Why So Many Women Watch Their Own Bodies From the Outside

The allegations in the Cornell 7 case have come up in my therapy sessions again and again over the past few weeks. While the specifics of the discourse varies from client to client, what I consistently hear in their reactions is recognition. Women know what it feels like to have their bodies treated as objects to be looked at and used. That experience is much older than the events at one fraternity house, and it shapes how many women relate to their own bodies every day.

Women have been pushing back against having their bodies judged for generations. In 1968, feminists protesting the Miss America pageant crowned a live sheep to make a point about women being judged like livestock. Nearly 60 years later, women are still being evaluated, and criticized, based on their appearance.

The standards may have changed somewhat, but the expectation that women's bodies are open to public scrutiny and judgment remains intact.

Learning to watch yourself

In 1997, psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts gave this a name: Objectification theory proposed that girls who grow up being watched and commented on can eventually take that outside view in and start monitoring their own bodies the way an observer would. They called this phenomenon self-objectification. People of every gender experience objectification, including men and nonbinary people. I'm focusing on women here because of the long history of judging women by their appearance, and because much of the research has focused on them.

A year later, Fredrickson and her colleagues published a study I still think about. College students tried on either a swimsuit or a sweater, alone in a dressing room, and then took a math test. The women in swimsuits did worse than the women in sweaters. The men's scores didn't change. Nobody was even watching them. Simply putting on a swimsuit seemed to shift the women's attention from the work in front of them to their appearance.

What's striking about that study is how little it took to distract the women from what they were doing. Nobody had to comment on their bodies or criticize how they looked. Just putting on a swimsuit was enough to distract them.

I think about how often this happens in everyday life. A woman sits through a meeting worrying about how her stomach looks in her chair. A teenager at the beach is so preoccupied with how she looks that she barely enjoys being there and avoids the water. It's hard to pay attention to what's happening around you when so much of your attention is focused on how you look. And there are psychological consequences: Research has found associations between self-objectification, body shame, and body dissatisfaction. Other studies have linked self-objectification to disordered eating.

What I see in my office

Many of my clients can tell me exactly how their body looks from across a room. They know which angles they avoid in photos and which clothes cover which parts. When I ask whether they're hungry or tired, they often go quiet for a long time. After years of watching the body from the outside, the inside has gotten hard to hear.

For people struggling with eating disorders, this disconnection can be especially difficult. Many of my clients have spent years following food rules, ignoring hunger, or judging their bodies based on appearance rather than how they feel. Over time, recognizing hunger, fullness, and other physical sensations can become increasingly difficult. Diet culture reinforces these patterns by praising restriction and treating control over eating as an accomplishment. Some of the very behaviors we worry about clinically are celebrated in everyday life.

Weight stigma only adds to the problem. Clients in larger bodies often tell me they feel stared at in the grocery store or at the doctor's office. It's as if their body is up for public discussion. That's objectification, too, even when it comes disguised as concern for health. And we know from research on weight stigma that these experiences are associated with greater risk for disordered eating.

In my work with clients who struggle with eating disorders and body image, we spend a lot of time talking about what it means to experience your body rather than constantly evaluate it. Many clients are so accustomed to checking how they look that they barely realize they're doing it. They might catch their reflection in a store window, replay how they looked during a conversation, or spend an entire evening worrying about whether someone noticed their stomach wasn't flat or their lack of muscle tone. I ask clients to notice when this happens and what they feel in those moments. What were they doing before their attention shifted to their appearance? What did they stop noticing? We also work on paying more attention to physical sensations including hunger, fullness, comfort, and discomfort, which can be hard to recognize after years of focusing primarily on appearance.

We also talk about what reinforces these habits. For some clients, it's social media. For others, it's the constant conversation among friends or family about bodies, food, and weight. These ways of thinking develop over time, and changing them takes practice.

Whose eyes are we looking through?

When I ask clients what they think about their bodies, so often what they tell me is what they imagine other people think. They have become so accustomed to seeing themselves through someone else’s eyes that it’s difficult to separate their own feelings from the judgments they’ve learned to anticipate.

That’s what concerns me most about self-objectification. Even when nobody is looking, women can spend years living as though someone is. And while the allegations at Cornell may be an extreme example of women being treated as objects, the habit of looking at ourselves through other people’s eyes is far more ordinary. It’s worth asking how much of our relationship with our bodies actually belongs to us.

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