The psychology of appearance
After
participating in a discussion about immigration on BBC TV's Question
Time in January, Professor Mary Beard was subjected to a torrent of
"truly vile" online abuse that she described as the kind of comments
that would "put many women off appearing in public".She described the comments that were posted on the (now defunct) website 'Don't Start Me Off' in her blog for the Times Literary Supplement :
“a web post that … discussed my pubic hair (do I brush the floor with it), whether I need rogering (that comment was taken down, as was the speculation about the capaciousness of my vagina, and the plan to plant a d*** in my mouth).
It is headed with the picture above (that's me....or in the words of one contributor:" A vile, spiteful excuse for a woman, who eats too much cabbage and has cheese straws for teeth.")
Beard, a professor of classics at
Cambridge University, presented the BBC2 programme ‘Meet the Romans with Mary
Beard’ last year.
TV critic
AA Gill (who refers to his girlfriend as ‘the blonde’), reviewed the programme.
His misogynistic comments were the subject of a Daily Mail article by Mary Beard:
“[He] suggested that I should be kept away from the cameras altogether and, in a topical reference, went on to imply that I belonged on The Undateables, a recent Channel 4 programme charting the dating difficulties of the disabled and facially disfigured.”
In 2010,Gill complained about her appearance in his review of the documentary Pompeii: Life and Death In A Roman Town :
‘For someone who looks this closely at the past,’ he wrote, ‘it is strange she hasn’t had a closer look at herself before stepping in front of a camera. Beard coos over corpses’ teeth without apparently noticing she is wearing them.
‘From behind she is 16; from the front, 60. The hair is a disaster, the outfit an embarrassment.
‘This isn’t sexist or beside the point. If you’re going to invite yourself into the front rooms of the living, then you need to make an effort.’
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| Professor Mary Beard |
It's your duty to be beautiful
Women advise other women that they have a duty to be beautiful if they want to:
and/or
“Ugliness is more powerful than any talent, intelligence or skill a woman may possess.”(Raiten- D'Antonio, 2010)
Greek businessman Demetri Marchessini (who donates one-fifth of the UKIP political party's funds) has written a book ("Women in Trousers: A Rear View")
explaining why women wearing trousers is "hostile behaviour": women
"know that men don't like trousers, yet they deliberately wear them".
Neuroscientist Dario Maistripieri, who lamented on Facebook that a neuroscience conference was full of unattractive women:
"My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone..”
..." seems to believe that women at an
academic conference exist first and foremost to be physically appealing to him.”
Objectification
"When we objectify someone we take away their humanity. This allows us to treat them with a level of cruelty we would not normally use against another feeling person.” (Raiten-D'Antonio, 2010)
A 2010 study (Saguy et al.)
demonstrated that women talk less, even when asked to discuss
themselves, if they thought that a man was observing them with a
critical eye.
Men tend to judge women mainly on their attractiveness as a potential sexual partner."Saguy’s study is one of the first to provide evidence of the social harms of sexual objectification – the act of treating people as 'de-personalised objects of desire instead of as individuals with complex personalities'. It targets women more often than men.”
A study at the University of Kansas (Landau et al., 2012) suggests that the underlying motivation for men's negative attitudes to women who don’t feel the need to be attractive in order to succeed in their careers or attract a mate may be because men are confused by them.
According to the study's findings, objectification can result from uncertain social interaction. In one experiment, men who wanted to interact positively with women but were asked to write about uncertainty in dealing with women were more likely to report that a woman’s appearance was more important than her personal background. Similarly, men who read an article promoting positive relationships with women followed by an article asserting that it’s hard for men to know for sure what women want were more likely to think about women in terms of their physical characteristics rather than their personalities.
It seems there are two distinct types of women: those who self-objectify, or visualise their bodies in the same way as an observer would (see OBJECTIFICATION THEORY) and those who do not. Women who consider themselves to be worthwhile human beings mainly because they are physically attractive are highly self-objectified. Women who value themselves because of their achievements and inner persona are less so.
(See Psychology Today blog, Do Women Want To Be Objectified?)
When a woman is no longer in the running as a possible mate (above middle-age), men still apply the same criteria when appraising her appearance that they use when ‘sizing up’ younger women as possible sex partners. She is a woman, after all. Most men are automatically - subconsciously - repulsed by older women; grey hair and wrinkles are not sexy. Like trouser-wearing, being an older woman and appearing in public - presenting a television programme, for example - without making the utmost effort to disguise the signs of age is considered by men a "hostile act".
If a woman over 60 (except maybe Joanna Lumley!) attempts to make friendly conversation with a younger man, he recoils in horror: OMIGOD SHE'S COMING ON TO ME!
The absence of female TV presenters over the age of 50 is evidence of this judgment; the executives who make the decisions about programme presenters are almost all male. See Daily Mail article: Just 5% of TV presenters are women over age of 50: Older men outnumber them by four to one, analysis reveals
REFERENCES
Raiten-D'Antonio, T., (2010) Ugly As Sin: The Truth About How We Look and Finding Freedom from Self-Hatred. FL: USA. Health Communications Inc.
Saguy, T., Quinn, D. M., Dovido J. F., Pratto F. (2010) Interacting Like a Body: Objectification Can Lead Women to Narrow Their Presence in Social Interactions. Psychological Science, February 2010 vol. 21 no. 2 178-182
Landau, M. J., Sullivan, D., Keefer, L. A., Rothschild, Z.A., Osman, M. R. (2012) Subjectivity uncertainty theory of objectification: Compensating for uncertainty about how to positively relate to others by downplaying their subjective attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2012
