Women are more than just bodies. See more. Be more.”
This is the powerful message Lexie and Lindsay Kite promote to young girls.
Lexie and Lindsay Kite, co-founders of Beauty Redefined, advocate for body image acceptance by teaching about the effects of self-objectification.
Specialising in the study of media representation of women and female body image, the Kite sisters explain how the portrayal of women and representations of beauty in the media often translates to objectification of others and ourselves. Lexie and Lindsay Kite assert that women often base their perception of their self-worth on what their bodies look like as opposed to what their bodies can do.
Lindsay claims that girls and women who are in a state of self-objectification perform worse on maths and reading comprehension tests than girls and women who are not fixated on how they look.
Similarly, All Woman Project is a foundation aiming to better the lives of girls and women worldwide, by displaying true, beautiful, positive and unretouched images of women in photo and video campaigns throughout the year. Their aim is to tackle self-objectification by challenging unrealistic ideas of beauty represented in the media.
(image from #Iamallwomen project)
Self-objectification has been associated with a decline in well-being, increased depressive symptoms, increased self-harm, and increased disordered eating. In other words, self-objectification is harmful and restrictive – the antithesis of empowerment.
For these reasons, Beauty Redefined is calling on women everywhere to see more by redefining beauty for themselves and be more by refusing to be defined by beauty.
“Progress for all of society requires valuing women for more than our parts — not simply expanding the definition of which parts are valuable”.
Beauty Redefined explains how some campaigns promoting self-esteem can encourage self-objectification by valuing beauty through sexualisation. Similar to Collective Shout’s campaigns, Beauty Redefined promotes the idea that objectification leads to the illusion that women and girls must conform to unattainable standards in order to be accepted by society.
Beauty Redefined claims that moving away from our self-objectification culture involves a “paradigm shift”. The first step is recognising and resisting messages in our everyday lives that objectify and distort our views of beauty, health, and individual worth. Being aware of self-talk that sounds like remarks made by an outsider and shifting these is the second.
Please join Collective Shout in our commitment to protecting girls and young women from sexual objectification by signing up today.