playing tennis, they may wonder whether their arms are jiggling; when giving an oral presentation, they may wonder if their stomach looks too big. People who self-objectify on a regular basis are considered to be self-objectifiers. Frequent self-objectification can become very distracting, and as we’ll see, even occasional self-objectification can have negative consequences for the mental health of young women (e.g., Moradi & Huang, 2008). We’ll cover the consequences later in this chapter, but before doing so, we’ll explore why the focus on beauty matters so much in the first place.