Self-objectification as empowerment
Peggy Orenstein was on Fresh Air yesterday; it was a great conversation.
Author Peggy Orenstein says that when it comes to sexuality, girls today are receiving mixed messages. Girls hear that “they’re supposed to be sexy, they’re supposed to perform sexually for boys,” Orenstein tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “but that their sexual pleasure is unspoken.”
While researching her new book, Girls & Sex, Orenstein spoke with more than 70 young women between the ages of 15 and 20 about their attitudes and early experiences with the full range of physical intimacy.
She says that pop culture and pornography sexualize young women by creating undue pressure to look and act sexy. These pressures affect both the sexual expectations that girls put on themselves and the expectations boys project onto them.
Orenstein adds that girls she spoke to were often navigating between being considered “slutty” or a “prude,” and that their own desires were often lost in the shuffle. Girls, Orenstein says, are being taught to please their partners without regard to their own desires.
Astonishing, isn’t it, when we already live in a world where equality between women and men is firmly established?
I jest, of course.
GROSS: So if the princess was the pop-culture symbol that you were concerned about when your daughter was very young, what would you say is the pop-culture symbol now that concerns you now that your daughter is reaching her teens? And are there any particular pop stars or celebrities that you’re concerned are offering an image that girls are trying to emulate and maybe it’s not a great idea?
ORENSTEIN: You know, there are great pop stars and there are pop stars that I have concerns about. And one of the kind of fun things about doing the reporting with this book was arguing back and forth with the girls about whether the kind of image of hot that was being sold to them was transgressive or whether it was liberating. And I guess, you know, right now I’d say the person who embodies that and who drives the older generation that I guess I’m part of – crazy – is Kim Kardashian. And it was really interesting to me to watch the recent release she did on International Women’s Day of her nude selfies. I don’t know if you paid attention to that. But what was interesting to me was that there was this argument over whether Kim was a feminist or Kim was a slut. And I kept watching that and thinking, you know, why are those the only two options? And she would talk about – in her defense she would say, I’m proud of my body and I’m expressing my sexuality. And those two lines were lines that I heard from girls a lot. And I was really taken by them because I kept thinking – you know, when a girl would show me a picture of herself dressed in the crop top and the – I started calling it the sorority girl uniform, the crop top and the little skirt and the high heels – and she would say, I’m proud of my body. And then a few minutes later she would say but if she gained a few pounds she would no longer want to dress like that because she’d be afraid that if she went to a party that some boys would called her what she said was, you know, the fat girl. And I started thinking, well, proud of your body but who gets to be proud of which body under what circumstances? And how liberating is it if humiliation lurks right around the corner? And that idea of hot, that idea that we [are] our bodies and that how our bodies look to other people is more important than how they feel to ourselves is something that an earlier generation might have protested against. But today’s generation is sold that as a form of personal empowerment and confidence. But because it’s so disconnected from actual feeling within their body, I found that often for girls the confidence came off with their clothes.
I just cannot, for the life of me, see how thinking how our bodies look to other people is more important than how they feel to ourselves is empowering. Cannot do it. Being needy isn’t empowering. Seeking constant validation isn’t empowering. Being an object for others to look at isn’t empowering.
GROSS: Your book opens after the introduction with clothing and school. And there’s a scene where the dean of a high school is telling the girl students not to dress in short shorts and tank tops or cropped tops and that they had to dress with more self-respect and wear clothes that their grandmothers would be comfortable with…
ORENSTEIN: Right.
GROSS: …When it comes to dressing for school. And you were talking to a girl – a girl’s telling you this story. You weren’t there when it happened. She’s telling you the story. And she’s telling you about how she stood up in the auditorium and objected to what the dean said. What were her grounds for objection?
ORENSTEIN: Yeah, so that’s Camilla (ph), and she stood up and she – because she had learned in this very school system – this was a very liberal school system – to be an upstander. So she went up in front of the whole auditorium and said, I’m a 12th-grader, and I think what you just said is not OK and it’s extremely sexist and it’s promoting rape culture and if I want to wear a tank top and shorts because it’s hot, I should be able to do that. And that has, you know, no correlation with how much respect I hold for myself, and you’re just blaming the victim. Everybody cheered in the auditorium, and then she, you know, dropped the mic and she headed back to her seat. And he said, thank you, Camilla, I totally agree, but there’s a time and a place for that kind of clothing. And she was so furious because she said, look, it doesn’t matter what I wear to school. I’m going to get cat-called no matter what. It doesn’t matter what I wear. When I get up to sharpen a pencil, I’m going to get a comment on my butt. And, you know, I cannot help my body type. This is who I am, and you don’t see boys having to deal with this. Boys aren’t walking down the hall with girls going, hey, boy, nice calves, you know? This is something – she said it’s distracting to me to be cat-called. That really affected me, and I thought, you know, we have to teach boys that it is not their right to say things about girls’ bodies, to say things about girls’ clothing, it is not their right to touch girls. And if we don’t start teaching them at that level, how can we expect them not to feel entitlement, you know, down the road at something more extreme?
GROSS: So I don’t mean to sound prudish here, but at the same time, there’s a certain type of clothing that is designed to be provocative. Like, that’s the point of it.
ORENSTEIN: Yes.
GROSS: Like, if you want to stay cool in hot weather, you could just wear a sleeveless shirt. It doesn’t have to show a lot of cleavage, it doesn’t have to show your naval with a piercing on it.
ORENSTEIN: Right, I agree. And that’s why you have to ask, you know, what is it that girls are being sold and why are they being sold this? So it’s a kind of – it’s complicated and it’s both sides. So she, for instance, went to school one day, she told me just right before we spoke, wearing a bustier. And she was thinking, oh, I look hot today. I’m going to have a great day. Which right there I thought, you know, well, why is that your measure of a great day? And then she goes into school and she realizes, uh-oh, everybody’s looking at me and everybody’s cat-calling – although she changed it. She was talking about herself in the first person and suddenly she shifted and said everybody’s looking at you, everybody’s making comments. And I thought, isn’t that interesting that when she gets to that objectified point, she starts seeing herself from the outside too.
It’s complicated, but it’s also wanting to have it both ways. Apparently Camilla wants not to be cat-called, but she also wants to wear a bustier to school thinking, oh, I look hot today. You can’t really do both, at least I’ve never been able to figure out how anyone can do that. If you wear a bustier in order to look hot – don’t you want to be cat-called? Or at least stared at with mute longing?
GROSS: I want to get back to, like, pop-culture symbols and what they’re teaching girls. You know, in so much pop music today, the girl stars or young women stars or women stars are wearing, you know, basically S and M fetish garb. You know, like…
ORENSTEIN: I know.
GROSS: Yeah, like, you know, bustiers or, you know, really tight leather revealing things with, like, high boots. I mean, they might as well have a whip, you know what I mean?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: It’s just like the dominatrix look. And shouldn’t you be able to, like, be a good musician and not dress like you’re a dominatrix? Give me some guidance of how to talk about that without sounding like you’re a total prude who is not aware of what pop culture means because I just think there has to be a way of talking about this without…
ORENSTEIN: I know.
GROSS: Yeah.
ORENSTEIN: It’s really hard, right? It’s really complicated, and it’s designed that way. It’s designed to make you sound old and out of touch and prude and your daughter feel like she’s expressing some kind of liberation and confidence. And when you say, like, can’t you just be a musician? Even when you look back 20, 30 years at musicians in the ’80s – like, if you look at Joan Jett or you look at – they’re pretty clothed. I mean, it’s pretty interesting that they’re still, you know, you think of them as having been very sexy stars but – you know, Annie Lennox, whatever – they had a broader range. And we do still have, you know, now Lorde or Adele or there – you know, there’s a few stars like that. But I think what’s hard about it is that this idea of hot – and that’s what they’re selling – is so narrow and so commercialized and so linked with porn, frankly. And it says over and over that first and foremost, you are your body. And first and foremost, you are presenting that body in a way that is sexually appealing to others. And I think one of the big disconnects, and I was exploring this in Cinderella too – “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” – that when girls are constantly acting out sexy from a really young age, they don’t connect that to their actual sexual development from the inside. And the risk is that that disconnect becomes permanent. And we do know over and over that, you know, self-objectification, self-sexualization is really unhealthy for girls. You know, there’s research stretching back for decades that shows that affects them cognitively. It affects their mental health. And we know too that even in the sexual realm, that girls who are self-objectifyng, girls who are constantly conscious of their bodies, actually report less pleasure, less (unintelligible), less ability to talk to their partners than girls that are not. So they’re really being sold a bill of goods to a great degree. And I don’t think that that’s prude to say because, you know, if you’re interested in their sexual pleasure and you’re interested in their expressing power, they’re not going to get there that way.
I don’t think I’d heard that word “self-0bjectification” before and I think it’s very useful. What she says sounds right to me. It sounds right if only because one can’t do everything, and if you’re spending a lot of your time and energy on looking hot to other people, you’re not spending it on other things, things which might be more broadly rewarding.
GROSS: So when you think about the sexual climate that you lived in when you became a teenager and you compare that to the climate your daughter is entering as she’s about to turn 13, how do they compare? Do you think the issues are any different? Do you think the pressures are any different?
ORENSTEIN: It’s so interesting. I mean, on one hand I want to say if they’re not, why aren’t they? When so much has changed for girls in the public realm, where so much has changed for them educationally, where so much has changed in their professional aspirations, why hasn’t much more changed in the private realm? At the same time, there’s a weird way where I feel I came of age in this kind of post-our-bodies-our-selves time. There was, among a certain population that I was part of, a sort of sense political duty that we deserved equality in the bedroom and a sense among the boys that we were with that they were in it with us. I feel that that – for that same kind of demographic has really not, you know, completely transformed -obviously, that’s still there – but has changed a lot. And I think a lot of it is because we’ve had a much more aggressive and much more relentless popular culture and porn culture that tells girls that they’re supposed to be sexy, that they’re supposed to perform sexuality for boys, but that their sexual pleasure is unspoken of.
That. I think it’s depressing as fuck.
Gross doesn’t have much trouble with her body temperature, I guess.
I hated male attention as a teen. I’d been sexually harassed wearing very conservative clothing when I was in middle school. Still a kid, but adults refused to do anything about my peers talking to me like I was a porn star and trying to help themselves to touches. I didn’t get comfortable with my body until I was an adult. But I *still* wore shorts in the summer and low necklines. Not to look sexy, but because the temperature was over 100 degrees and I don’t need heatstroke just because some guys feel entitled.
“Camilla wants not to be cat-called, but she also wants to wear a bustier to school thinking, oh, I look hot today.”
Actually, it’s not incompatible. Wanting to be admired in a way that leaves you in control of the situation is just human. Boys want that, too. So do CEOs. What society tells them to do to be admired is different, but Camilla is merely following the script in all the media.
Then, instead of admiration she gets humiliation. That part is left out of all the media except porn. That doesn’t mean what she wants is incompatible. It means society pulled a fast one on her and gave her incompatible goals. AKA welcome to your subhuman status.
The script for women is bogus from A to Z, damages girls, and the whole works. But kids can’t rewrite society’s dreams. They’re just trying to fit into the stories they’re told.
Quixote’s hit the nail on the head, I think. “Wanting to be admired in a way that leaves you in control of the situation is just human.”
You may want to be admired, to be thought attractive, and maybe brave, but you may have this crazy notion that the admirers and perceivers might also see you as a person, like them, one with a right to walk around without other people publicly intrusively judging.
It’s possible to objectify oneself and others without forgetting that you/they are also, and mainly, subjects. We can’t help doing it to some degree. When you groom yourself, aiming for a certain look, you’re objectifying. Every time you admire a beautiful person’s beauty you’re objectifying them.
The trick is to be able to do that without forgetting that the person you’re looking at (in the mirror or on the street) is also a subject, a person who is more than their physical appearance. We seem to have a terribly hard time granting that subjective personhood to women. The problem isn’t girls and women wearing bustiers–put burkas on them and they’re still objectified.
That’s the thing–if you’re female, you’re going to be objectified, and in the most reductive, demeaning way, without regard for your subjectivity–no matter what you do. You might as well aim for attractive object, if you can.
Oh god…it started when I turned 12…this wrenching need…it didn’t matter what they were wearing…it never went away…
I think this Ted Talk was the first time I ever heard the idea of self objectification:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMS4VJKekW8
Basically the worst thing about it is the habitual body monitoring. There’s this nagging thought in your head at all time about what you look like and how people are looking at you and whether you’re sexy or pretty enough. You focus more on how you look to other people than how you feel or anything else.
And then there’s a Margaret Atwood quote I read once that doesn’t use the term but sums it up nicely:
“Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Both these introductions to to concept blew my mind. I spent so much time worrying about what I looked like and what men thought about it. I still catch myself doing it sometimes.
Orenstein talks a lot about self-objectification in Cinderella Ate My Daughter (which is a great book, would definitely recommend). It’s very unsettling when she gets into how early it starts.
I have a problem with some of the language used here. For example.
and
In context, these are clearly meant to be bad things. But on the plain meaning of the words, they are simple, unremarkable truths.
We are our bodies. Really, we are. The dualists are wrong: there’s no soul; we’re meat all the way through. And women are objects. I checked; I looked it up:
People are objects. Animals are objects. Captain Kirk, he goes zipping around the universe encountering alien life forms made of pure energy, but we don’t have any of those here on earth. All the living things on this planet are objects.
The problem here isn’t that I’m being a smart-ass about words. The problem is that if we can’t ground our ideas, and our statements, and our arguments in the meaning of the words that we use to express them, then we won’t be able to communicate; we won’t be able to analyze; we won’t be able to persuade; we won’t be able to move forward. We’ll just be stuck reciting empty words to each other.
Ophelia is outstanding at being able to go into a text, and excise one word, and say, “No! That is not what that word means. That is where this argument fails. That is where the writer is trying to hoodwink us.” And yet for some reason object gets a pass on this.
Now, maybe my problem is just that I don’t understand how these words are being used by these people, in this forum. I haven’t read the right authors; I have taken the right Critical Theory courses. And if this were a literary blog, that would be fine: either I get with the program and learn the shibboleths or I go back to watching the ball game. But this is not a literary blog. These are matters of vital importance to us, and our society, and our world. We need to get these ideas out beyond this blog. If Sartre and Foucault are prerequisites for understanding what we are saying, then there’s no hope.
Lady Mondegreen gets some traction on this by making a distinction between subjects and objects. I’d like to see these issues analyzed in terms of agency, and power dynamics, and roles. Orenstein mentions roles
but it is almost parenthetical. This needs to be explicitly analyzed, front and center: acting takes effort; constantly acting is exhausting. Now you have something you can point to, and say “This is a problem, and here’s why.”
Steven, I think I spelled some of it out. Let me be more explicit: when girls and women are seen as, and learn to see themselves as, primarily pretty and/or sexy objects, that is a bad thing. Here object is not being used in the dictionary sense you quoted; it means something like “instrument for the enjoyment and use of others”–a thing lacking subjectivity of its own. The attitude that dehumanizes women by relegating them to objecthood is rarely unmixed–most people know that women are people, too–but it’s very strong and pervasive, and has a nasty way of overriding more humane impulses.
That analysis is called “feminism.” It’s been going on for quite some time.
You’re like someone just coming into a room where a conversation has been going on for a long while. I must say, your comment at #7 strikes me as a near-perfect example of mansplaining.
I want to add: my use of the term “mansplaining” is not meant to be code for, “Shut up, Steven!” I don’t at all want you to shut up. I do think you have incorrectly assumed this conversation to be at a more elementary level than it is. (We don’t need Foucault to have this conversation, but we don’t need
either.
The problem is the culture is prudish. It might not look like it, when you lok at how the pop stars dress, and how young women dress, but as is discussed here the restrictions and expectations of what women and girls ought to wear and how they ought to act are getting more severe.
One big issue I think is the sexualization of the female form. My experience is a little different as I grew up in Denmark. I was born in 1973, so I caught the tail end of the sexual revolution.
When I went to the beach as a child, most women would be topless. A large section of the beach was filled with men and women bathing and lounging in the nude. These were not people who had adopted naturism as, but just people who were more comfortable in the nude.
In school in the early years of school, in gym there would be two dressing rooms, one for girls and one for boys, but only one shower room, placed in between, so we would have to shower with the other sex.
As a teen when we went to the beach or someones pool, the girls would still take of their tops when sunbathing.
Now I am not saying that as a teenager seeing my friends breasts out in the open as it were was not enticing, but you actually got used to it, and I don’t think anyone felt more embarrassed on average than people do today.
Today in Denmark young women and girls would never bare their breasts in public. There are some few revolutionaries who insist on doing it, but the norms have changed and breasts are no longer one part of the female form, but something powerful and sexual and very private. At the same time you cannot find a women under the age of perhaps 35, who has her natural hair under her arms, or pubic hair (I am told). Women are not only more uncomfortable showing their bodies, but they are expected and have internalized the idea their natural body is wrong and must be simultaneously sexualized, on display and hidden away.
No matter what, their bodies are first and foremost sexual objects to be used and shown with caution.
If you look at adds on the back and sides of busses. Signs on the side of the road. Ads in newspapers, or tv commercials. Here naked breasts are everywhere, as advertising for nightclubs, plastic surgeons or indeed for shampoo.
When feminists protested when the back of busses in Copenhagen was plastered over with an add for a nightclub, showing a woman’s bottom as she seductively removes her thong, they were accused of being prudes. What is wrong with showing the female form, they were told.
We seem to be in a situation where we get the worst parts of it. Pornography and sexualized images of women is everywhere, you cannot stop it, and you cannot publicly say it’s a problem without being a prude.
At the same time, women and girls learn that their bodies are not themselves. That they are wrong to just be their bodies and be comfortable. Even Ophelia Benson thinks that dressing in certain ways invites to catcalls.
So women have to walk the fine line between making their bodies attain peak sexual appeal, and at the same time show it in the appropriate way at all times, which is modest in some situations, and extremely sexualized in others.
So the culture as such is being extremely prudish with strict norms on what is allowed for women and girls, to a degree which I think is greater than any before in my experience.
Steven @ 7 – you rewrote what I said and then disputed what you said instead of what I said. I didn’t say “Being an object isn’t empowering.” I said “Being an object for others to look at isn’t empowering.” I’m not disputing that we’re objects in the basic, obvious sense you pointed out. I’m disputing the idea that thinking of ourselves as solely or chiefly consumer objects for other people to stare at and drool over is empowering.
‘Hotness,’ and ‘sexyness’ have become abstraction entirely separate from the person in question. So it’s easy for Camilla and co. to be caught between competing external notions.
We live in a culture where girls are developing eating disorders in preschool, and not knowing what an orgasm is until they are 20-30.
Or later…my mother died not knowing, and she was 67. But she did know how to slut shame….
Whenever I start to think that we’ve changed a lot as a society, I listen to the way my friends who have kids talk. No matter how liberal they are, they all turn into gender essentialists as soon as they have kids: “girls are easy; boys are trouble to raise!” “Girls are like [this]; boys are like [that]….”
And the double standard is still alive and well, when otherwise modern individuals suggest that me and other male friends of the family will be called upon to scare the hell out of any boys who want to date their daughters in the future, like I’m the freaking Virginity Police or something — and of course, nobody ever suggests that their boys will need such a protective force.
Screechy Monkey @14
Indeed. I observed exactly that recently with friends whose boy likes cars and guns, while the girl likes ponies. Didn’t matter how often I pointed out that Dad likes cars and guns….
Where the pony thing came from none of us could figure out to be fair. My guess is a book. That girl just reads and reads.
Rob,
Yep. And of course, the parents always vigorously deny that their tastes and biases and preconceptions influence their child in any way! (Which is bizarre, because in other contexts parents love to wax rhapsodically about the glories of passing on their values to a new generation.)
I once watched a friend declare with amazement and pride that his daughter “likes the same songs as me!” oblivious to the fact that when the radio played one of “Daddy’s songs” — and only then — he would sing along and dance for his toddler daughter, to which she would respond. (And no, he wasn’t being facetious or having fun with me. He honestly, truly, believed that his 2-year-old just happened to independently like the same music as him.)
That made me tear up a little because someone I knew died recently. At the funeral their daughter described sitting in the lounge wearing headphones (with no music playing) while dad turned his music up and danced and sang in front of her to ‘annoy’ his snooty daughter. She had her music off just because she loved the interaction with her dad, even though she had never admitted that to him.
Not a dry eye in the house.
Aw.
Objects in computer programming aren’t material forms perceived by the senses. Sounds are not considered objects, in colloquial use, even though they are perceived by the senses, nor is heat.
So let’s move away from the dictionary and think of real use. If someone asks you, what’s that object near the window, and a woman is putting a cat into a cat bed, you will answer “It’s a cat bed.” Because we don’t call people or animals objects normally– objects, in ordinary speech, imply “inanimate objects”.