Oversexualization of women: How it affects mental health
The following article is inspired by my research around Sexual Human Trafficking and the Ted Talk “The dangerous ways ads see women” by Jean Kilbourne (which I highly recommend).
The Male Gaze in Art History and the Media
Graphics: Sóley Ylja A. Bartsch
One needs to take just a simple look at the history of art to see that women have forever been portrayed as beautiful. Only in short-lived, realistic art movements have they been pictured as old or ugly; the vast majority of women’s presence has been an idealistic view of how men would like them to look.
The so-called “male gaze” is a pop culture analytic term that expresses how women have been presented in a way that pleases the male heterosexual audience. Whether that is hypersexual or completely innocent, women have generally been materialized on the screens as caricatures of the real humans behind this gender with little to no substance. Only in recent years have we started having more in-depth female characters written by women.
My question is if all these years we have been presented with how women should look and behave through the male gaze, how do we know that women nowadays present their real needs, thoughts, emotions and imaginations without any trace of the male gaze? How do we know that women today are really free to be themselves without still expressing some forms of past male-dominant societal norms?
In my personal opinion, we still haven’t moved past these pictures. How could we after all? Female voices have only been present for very few years compared to how long the history of humanity has existed, and the thoughts and needs of the population that identifies as female are still affected by idealized pictures of the male mind. This is why I believe many have pointed out how the over-sexualization of women has so many negative effects on them.
The societal pressure to be sexy
There are many problems with over sexualization, many of which have been pointed out way before this article was written. Some of said problems are its sexist nature and how women are objectified within this concept. However, in this article, I would like to bring the focus to the external pressure that many self-identified women feel from society to be sexy at all times. Somehow and for some reason, in many countries of the West, women have to be sexy no matter what they do, even if they walk, or speak or just bend over to reach something. Even if they don’t want to be sexy their bodies can be sexualized at any given time and at any point within their day for no apparent reason. If a woman is too hot and she is wearing a pair of shorts she will easily gain stares, whispers or even comments on her body, even if she just wants to not be hot. This often leads to anxiety to either “perform” their gender (ie. “be sexy to be a woman”) or fear of getting scrutinized for no reason just because they exist.
Graphics: Sóley Ylja A. Bartsch
The perfect image that doesn’t exist
Another important problem of the over-sexualization of the female body is that it is pictured in a perfect state at all points. The female body is viewed from every angle and inch and it is illustrated as perfect in every form and shape. Nowadays this is even more apparent since we have filters for videos and famous people who “beautify” themselves every other week with some kind of surgery or through other processes. I don’t believe there is a single real image that is not edited in some way online. Needless to say that this often causes depression, insecurity and other negative emotions to everyday people who cannot demonstrate this unnatural perfection. It is also devastating for many women to age, because we rarely see images of older women let alone portrayed in a positive and attractive light. Therefore, women are often set against two major forces: nature and time. No wonder they cannot win.
How to reach beyond the image
I believe that in order to save future generations from low self esteem, anxiety and body dysmorphia we need to start educating people of all genders and present more realistic images on social media. There is nothing wrong with editing pictures lightly to make them more attractive. Neither is it wrong to write stories with more idealistic characters. Fantasy is often a very sweet escape from the anxiety of real life and it should be part of society at all times. However, I do believe that these oversexualized perfect images that are presented everywhere at all times have negatively affected the self esteem of many people. It is just unnatural to ask someone to look extremely good at all times no matter what they do and, unfortunately, a good amount of people feel inadequate because they believe they should really strive to look this good at all times and at all ages.
I would also like to return to the point of oversexualization of women in their everyday routines. It is important to start presenting the female body as something natural; something which hasn’t happened until now. Women’s bodies always have to symbolize something, whether that is innocence, motherhood or sex. It cannot exist as a natural thing within the society that we have created due to the history of connotations it has had up until now. This is why many women can just go on with their day and have strangers comment on them out of the blue.
To stop the above, we need to teach the generations that are to come that the female body is something natural and its main goal is to provide a physical presence for the person that has it and not to satisfy the likings of anyone around it. It should be sexualized only when the person who inhabits it wishes to be presented as sexual and not when others just decide that they want to view it as such.