This may be because being aware of your appearance has benefits, despite the risk of self-objectification and the harms it brings. Turning off self-view is easy to do and may help some people, but many others - including us - feel that this puts them at a disadvantage. This hides your image from yourself but not others. One way to reduce the negative effects of endless video meetings is to use the “hide self-view” function during online interactions. Facial dissatisfaction also seems to play a role in Zoom fatigue, with women across all races reporting higher levels of Zoom fatigue than their male counterparts.įor better or worse, the virtualization of daily life is here to stay. One study found that the more time women who are focused on their looks spent on video calls, the less satisfied they were with their appearance. While we are not aware of any research directly exploring the connection between video meetings and self-objectification, some recent studies suggest that our concerns are well-founded. High levels of this self-objectification can be associated with mental health consequences, including disordered eating, increased anxiety over one’s appearance and depression. In some women, self-objectification can become the default way of thinking of themselves and navigating the world. We found that the more a woman was focused on her appearance, the less connection there was between the amount of clothing she was wearing and how cold she felt. To test this, we asked women how cold they felt while standing outside nightclubs and bars on chilly nights. In a paper we published in 2021, our team showed that women who think of themselves as objects have difficulty recognizing their own body temperature. One study showed that girls who were prone to self-objectification were less physically coordinated than girls who showed less self-objectification. This can cause worse motor performance as well as difficulty recognizing one’s own emotional and bodily states. Self-objectification also leads women to, in a sense, distance themselves from their own bodies. Other research has shown that when women think of themselves as objects, they speak less in mixed gender groups. In the aforementioned study, trying on a swimsuit produced feelings of shame among women, which in turn led to restrained eating. Men’s math performance was not affected by this objectifying experience.įurther, experiencing objectification has behavioral and physiological consequences. In a seminal study conducted in 1998, researchers showed that when women put on a new swimsuit and viewed themselves in a mirror, the self-objectification this produced caused women to perform poorly on math problems. Research suggests that experiencing self-objectification is cognitively taxing for women. While these experiences with self-objectification lead both women and men to focus on their appearance, women tend to face many more negative consequences. Thinking of yourself as an object can lead to changes in a person’s behavior and physical awareness, and has also been shown to negatively affect mental health in a number of ways. When you log in to a virtual meeting, you are essentially doing all of these things at once. Research has shown that being near a mirror, taking a picture of oneself and feeling that one’s appearance is being evaluated by others all increase self-objectification.
Researchers investigate self-objectification in experimental studies by having study participants focus on their appearance and then measure cognitive, emotional, behavioral or physiological outcomes. Consequently, women self-objectify, treating themselves as objects to be looked at. Because women and girls are socialized in a culture that prioritizes their appearance, they internalize the idea that they are objects. It’s not surprising that women’s bodies are treated as objects far more often than men’s. Advertisements are rife with examples of this, where close-ups of certain body parts are often shown to help market a product, such as a bottle of cologne graphically nestled between a woman’s breasts. This often comes in the form of sexual objectification, where bodies and body parts are seen as separate from the person to which they are attached. Objectification is a bit of a buzzword, but the meaning is rather literal: being seen or treated as an object.