Ted Audio Collective.
Hi, TED Talks Daily listeners.
I'm Elise Hugh and we're about to do something a bit different for this week's Sunday pick.
You're about to hear a special episode of Vibe Check featuring me.
I sat down with hosts Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford to talk about my book, Flawless.
And I'm so excited to share our discussion with you because we dive into so many things I think are really vital for today.
Beauty standards, body modification and all the ways the internet has changed how we see ourselves.
The episode also features a wonderful TED Talk by Dr.
Lindsay Kite about how body image impacts mental health.
It's a great and funny conversation and I hope it helps you see yourself a little differently.
You can find Vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts and come back to the TED Talks Daily feed each Sunday for another treat from around the TED landscape.
Now onto the episode after a quick break.
Hey lady. Hey group.
I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Zach Stafford.
And you are listening to Vibe Check.
So for those who don't know, Vibe Check is a news and culture podcast hosted by Zach and me and our dear friend Saeed Jones.
But this episode, we have a special collaboration with a very special friend, journalist and podcast host, Elise Hugh.
Elise Hugh is the host of TED Talks Daily.
She is the host of the Forever 35 podcast and she's also a host at large for NPR.
But for this episode that's going to be appearing in multiple feeds, Elise is joining us in Vibe Check land to talk about a topic near and dear to us.
And that is body positivity.
Elise has a book called Flawless Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K -Beauty Capital.
And it's all about her time in South Korea and how that beauty industry is several years ahead of every other nation and how this has toxic and positive effects on all of us and what we think about our own bodies.
Yeah. It's a really great chat.
Someone that loves having these conversations.
And I'm so glad Elise was able to join us today.
And then after that, you're going to hear a TED Talk from Drs.
Lindsay and Lexi Kite about body obsession, body positivity and how it can affect your mental health.
We thought this would be a perfect addition to today's episode.
In fact, the sisters are actually quoted in Elise's book.
All right. So we've got a good one for y 'all.
Let's just get into it.
It's going to be great.
Let's jump in. Yeah, let's do it.
So I always open up Vibe Check by saying, hey, ladies, but this chat, we have two ladies and a mother.
Hey, girls. A mother.
Welcome. We're now plugged into the collab of the summer.
Forget about Deadpool, Wolverine.
This is Ted and Vibe Check.
Yeah. Move over, Charlie XCX and Billie Eilish.
This is Vibe Check Ted Talks Daily.
Yes. I want us to talk a bit about your book, Elise.
But first, in the spirit of Vibe Check, our news and culture podcast where we talk about all the things and how they feel, I want to start by asking you the question we begin every Vibe Check episode with, which is, what's your vibe?
It's not very mindful and not very demure.
Whoa, not demure. So tell us more about that because everyone's demure right now.
We are in a shift. We're in a cultural or a zeitgeist shift right now from brat summer to very mindful, very demure.
And I think it happened in like 12 seconds.
All of a sudden, everybody's very mindful, very demure.
And I can't get down with it.
Like, I'm very scattered and very everywhere.
I'm not mindful. I'm chaotic.
So what I'm hearing is you love brat summer because why can't we just stay there?
So brat fall for everyone.
Can some of us who are not mindful and not demure just like stay in the brat zone?
Like, why do we have to all switch collectively?
I don't like it. Okay.
So your vibe is questioning, questioning the systems and structures.
Which is my general vibe anyway, right?
Wow. That's what I do as a journalist as well.
What's your zodiac sign?
I am Aquarius Sun, Sagittarius Moon, Aries Rising.
Oh my God. So much fire and air and air.
Yeah. Okay. Which only paints fire.
Hot gas. So again, I cannot.
You can't be demure.
I cannot be demure.
I cannot be mindful.
It's not constitutionally possible.
What about you guys?
What's y 'all's vibe?
I am in a hangover from the one and only Missy, Miss Demeter, Elliot.
I'm not actually hungover.
I didn't drink, but I'm just on a hangover from her energy.
I saw her live in Toronto with my mom.
It was amazing. Toronto people love concerts.
I had no idea. I see why Drake has such a big head because you do a show with Toronto.
They love you. They are like, they're excited.
They're like, you crossed the border.
You know why? Because they're bored.
They're bored in Toronto.
Yeah, what else are you doing?
You're going to straight.
Blessings to our Canadian friends, but I've been.
I've been. Yeah, I think there could be some boredom, but we love them.
I love Canada, but they were hyped and they energized me.
So I'm feeling great today.
I'm excited to be talking with the both of you.
Okay. Okay. What about you, Sam?
You know, I am feeling mindful as you both know, because y 'all were at my party.
Y 'all saw me turn 40 this past weekend.
Happy birthday. And after that party at my house, thank you.
Then I headed down to San Diego with two really good friends who came up from Texas just to chill for a few days.
So I'm easing into 40 and maybe the best place to do it, which is San Diego.
Because ain't nobody working too hard down here.
It is chill vibes all the way.
It is chill vibes. So yeah, I'm just like kind of happy about 40 grateful for my health.
A few days before my 40th, my retinol serum ran out and I was like, this is a metaphor.
This is the sign. What does it mean?
And my mindful reaction was, wait to order some more retinol, just like your skin for a little bit.
Feel it. You know, feel it.
So, you know, skin's popping with no chemical aids today.
Look at that. And I'm chilling in San Diego.
So my vibe is mindfully rested.
And glowy. And glowy.
Well, you know, a word I would use and a word that will be a bridge for us today is, Sam, your skin looks flawless.
That's what it looks like.
I see what you did there.
Yeah. You see what I'm doing?
You see what I'm doing?
And Elise, you are flawless because you have a book out now called Flawless.
Lessons and Looks and Culture from the K Beauty Capital.
So let's start there with this chat.
Tell us about your book.
Congrats. I got it weeks ago and it's been like in my house.
Yeah. Flawless is about my time in South Korea.
I was the founding NPR bureau chief in Seoul, South Korea.
And the big thesis of the book is that Korea isn't just like a little bit ahead, but it's five to 10 years ahead when it comes to upgrading our faces and bodies and just bodily modification in general.
And that taught me a lot of lessons about A, not to judge it, because when I first got there and people had post -op bandages on their noses or faces entirely, I was just like, what's up with this?
Why does everybody need to fix themselves?
And then it all just became very normal.
I mean, especially we see on TikTok people like documenting their entire BBLs and other kinds of procedures, like a lot of the things that Korea was doing when it came to injectables.
Injectables, fillers, plastic surgery, major plastic surgery, that all just became globalized and more normalized here in the West like a few years later.
And so it really offered us a window into the future.
And then also Flawless ends up exploring like the ways that beauty culture can be fun, but the ways it can also be toxic.
It's both empowering and disempowering at once.
Yeah. One of the big ideas of the book that changed the way I think about body positivity and changed the way I think about my face and my phone and how it all relates is this concept you write about called the technological gaze.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal.
Right. I mean, feminists and stuff, we've talked about the male gaze forever, the idea that women are supposed to perform for the presumptions and the perspective of men in society and in patriarchies in general.
But the technological gaze is more insidious.
It's the way that we have all learned to perform for the machine, to do it for the algorithm, to know what our feeds are sending us, to read that and then perform as if it's going to lead to more engagement and more friends and more mattering.
And so that's the way in which digital culture is now setting physical body standards.
We're now trying to follow what our filters are teaching us matters.
And this is what makes it so much harder than just trying to look good for a man.
Like the limit does not exist when the gaze is technological.
That's right. Because if you want to look like a filter, you just keep going, right?
You can if you want to.
Totally. Have you seen A .I.'s examples of the perfect male body?
You can go to Mid Journey and just enter in a prompt, The Perfect Male Body 2024.
I can't do it. And it looks like a cyborg.
It's like the veins popping out of the neck.
They're so small. They look like that Reacher actor that was on HGH.
If you can picture this, that's what A .I.
thinks the perfect male body is.
And so that's totally what you were saying, Sam.
It underlines this idea that the limit doesn't exist.
We're just chasing these increasingly dystopian cyborgian standards.
Yeah, and those are being built off of data sources from what we were putting on the internet in the first place.
And a lot of that was trained through.
I used to work at Grindr years ago.
I was the chief content officer.
And I saw when I arrived that how we built our grid system for this app where people were hooking up and meeting each other.
Like literally how our grid was built was a little square.
Your whole body doesn't fit in that square.
Because if your whole body is in it, you can't really see you that well because it's in a larger grid.
So people started focusing on their abs, their pecs, and they started kind of modifying their body, which then they started matching that in the gym to really pump up a certain area so that they were desirable in this grid system.
And now we're seeing A .I.
take those images and be like, this is the ideal form, which of course goes back to Greece and the Roman Empire.
But you know, that brings us to today where specific types of demographics of people are really impacted by these desires for certain types of bodies.
So talk to us about who is really dealing with this most globally right now from your research.
So this is incredibly marginalizing.
The more we play to what data or the algorithms decide is beautiful, the more people can't fit in.
So the more narrow our idea of pretty is, then the wider the pool of ugly becomes.
Damn. Wait, say that again.
Say it again. The more narrow the more narrow our idea of pretty is, then the wider the pool of ugly becomes.
It's incredibly marginalizing.
The more you say, like, this is the ideal height, this is the ideal skin, this is the ideal butt, this is the ideal nose.
The more it's impossible to keep up without a lot of money and interventions, which is what we're seeing in celebrity culture, right?
Like, the people who can keep up are people like the Kardashians who can live in this, like, ethnically ambiguous place of having some body parts from the global south, some facial parts from the global north.
Like, it's this mix and match.
Forget Instagram face.
Now we're in, like, metaverse body.
And it's completely impossible unless you are of the upper, upper, upper class.
So conventionally pretty has now become conventionally rich.
Yeah. I assume with all these beauty standard conversations, it hurts women and young girls the worst.
But I also live in L .A.
and I see the men doing it, too.
Has the rampant nature of the A .I.
and the filter and all of it made this actually a co -ed endeavor?
If we look at Korea as an example, it has become increasingly co -ed.
Already something like 52 % of college -aged women in South Korea report having gotten work done by the time they're in college.
Wow. And that's Korean health ministry data.
But over the last decade or decade and a half, we've seen something like a 70 % jump in men in Korea seeking plastic surgery.
Because the more we fall into this technological gaze and spend our lives on Zooms and spend our lives seeing ourselves in filters, the more it's not gender discriminating.
Everybody is having to do work or everybody is having to keep up.
And it's extremely exhausting not only for people who are getting fat shamed or just stereotyped or whatever because they can't fit in.
It's also exhausting for everybody who can fit in because you're constantly in this race against the constant maintenance.
And if you're supposed to forever stay appearing as if you're somewhere between the ages of 18 and 35, we're all just like inevitably getting older.
So you're investing in your own diminishment, right?
You're investing in your own like the more you participate in it, the more it gets harder to still stay in that range, right?
Because no matter what, our meat space bodies are going to age.
And, you know, at least you're deep in this world, which I feel like means that you're probably thinking about it a lot all day long, which means you can't always be strong enough to say this isn't good or not fall prey to kind of the prowess of these thinking.
So how do you manage yourself through all of this?
Have you found yourself impacted by these standards that you've been studying?
Have you changed practices in your own life to combat them now that you're conscious of them?
Yeah, I mean, it's balancing dualities because I like stuff.
Like so many other girls, I like stuff.
I like trying things out.
And so for me, I have drawn the line at permanence.
So I won't do anything to my body that can't be undone.
And that's actually more and more possible now.
And then also the other thing that I've done that I think has really changed is I just wait a beat.
So just as Sam is like, you know what, I don't have my serum today.
I don't have to wear it.
And just you can stretch that out a little longer.
And then when I wait a beat, I'm sort of like, oh, I don't really have to do that.
I made that decision with Botox.
Like everybody in my friend group is of the age where they're getting Botox.
And I'm just like, I'm just going to wait because if I wait three months, that's like hundreds of dollars saved.
If I wait another three months, that's another hundreds of dollars of saved.
And then eventually I just didn't do it because I was like, whatever, you know, I've like learned to evolve how my body is going to evolve.
And some of that just came with like just sitting with it and not doing anything at all.
So I think that I've started to do in thinking about all of this, you know, looking good for the abs and what I want my body to look like.
I've tried to ask myself whenever I start thinking about how my body should look, I say, all right, what if the real question is not how do I want my body to look, but what do I want my body to be able to do?
And what I really want as I age is for my body to continue to be mobile and healthy.
And so maybe the effort is more in literally flexibility and yoga and aerobic exercise and less in is the face skin looking tight because the face skin cannot carry my nephew.
You know, my cheekbones cannot walk along the beach.
My body does that. And so it's more about like thinking about what my body can do and not how it can look.
Yep. And that really ties into the Kite Sisters Ted Talk because they're like your body is an instrument, not an ornament.
It's not there to be looked at.
It's there for what it can do and what it can feel.
So just to be inclusive of people with different bodily abilities, there's also so much that we can feel too.
Like there's a school of thought that I get to at the very end of Flawless.
It's not body positivity.
It's not body neutrality, like body neutrality I can get with because it's sort of like all bodies are just bodies.
But just to build on what Sam is saying, there's this school of thought called sensualism that really emphasizes what our bodies can do and also what our bodies just feel, you know, like the wind on your face or sexual experiences.
There's like so many great things that can bring us into our bodies and less outside of them and focused on looking over our shoulders and what other people think of us, you know?
Yeah. This is so up Zach's alley because Zach is always so like I'm sorry.
I was a body feel. So at least I'm sitting here being like, I just want to listen.
Like I like exactly how to actually engage in this conversation because I'm like, I love what you're saying.
And why I love it is like listeners have I checked out.
I've talked a lot about my own experiences battling disorder eating my whole life.
I've been in and out of programs since I've been little.
I'm not great. I'm in a wonderful place.
But I love talking about it.
That's also why I love Glennon Doyle, another podcast host because she talks about it a lot.
And something that I know that you've written about, talked about, you've talked about Sam about is about how you talk to your own children about how do they feel in their clothing.
It's not about it's too big.
It's too small. Is it how does it feel?
And that was something I learned as a young person was like, stop looking at the label size because I think it can mean a thousand things depending on where you're at.
It should be about how it feels on the body, which is really radical thinking, right?
At least. Well, especially for somebody like me who used to work at The Gap, you know, trying to be like, oh, it looks cute on you no matter what you can dress it up and dress it down.
Also, Elise won't say this, but I will because we've been friends for a long time.
She used to model clothes.
That's right. I also had my early odds eating disorder.
So let's go girl. And I've also done modeling.
Look at us. There we go.
Products. It's so funny because those of us who went through the early odds, like late 90s early odds, just the crucible of what we were supposed to look like and the fat shaming and like Ali McBeal being big and like all those skinny white ladies.
Even the jeans. No one could wear those blow floor and those whale tails like.
So what I've learned about that now that I'm looking back in the year 2024, it's like all of us who had disordered eating or suffered in one way or the other thought we were so alone when we were going through it.
And then all these elder millennials are now like, oh, wait, I had an eating disorder too.
You too? Like everybody went through it.
And that which says something about kind of culture and the system that we were part of and how fat phobic society was, how baked in diet culture was in our media.
Like it's really pretty bad, but it's also led to a lot of journalism and a lot of like, yeah, I mean, flawless wouldn't exist unless I had to untangle a lot of these things as an adult.
Yeah. And I love that you're untangling them because something I talk a lot with my family about is this feeling when I get online due to all the body modifications, due to how people are talking about their bodies online.
I'm like, girl, everyone has an eating disorder right now.
Like they're talking in ways that has become very normalized within disordered eating communities because that's a whole other, you know, we talk about like the far right and they're like in cell communities online.
There's a whole like disordered eating online community.
The pro Anna stuff is really dangerous.
And you know, we are living in a culture where I look around and I'm like, it's so present in your book, really touch on that, especially with Korea, where I think you pointed out that like even job applications require head shots sometimes with people to apply.
So like, how do people live in this space in which like they may be talking about, like, how does it feel on my body?
How do I have a healthy approach to my body?
But like your job is saying you need to look a certain way.
Yeah, and we're still hopping on zoom meetings all the time and seeing our face.
It's still happening, you know, I know.
It's really hard when it's baked in.
So this idea of like looks based discrimination, appearance based discrimination, is called look ism.
We don't use the term very much in the US, but any of us who have ever been made fun of for our looks have been victims of lookism.
And so there are more regulations now in South Korea to try and stop the practice of it at the economic level at the social and political level.
So like government ministries, you cannot require a headshot on resumes anymore and then they kind of outlawed it later.
But there used to be like the labor department in South Korea had put out a tweet saying like the ideal way to look for your job interviews is to have a seabed cup broth.
Are you serious? Yeah, and they ended up having to pull that down, but like that was normalize.
So now there are more regulations, there are more people speaking up.
There is more activism around it.
But it's tough. It's it's an uphill battle because the logic is like, oh, if you can look better, why don't you?
It's just like it would be easier for you to be prettier.
So why don't you just fix that thing?
And so there's not a lot of like questioning of that logic.
But I have said again and again that while this can alleviate anxieties for us individually to try and like look better and fit, it's not good collectively, right?
Just as the solution to homophobia isn't to make everyone straight and the solution to racism isn't to make everyone white, even though it might be easier in a white dominant culture.
The solution to fat phobia isn't to make everyone skinny and the solution to lookism isn't to make everyone interchangeably pretty.
And so it's actually the opposite, right?
It's to detangle our appearance from our word and it's to celebrate diversity and difference and like teach that just to go back to your question, Zach, to teach that in our children.
It's like to get them to see more naked bodies and art, you know, when they're older, I'll take them to like the Korean bath houses where you can like see that everybody else has like little ponches of fat and long bodies and short bodies and like everybody is different.
And old bodies that are allowed.
Old bodies. Exactly.
So some of it is just exposure.
All right. Time for a quick break, but stay tuned.
We'll be right back.
All right. We are back and now we're going to jump back into our conversation with Elise Hugh.
Speaking of your kids, who I've met, they're all great and seem incredibly well adjusted.
But you have three daughters navigating all of this.
When you see them falling into the trap of the technological gaze or whatever, what is the first thing you say, the first question you ask, the first intervention when you see it happening?
It's to ask questions.
It's sort of like what you get that idea because they've already gotten the idea that fat is bad.
It's like not good to call somebody fat or it's not good to be fat.
And I'm like, wait, why don't you think that?
Like, where did you learn that?
Why do you think that in the first place?
And then we kind of just emphasize that.
And this is something that I have to constantly emphasize with myself, too, that all bodies are worthy and all bodies deserve to be safe and all bodies matter so much of parenting as I've gotten more used to it.
I'm still not quite used to it.
People are always surprised.
I have children due to my general chaos.
But they're like, Elise is the only mother of three I know who will shut down a party.
You can do it. You can do it.
We love her always.
Go ahead. Last week, my Gen Z slash Gen Alpha Cusper was like, why are you a child stuck in a millennial's body?
Anyway, so what I have learned, though, is like they do what you do.
They don't necessarily like do what you say.
And so you really have to model it.
So it means I have to do the work of like not being bodily focused and not being so like weight obsessed like my mother was.
My mother was very weight obsessed.
And it's like, I wonder why I thought these things I did when I was a teenager.
You know, so a lot of it is modeling.
And then a lot of it is just like getting curious with the kids and just talking to them and then giving them lots of exposure of different bodies.
Because I think the problem with kids on social media, you could also just keep them off of social media, which is that's another big movement right now, right?
Like a phone free childhood.
And so we kind of have like a family iPad that they can get on.
But it's generally supervised.
Like my daughters don't have phones yet, even though my oldest is in sixth grade now.
But yeah, like one of the problems with just kids being on social media is that they are shown the same looking people and they are given the same suite of features on their filters.
And so it's like active work to try and widen the lens.
I like that widening the lens is such a great way of thinking of it, because what you're asking them to do at the end of the day is to celebrate their own uniqueness.
And the thing that makes them special and not think just because I see it on my TikTok, like I should be like that, or just because I see it on my Instagram feed, I have to look like that.
And I think, you know, when I go online, I'm like, God, does every man have a six pack and pecs the size of, you know, melons?
And because I go out in the world, I'm like, that's not true, that that's not most people.
And I think you have to sit in your own body, sit in your own reality and make sure you're looking at the world in a wide view and not just this really focused alchirithmic view that is just giving you the same body over and over, which is what we brought up in the beginning.
So it's so so good.
And the truth is not all of us want those six packs too.
Like all of us were born with different preferences.
Give me a man with a beer gut.
That's hot. Yeah, well, I'm sorry for speaking my truth.
Everybody knows I'm super into bears.
I used to go to Bear Week in D .C.
That's my favorite subculture of the day.
Oh my god, police. And some Goldilocks in here.
So Sam and I have similar taste in men.
We're going to Bear Week next year, Elise.
Yeah, we are. It's time.
It's been on my bucket list.
Yeah. It is. Like we all are very different.
And then we up until the age of three like different things we find different, attractive and compelling.
But research has indicated that by the age of three, we start to normalize or we start to change our preferences to whatever other people seem to like.
Wow. And so even though like my default is to like bigger guys who are pudgier, media told me that I was supposed to like be into Zach Morris and blonde guys, even though that wasn't really what my natural preference was when I was a child before I had like social inputs telling me what I was supposed
to be like. Yeah. And what's amazing about this timeline you're giving out from my understanding around, you know, gender and psychology of young children is around that same time of three is when gender becomes a more concretized concept to kids.
And they are like, oh, that's what we call gender play from like three to nine ish.
And that's where you see the emergence of like, Tom girl is a term used for like kindergarten girls that are wearing overalls.
And it's because kids are just playing and testing and getting feedback from their decisions because they go to the playground, they're wearing overalls and the kid says, ew, that's gross or I love that.
And then it forms their identity.
So yeah, that's such a critical moment which you're supposed to say to kids like play feel good in your body, figure out what feels good and don't shame each other because it can have really bad long term effects on them.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is also good.
We got a wrap soon, but I want you to once more tell our listeners and yours to the name of your book and where to find it, which is I hope everywhere.
Yes, it's coming out in Polish soon.
Okay. If you read English, it's everywhere you get books.
It's called flawless lessons in looks and culture from the K beauty capital by me Elise Hugh, obviously support your indie bookstores if he can.
But yeah, you can get it everywhere you get books.
And then you can find me on the podcasts, Ted talks daily and forever 35.
Amazing. And then our final question for you today.
What is something you recommend to listeners to read, watch, engage something that's important to you or keeping your vibe right right now.
Okay, so it is now in national theatrical release in the US, a movie called sugar cane.
It is a documentary about the Native American residential schools that Native American children were sent to for essentially reeducation to try and the quote was like, let's teach the Indian out of them.
And it's just completely tragic.
There were at least 400 in the US.
There was hundreds in Canada as well.
And my friends, Emily Cassie and Julian brave noise cat got together to investigate sort of what has happened after the closure of one of these schools that really ran until the eighties or nineties.
And then the movie in January and then National Geographic picked it up and now I think it's in major cities, but the movie is called sugar cane.
It sounds like it would be dark and bleak, but instead, it's epic and intimate and thrilling to watch.
And it's just also such an important story and such an important part of American history that I think that we often didn't get taught.
So I have a lighter recommendation, but I think like what's really on my heart right now is to recommend sugar cane to you all.
I Googled it as we're talking.
It looks incredible.
And if you're living in Canada, it is available ever in Canada right now.
I'm recording in Canada.
So it prioritize those, but it is wide as of this week and it is in most major cities.
It looks incredible.
Wow. It's gonna be longlisted for the Oscar if not nominated.
So get in on it now.
Yeah, get in early.
Get on the sugar cane train.
Well, listen, this was such a fun little key key.
I love this crossover collab moment, this multinational crossover collab moment with Zach and Toronto for it.
Yes. We're covering the continent.
We really are. Or 66 % of it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Check out Ted Talks Daily.
Check out Forever 35.
Check out VibeJack.
And thanks to everyone for listening.
Thanks y 'all. And thank you, Elise.
Yes. Enjoy. So fun.
We're gonna take one more quick break, but don't go anywhere.
We'll be right back.
We're back. And now we're going to listen to a Ted Talk from Drs.
Lindsay and Lexi Kite.
As a competitive swimmer starting in early elementary school, my perception of my body or my body image was shaped by my physical abilities and experiences.
By high school, that had changed.
At age 15, after years of swim meets and daily practices, doing something I loved and was good at, I quit.
I didn't quit because I hated swimming.
I quit because I hated the way I looked in my swimsuit.
So for years, I hid myself.
And I tried relentlessly to fix myself.
But despite all my best efforts, I never felt truly swimsuit worthy.
What I didn't realize at the time is that my body was never the problem.
The problem was my body image.
So when I sat in a classroom my freshman year of college and learned for the first time about the ways women's bodies are objectified and distorted in media, it shook me.
And it woke me up to a lot of the ways I had suffered and held myself back because my self worth and my body image were completely defined by my appearance.
An appearance that never did and never quite could live up to those cultural ideals.
Understanding this problem of negative body image and how to fix it became my academic and personal passion.
And I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when my college roommate discovered that same passion because we not only shared a tiny dorm room, we also shared all of our DNA.
My twin sister, Lexi, and I have been working together to promote positive body image since 2009 when we started our PhDs and founded the nonprofit Beauty Redefined.
Our approach to body image is a bit different than most because we are working to redefine not just the look of beauty, but its meaning and value in our lives.
Over the last 15 years or so, lots of well -meaning people and companies have worked to improve women's body image by pushing the message that all women are beautiful, flaws in all.
This is a really nice message, but it isn't fixing the problem.
That's because girls and women aren't only suffering because of the unattainable ways beauty is being defined.
They are suffering because they are being defined by beauty.
They are bodies first and people second.
So rather than working to make sure more women's bodies are viewed as valuable, we are focused on making sure women are valued as more than bodies to view.
Our work is founded on the premise that positive body image isn't believing your body looks good.
It's knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.
We have to be able to see more in ourselves and everyone else.
Only then can we move on and be able to be more.
More than objects. More than beautiful.
More than a body. We can start this process by learning to see the invisible shame that is a normal part of most of our lives.
And that starts with body fixation.
Whether you feel like a perfect ten or a troll, if you're constantly thinking about your appearance, you're falling into this trap called self objectification.
Even if you've never heard of this concept before, it's going to sound completely familiar to most girls and women, and increasingly more boys and men.
It feels like a mental task list that badgers you as you move throughout your day.
If left to its own devices, mine sounds something like this.
Okay, adjust your shirt, adjust your skirt.
I see those people are looking at me, so I'm going to give them my best angles.
Make sure I suck it in.
Oh, chin up. I feel that double chin creeping in.
Now I have to readjust my shirt, readjust my skirt, and continue this process until you die.
Self objectification is the process of monitoring your body from an outsider's perspective, picturing what you look like all day, even when no one is looking at you.
Studies show if girls and women are in a state of self objectification, they perform worse on math and reading comprehension tests.
They can't throw a softball as hard, or run as far, or lift as heavy of weights as they can when they're not self -conscious of their bodies.
If even a small part of your mental energy is constantly dedicated to your looks, you are at a disadvantage.
And this problem of self objectification goes hand in hand with negative body image.
About three quarters of the women in our dissertation studies felt very negatively toward their bodies.
And almost all of them were also self objectifying.
This was especially clear in the way they answered the first question I asked.
How do you feel about your body?
One woman said, I feel like I'm too fat, or not skinny enough for the world today.
I feel like I'm not good enough for my husband because of my body.
Another woman said, it's never looked how I wanted it to.
There's cellulite, scars, veins, things I try hard to keep hidden.
As you can hear, these women are describing their feelings about their own bodies as if they are outside viewers looking at themselves.
It is incredibly difficult to feel good about your body if you are judging it solely based on appearance, especially over time and especially considering these unattainable ideals we're up against.
But some women do feel good about their bodies, and we need to figure out how.
Even when you feel positively toward your body, if you are thinking about it in terms of appearance, that's likely to change over time.
So we need to understand how we can move on and not only redefine beauty for ourselves in ways that are better for our health, but redefine health for ourselves in ways that have nothing to do with beauty.
Too many of us are judging our own fitness in ways that have a lot to do with how we look and very little to do with our actual health.
But studies show a person's level of physical activity is actually a much better indicator of their health and fitness than their body mass index, their weight, their size, and any other external measurement.
If we really understood this, health and fitness could become something so much more achievable and even empowering.
We would be able to focus on how we feel, what our bodies can do, and our internal vitals and health, rather than getting so hung up on whether we have six -pack abs or can fit into those old jeans in the back of our closets we don't care about.
This is definitely a huge paradigm shift for most people, but I like to simplify it and summarize it using my favorite beauty redefined mantra.
My body is an instrument, not an ornament.
Once we can see more in ourselves than ornaments to be looked at, we can move on to being more.
In our body -obsessed culture, this is hard, but some women do feel good about their bodies, regardless of how they look.
So again, how is this possible?
Our work at Beauty Redefined is based on what we found by asking that question.
When we looked at the women who felt good about their bodies, we found they often had one thing in common.
They also described very painful experiences that had either created or magnified their body shame at some point.
This pointed us to a hopeful process and a theoretical model called body image resilience.
Through this process, some women grow stronger and love their bodies more, not just in spite of the pain they experience, but because of what they learn through that pain.
This is possible because those painful experiences can work as disruptions to our body image, pushing us out of our comfort zones that might be filled with self -objectification and shame.
I say comfort zone because those things are normal for too many of us, but they are anything but comfortable.
A body image disruption changes that because it changes the way you perceive and relate to your own body.
So whether your disruption is being made fun of, being sexually assaulted, having a baby, or putting on a swimsuit, we all respond in some way to deal with the shame that those things stir up.
Our research identified three possible paths people take in response to a body image disruption.
The first path sinks us deeper into shame through harmful coping mechanisms like self -harm, disordered eating, and abuse of alcohol or drugs.
A 13 -year -old girl shared her example with me of initially sinking into this first path.
She said, I used to cut myself.
Well, my last time doing that was yesterday, but I did it because I was bullied every day about my looks.
I was told that no one would ever like me because of the way I looked.
Just like this heartbreaking example, if your response to a disruption numbs you but ultimately leaves you worse off than before, it fits into this first and worst response path.
The second path keeps us clinging to those uncomfortable comfort zones through hiding and fixing.
Hiding by avoiding events, situations, and activities where you don't want to be looked at.
And fixing by trying to change your appearance in some way to cope with shame, whether that's through a liquid -only detox or liposuction.
Even after I quit swimming and spent years fixing my supposed flaws or hiding them successfully, I still never felt any better about my body.
That's because this second path doesn't allow you to fight against body shame.
It simply helps you adapt to it by dressing it up or walking it away to deal with later.
Since shame and body fixation are such normal parts of so many of our comfort zones, it's likely that we don't even realize when we are reacting to those issues.
So sinking deeper into shame and clinging to our comfort zones are probably just our defaults and not deliberate choices.
But no matter how many times you have found yourself on one of these two paths, it is always possible to recognize your disruptions and respond to them in a better way.
For some of you, listening to me speak right now could be a body image disruption, because my words might be shining a light on the shame you've grown numb to, or the self -objectification you've never lived without.
That's what happened for that 13 -year -old girl I mentioned just a moment ago.
In the midst of her long detour on that first path with self -harm, she reluctantly attended a beauty redefined event where we spoke about how to develop body image resilience.
And she wrote to us afterward saying, I thought you would say, you guys are all so beautiful and then go home, but you helped me see that I'm worth so much more than how I look to other people.
Like you guys said, I can either use my experiences to make me or break me, and I'm going to use them to make me a stronger, more compassionate person.
I am so much more than what is on the outside.
I'm going to work on believing that.
And she did get to work on believing that.
She started practicing the strategies we recommended in that event, and she stopped cutting herself.
She sent us excited updates at 24 days and then 45 days with no self -harm, and then months and now years later, saying it had been very difficult.
But she was receiving professional help and working to help others with similar pain by posting uplifting quotes around her school.
As soon as she was able to see the self -objectification that had been sinking her deeper into shame, she was able to see more in herself and then fight to be more.
That day, she chose a better path, the third path, and started rising with body image resilience.
It took me years of clinging to my own comfort zone, refusing to swim before I was able to find that better path.
All through high school and college, just being invited to go swimming had become a regular body image disruption in my life, one I always responded to by hiding and fixing.
So at age 21, when my friends and my boyfriend invited me to go swim at a lake on a perfect summer day, I responded to that little disruption the same way I always did.
Without even thinking about it, I automatically fired off all my best excuses to hide while I mentally made plans to fix myself so I could go next time.
But that day, those standard excuses rang hollow to even me.
They almost felt like self -betrayal, because I realized that despite what I was hearing myself say out loud, I really did want to go.
In that moment, I caught my first glimpse of the way I had been drowning in body shame, even as I had avoided the water for years.
I stood there in my bathroom alone, and I did some serious self -reflection.
And I decided I was going to face my disruption in a new way, head on.
I quietly worked up the courage to put on a swimsuit, and I tried so hard to not care that everyone could see me as I hesitantly waded into that lake.
But that care, that exhausting self -objectification, washed away the moment I immersed myself in the water.
As I swam my first few strokes in years, I was overwhelmed with this familiar feeling that I was powerful, I was capable.
I was able to see how I had been on this endless loop of trying to fix my body that never needed to be fixed.
In order to do something, I never stopped being able to do.
I was still a swimmer, and any fear I had about how I looked that day disappeared because I was finally experiencing my body as an instrument for my use rather than an ornament to be looked at.
I had tried for so long to qualify to swim without shame, but it was only when I could see my shame and choose to swim against it that I was able to find that better path.
The third path to the brave new world of body image resilience.
That path has become my passion, and in the ten years since that experience, earning a PhD with my twin sister along the way, I've worked to help others understand and tap into their own power to face body image disruptions and come out stronger for it.
Developing body image resilience is a continuous ongoing process, but the crucial first step is what we are already doing right now.
We're learning to see more.
We have to be able to see more in our media and cultural messages that objectify and distort our views of beauty, health, and individual worth.
Only then can we see more in everyone around us, and especially in ourselves.
When we can see more, we can be more.
More than objects. More than beautiful.
More than a body. See more by redefining beauty for yourself.
Be more by refusing to be defined by beauty.
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