Lexie and Lindsay Kite have long promoted positive body image, ever since they both pursued Ph.D.s in communications with a focus on media and body image at the University of Utah. After establishing the nonprofit Beauty Redefined in 2009, the Kite sisters have continued their work on body image resilience, which posits that women and people of all genders can learn from moments of body shame to become stronger as individuals rather than allowing stringent beauty ideals to dictate behavior and sense of self. The 35-year-old twins’ debut book, More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Dec. 29), also defines the related notion of self-objectification and explains how best to identify the moments when we begin to see our bodies from the outside rather than physically inhabiting them. We recently spoke with the Kites over Zoom; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the most universal concepts in this book is self-objectification. Would you explain this term and what it means for the work that you do?
Lexie: Self-objectification is what happens when your mind and your identity are literally doubled. You become a person living and a person living to be looked at. You’re picturing yourself from the outside, monitoring your body according to your worst fears of what you think people might be thinking when they look at you. Self-objectification is something that research shows impacts most girls and women and [increasingly] all genders throughout their lives. But self-objectification is something that is core to our work because once you can name it [and] shine a light on it, it doesn’t mean that you will rid yourself from it, [but] you can fight against it. That’s the whole premise of becoming more than a body—more than somebody to be evaluated from the outside.
Lindsay: Otherwise, we’re imagining ourselves from the outside instead of living from the insides of our bodies. It’s pretty natural in a culture that objectifies women’s bodies. When we grow up seeing women’s bodies being viewed with an outside lens, a sexualized gaze, then we turn that gaze upon ourselves, and we use it for the rest of our lives without even knowing that it’s not the natural way that we should be engaging with our bodies.
How do you feel about social media? Do you have tips for engaging with it constructively?
Lindsay: Social media is, in some ways, a necessary evil for the work that we do. We, as individuals, have
taken great care to make sure that we really curate our own feeds but also the ways we represent ourselves. With social media, so much of it is so idealized-image based. The first step is to be really critical of it and to recognize the pressures that real people feel to reflect those same ideals....The accounts that are the trickiest...are the ones that are really body-centric. It’s not an intentional or malicious thing to say, “When I shrink my images and FaceTune everything, I’m trying to hold people to unrealistic standards.” No, it’s just something that we inadvertently and subconsciously do. We ask people to avoid curating your own social media feed to look in ways that split your identity and your focus from living inside of yourself to looking at yourself from the outside in.
And you point out the purchasing power of women and the marketing that is constantly being done through social media.
Lindsay: It’s the way capitalism has been used against women. And we need to use capitalism for our gain and show these industries that our money, our dollars aren’t going to be used against us anymore. They can be used to build us up instead of tear us down.
Lexie: It’s true. We live in a world where women, who don’t have the opportunity to hold power in the same way men do, can grasp for some of that power through replicating these objectifying ideals, replicating this capitalism that hurts us by turning it against us as women. We’re trying to help women and all people see a better way—that we have more power beyond constant fixing, and decorating, and pointing out the flaws.
You mention spirituality and the many different forms it can take. Can you share a powerful spiritual experience that helped you to reconnect with being inside of your body?
Lindsay: For me, it’s been a journey to reconnect with who I always have been. In psychology, they call that inner-child work. Something that was extremely powerful was simply to reflect on an image of myself that I loved as a little girl: I’m sitting on this couch, I’m 5 years old, and I’m holding this little white bunny. I can see my chubby little round cheeks, these thick, dark eyebrows growing in already at that age. When you can look back on an image of yourself and think back on a memory where there was no awareness of how other people perceived your body, it can help you tap back into that sense of self that isn’t divided.
Lexie: I feel like what we want is for this book, in some ways, to feel like a spiritual venture. We want this book to help you reconnect with your inner child and your purpose that extends so far beyond your decorative appeal. We can’t imagine how much girls and women could contribute if they could step back into themselves.
How do you think about your work as being different from the traditional body-positivity messaging we often see?
Lindsay: The problem that [most people] see is that women don’t feel good about the way they look. But our research shows that the root of all women’s body image issues is self-objectification. Through our work with that focus on objectification, we know that it’s more important to help people identify all of the ways that they’ve been taught to hide, to hold back, to stop raising their hand in class, to stop going up for leadership positions, to stop playing sports. We take the focus off of “You do look right, you are beautiful,” and say, “You’re more than beautiful.” When you can get your mind off of focusing on whether or not you’re beautiful enough, you can move on to better things regardless of how you look or even how you feel about how you look.
Lindsay: We live in this culture that values women according to how we look. And it doesn’t mean that everyone around us is going to stop doing that just because we decide that “my body is an instrument, not an ornament.” You will still have moments where you self-objectify. But you can go through those hard things, and they can be a reminder to you to turn back to who you really are and to access your skills for media literacy and be critical of every image and message you see. You can use your social skills to be able to confide in somebody else, even a professional, but especially with other people who are absolutely going through the exact same things you are and can provide some solidarity there. So we can work together to rise through that.
Johanna Zwirner is the editorial assistant.
