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

