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Women often learn to see and judge their bodies through other people's eyes.

Self-objectification can contribute to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.

Shifting attention from how our bodies look to how they feel can help challenge self-objectification.

The allegations in the Cornell 7 case have come up in my therapy sessions again and again over the past few weeks. While the specifics of the discourse varies from client to client, what I consistently hear in their reactions is recognition. Women know what it feels like to have their bodies treated as objects to be looked at and used. That experience is much older than the events at one fraternity house, and it shapes how many women relate to their own bodies every day.

Women have been pushing back against having their bodies judged for generations. In 1968, feminists protesting the Miss America pageant crowned a live sheep to make a point about women being judged like livestock. Nearly 60 years later, women are still being evaluated, and criticized, based on their appearance.

The standards may have changed somewhat, but the expectation that women's bodies are open to public scrutiny and judgment remains intact.

Learning to watch yourself

In 1997, psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts gave this a name: Objectification theory proposed that girls who grow up being watched and commented on can eventually take that outside view in and start monitoring their own bodies the way an observer would. They called this phenomenon self-objectification. People of every gender experience objectification, including men and nonbinary people. I'm focusing on women here because of the long history of judging women by their appearance, and because much of the research has focused on them.

A year later, Fredrickson and her colleagues published a study I still think about. College students tried on either a swimsuit or a........

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