Looking in the Mirror
How objectification works
Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash
Hey there everyone—
I was a skinny kid. Not the wiry and tough kind, the ones that sprint by you, laughing. I was skeletal. Everyone has pointy elbows. But each of my bones was marked at its end by a knobby circular protrusion—the edges of my wrists, the insides of my elbows, my ankle bones, my knees. I was tall, too—taller than all the girls and most of the boys. Plus, glasses.
When I needed clothes, my mom and I would go to a store and I would pick shirts and pants and blouses and skirts from two sizes below what I was supposed to be, to two sizes up. I’d stagger into the dressing room, too many hangers crushed against my chest. Pants fell off my ass or were high waters. Shirts cuffed mid-forearm, hiked up my ribs, exposing my front, or if they were long enough, engulfed me in fabric. If by some miracle something actually fit, we bought it.
My mom tried to teach me about fashion. She’d patiently tell me how to mask my figure, give me the illusion of curves with belts, hide my skinny arms with puffed sleeves. She’d draw sketches on the backs of envelopes as she talked. Long hair and a center part would draw my face down, she explained, making me look even thinner. It should be short.
My mother knew what she was talking about. She’d been a Ford model in New York City in the part of her life before she got married and had me. I’d look at the drawings on the envelopes. I hated puffy sleeves. They made my arms look like sticks. Too much contrast between my arm and the puff. I wanted long hair. Mostly, I wanted to be able to buy an outfit and not have it be something we prepared for in advance, strategized, evaluated, regrouped after each failed trip.
I’d stand in my bedroom and look in the mirror, trying to imagine myself as the girl on the back of the envelope. Would I be pretty? Could I at least fit in? After one too many exasperated moments before the mirror, I heard a voice in my head. In a matter of fact tone, it told me the truth. “You’re never going to be beautiful,” it said. “So you might as well be nice.”
If that sounds sweet, you don’t get it.
It wasn’t be nice to be a good person, in an intrinsic, moral way. It was be nice because some part of you has to be beautiful, the inside or the outside. I couldn’t do anything about the outside part, but maybe I could control the inside. Maybe then someone would tell me I was beautiful.
I was on the cusp of adolescence. My mother was trying to give me power, the best way she knew how. In a patriarchal system of exchange, beauty was the way to marry up, or at least find someone to take care of you. She wanted me to survive.
What I hadn’t yet realized, at 9 or 10, was that when I internalized the idea that someone else finding me beautiful was the most important thing, I split myself in two. I left behind my own dawning self-knowing and in its place, substituted the evaluation and desire of the other. My gaze, which had been internal, became external. Once I learned about sexual violence, that external gaze became even more necessary: in addition to scanning to see if I was pleasing, I scanned for threats.
Objectification is the act of turning something living and vibrant and changeable into a thing. It’s one of the key preconditions for an ideology to work. I cannot evaluate my value in patriarchy, or in white supremacy, until I can see myself through its gaze. I have to step outside my experience to look at that selfhood as if it is a static thing. Years of practice of objectification are designed to ease the friction between the self and the systems of which we are a part.
Finally, one day someone will ask you what you want, what you truly desire, whether that’s in bed, or what you want to eat, or what you want to learn, or what you want to create in the time you have left on this earth, and you’ll blank out, right there in the strobe light of that question, because you can’t find it, that answer. It’s not that you know it and you’re hiding; it’s that it’s gone.
The rub here is that ideologies aren’t seamless. It’s not that they knock out all of our internal experience and turn us into robots. It’s that there’s a slippage, an inconsistency, a faulty wiring between us, our sense of what is real and true and what is being represented as worthy and normal by these networks of power. The more in congruence we are with the dominant culture, the less that slippage causes pain. If we aren’t measuring up, it’s harder to stay in contact with our internal experience. Because instead of being a source of wonder, of gratitude that we get to be here at all, our experience is of shame. We leave the self, only to re-enter it and castigate it, thing-ify it, improve it. But what if we can’t make it better, this objectified self? What then?
There are two usual responses to that shame, that certainty that we’re intrinsically flawed. One is conscious, the other is largely unconscious. In the first, we practice monitoring ourselves, policing our behaviors and believing the more we conform to what is expected, the safer we’ll be. In the second, we wall ourselves off from those feelings, desires, aspects of being that we know mark us as deviant, contemptible, disgusting, and undeserving of care. They become our shadow, or we project them onto others, the not me, the ones who are alien, animal, less than human, repositories of all that cannot be tolerated in the self.
But there’s a third approach, and that’s collective resistance and critique. By sharing our experiences of internalized oppression, of how we daily objectify ourselves, we can receive encouragement from others to learn from our collective pain. We can root our personal experience in the wider framework of our particular standpoint—how we are situated, in terms of our identities, our relationships to power, resources, and status, our subjection to oppression, our congruence and distance from the dominant culture. We can stay vulnerable, naming the ways we do violence to ourselves, and how we are encouraged to enact violence on others.
Shame is an intensely private experience. It requires our silence. It demands our obedience to systems and people who shame us, to make it stop. To admit our own propensity to violence, to have that violence be seen and held collectively, gives us a chance to dull the shame and prevent the violence from happening. It is virtually impossible to name and understand the complexity of power and ideology on our own. But collectively, we can release the energy that’s been bound by our own self-monitoring, free it for action to make change.
Stay safe out there this week —
xo
Rebecca
That was an awesome read.
Thank you for a great read that made me think.