Objectify This

Are women’s magazines bad for women?

It might seem like a stupid question. But when, as the New York Times reports, a University of Missouri study “found that looking at women’s magazines for 1-3 minutes had a negative impact on women’s self esteem. So imagine what happens if we’re bombarded by these images every day.”

This suggests that women (and probably men, too, although the data just indicate women) compare themselves to airbrushed images.

Its not just inference that leads me to believe that these harmful messages also affect men – the alarming op-ed also states, “According to a 2002 New York Times article about body-conscious athletes, boys as young as 10 are “bulking up with steroids.”"

The attempted equation of the real self with the unreal image is a hallmark of self-objectification– a treatment of the self as an object, rather than a subject with agency. I would not doubt that a similar process occurs in racial or ethnic minorities surroundedby images of the majority. Self-objectification is also known as internalized repression. (For an earlier discussion of this, check out I, Fembot: Subject and Object Revisited.)

Here’s the full video essay at the New York Times Op-Ed Videos. Hat tip to Jon for the tip off.

The point this video makes is that Keats was wrong, at least today. It’s no longer “Truth is beauty, beauty truth,” but that by immersing ourselves in the idealization of a specific beauty, we subject ourselves to its complementary condemnation of everything that is not-that. And if our standards of beauty are unrealistic, the entire world becomes a little uglier.

Our everyday truth becomes informed by the idea that this recognizeable beauty is the beauty, is the only real beauty. Yet, as the video indicates, this “real beauty” is not real at all. If we are to see beauty in the true, we must start by revaluing the true, and recognizing and celebrating it’s power.