Out-of-Body Image: How Media Teaches Young Girls to Hate Their Bodies and Young Boys to Objectify Them (Spring 2008)

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A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girls’ perceptions of their bodies—a trend that the internet has only worsened over the years. ThrowbackThursday

have shown that girls and women who self-objectify are more prone to depression and low self-esteem and have less faith in their own capabilities, which can lead to diminished success in life. They are more likely to engage in “habitual body monitoring”—constantly thinking about how their bodies appear to the outside world—which puts them at higher risk for eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

Another worrisome effect of self-objectification is that it diminishes political efficacy—a person’s belief that she can have an impact through the political process. In another survey of mine, 33 percent of high self-objectifiers felt low political efficacy, compared to 13 percent of low self-objectifiers. Since political efficacy leads to participation in politics, having less of it means that self-objectifiers may be less likely to vote or run for office.

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.

At the root of this normalization of self-objectification may lie new consumer values in the U.S. Unlike the “producer citizen” of yesteryear—invoked in the 1960s by John F. Kennedy’s request to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—the more common “consumer citizen” of today asks what the country, and everyone else, can do for him or her.

 

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