P
erhaps one of the most cursed
images a young woman can con-
jure is the female dressing room
— the one tucked in the backstage corner
of every theatre, dance studio and concert
hall. With its taunting mirrored walls and
the rancid stenches of burnt hair and the
nervous sweat only starved teenage girls
can produce, the place is hellish in the
most basic sense.
Having grown up doing theatre and
competitive show choir, I’ve experienced
that hairspray-scented inferno countless
times. Girls in dressing rooms like to act
as though they’re unbothered by the hor-
ror of it all — the sheepish undressing and
anxious glances in floor-length mirrors,
frantically stuffing your clothes in the
deepest corners of the room so no one sees
how ugly your underwear is or how enor-
mously-sized your jeans are. But, no mat-
ter how strong you like to think you are,
the hyper-consciousness we, as women,
already feel toward our bodies increases
ten-fold the moment we walk through
that door. We know that the quicker we
undress, the less time other girls have to
observe our stomach rolls or our stretch
marks or, God forbid, that one patch of
cellulite on your left thigh that no exfoli-
ant can seem to alleviate. So, to minimize
the gaze of the observer, you move like
your life depends on it and get out of there
as fast as you can.
I thought I had escaped this unfor-
giving landscape when I graduated high
school. I was wrong.
I was sitting in my third — but what
felt like my ninetieth — Zoom class of the
week when I took in the image of our vir-
tual classroom, with its stacked profiles
and rows of women staring into their re-
flection. A moment of clarity came over
me as I realized what it really resembled:
A dressing room — that horrific call to my
girlhood.
Zoom’s rectangular profiles act as the
room’s mirrored walls. We may be in class,
listening and participating, but we’re also
primping. The girl mid-center fixes her
hair there, then another girl on the bot-
tom left corner adjusts her glasses. An-
other quickly sits more upright when she
sees the look of her slouched posture in
the camera.
As my professor went on about the
class syllabus, all I could think about was
this dystopian-looking and completely de-
pressing grid of reflections: girls primp-
ing, then fixing, then checking, then fixing
again. And I was doing it too — obsessively
fixing my bangs, turning over my necklac-
es until they fell at the perfect spot on my
chest, using the camera to analyze wheth-
er or not I was smiling enough in class.
We were fidgeting robots, adhering to the
automated voices in our head telling us to
move our head, fix that one stray strand
of hair, smile a bit more — anything to ap-
pease the cameras in front of us. We were
stuck in a figurative dressing room, bound
only by the strength of our internet con-
nection, hyperconscious of our appear-
ance, fixated on the reflections we saw.
So why do we fidget and primp our way
through virtual classes?
Believe it or not, the narrative of wom-
en as vain creatures originated long be-
fore the time of cameras and video calls.
A woman staring into a mirror — an im-
age so sacred — is the product of centuries
of historical, psychological and socio-po-
litical precedent — even Shakespeare was
gifting us with sonnets about vanity, beau-
ty and fertility as captured by a woman’s
reflection.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
American psychologists assigned ter-
minology to this enduring phenomenon
when they explored the notion of the
“looking-glass self,” which asserts that
a person’s sense of self is partially con-
structed by how others perceive them.
While initial theorizing mostly mused
on the non-physical sense of self, in later
years there was a greater focus on the idea
of the looking-glass self as applied to how
women view our physical bodies.
Enter feminist theorist Simone de
Beauvoir. Beauvoir argued that “when a
girl becomes a woman, she becomes dou-
bled; so instead of existing only within
herself, she also exists outside herself.”
Thus, once she enters womanhood, the
adolescent girl is socialized to “exist out-
side herself,” or in other terms, objectify
herself as others — usually men — would
objectify her.
The psychological study of women’s
self-objectification
gained
significant
momentum when Barbara L. Fredrickson
of the University of Michigan and Tomi-
Ann Roberts of Colorado College gave
this doubled womanly existence a name
and a reason: objectification theory. The
conjecture proposes that girls and women
tend to internalize a third-person per-
spective — an observer’s perspective — as
the principal view of their physical bod-
ies. This internalized perspective can lead
to shame (woohoo!), anxiety (fun!), self-
disgust (sounds about right) and behavior
of constant adjusting that psychologists
like to call “habitual body monitoring.”
Sounds familiar? That’s because this
kind of obsessive preening is taking place
in every Zoom call across campus, where
you’re forced to stare at — and scrutinize
— yourself in the camera for hours at a
time.
LSA freshman Rebekah Turner told The
Daily how she has become accustomed to
this very kind of behavior.
“The first week of classes, I didn’t nec-
essarily feel pressure to look good for
Zoom, but I could constantly see myself
playing with my hair and looking at my-
self,” Turner said. “It is distracting think-
ing, ‘Oh, is my hair good? ... Should I do
my makeup?’ I feel like I stare at myself a
lot and think, ‘Oh, I look so bad.’”
We’re constantly trying to assume the
perspective of this imaginary, third-per-
son observer. And Zoom simply digitizes
this experience.
Turner said, “For my PoliSci class,
there’s like 200 people there. It’s hard be-
cause I’m thinking, ‘Oh, is someone look-
ing at me right now?’”
The way your female classmates check
their profile image throughout Zoom lec-
tures is not based on some shallow, girl-
ish tendency to obsess over their appear-
ance. It’s rooted in a deeply misogynistic
notion we’re fed that our identity and our
value rests entirely on how we are physi-
cally perceived by others. These enduring
effects of self-objectification by women
means sexism endures, deeply embedded
in the subconscious.
Turner summarized this experience in
a few words: “(On Zoom,) you really are
sitting in front of a mirror for an hour and
a half,” she said.
I interviewed two other random stu-
dents on the Diag about their Zoom expe-
rience, and the similarities between their
remarks and Turner’s are striking.
Public Health junior Reem Farjo said,
“I am definitely more aware of my appear-
ance than when I was in in-person classes.
It’s like if I showed up to class with a mir-
ror.”
LSA freshman Gabi Skinner concluded
with, “(On Zoom,) it’s like you’re sitting
in front of a mirror, with 200 other mini-
mirrors, so comparison is really, really
easy.”
In Zoom classes, in dressing rooms,
walking down a dark street, walking
through a crowded lecture hall, we’re
there and we’re outside ourselves, observ-
ing, self-criticizing, listening to our sub-
conscious as we adjust appropriately, with
a swift brush of the hair or tucking of the
shirt, with a rapid Chapstick application
or adjustment of our dress strap. We’re
fixing like robots — like the very pixels
making up your Zoom screens. This time
around, virtual learning means we have
a monitor to keep track of this obsessive
primping and the habitual body monitor-
ing. Just don’t call it laughable, don’t call
it a distraction. Call it what it is: Sexism
that endures and a true feminist issue.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
15 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020
statement
BY GRACE TUCKER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
Why Zoom reflections are
a feminist issue