- Quick, what's 30 times 1/8? Now try answering
that same question in a swimsuit.
-
- It's tougher for women, but not for men,
Colorado College psychology professor Tomi-Ann Roberts discovered when
she and colleagues asked 350 college students to do just that.
-
- "Women are so preoccupied with how
their bodies look that they use up their mental resources that they could
spend on other things," Roberts said.
-
- When they were wearing swimsuits, women
described their emotions as "disgusted," "ashamed"
or "disgraced."
-
- By contrast, men confessed to simply
feeling silly or foolish in the swimsuits. Men fared just as well on the
math problems as they did when they wore street clothes.
-
- Women wearing swimsuits scored "significantly"
poorer on an advanced math test than women in street clothes.
-
- Roberts got involved in the swimsuit
experiment because she believes American society glorifies an unrealistically
thin and shapely female body -- in ads, movies and everyday life.
-
- Consequently, girls at puberty start
viewing their bodies as outsiders would -- gauging their bodies by how
they look, not how well they work.
-
- Roberts wanted to measure the consequences
for girls and women who spend time trying to measure up to an impossible
ideal.
-
- She and colleague Barbara Frederickson
recruited 350 psychology students from the University of Michigan and Duke
University to take part in an "emotions and consumer behavior study."
-
- In a dressing room, the volunteers donned
either a sweater or a swimsuit.
-
- Some were asked to answer questions aimed
at measuring body shame. Others were given a math test, and all were offered
a couple of cookies to eat.
-
- The women who felt most ashamed of their
bodies refused the cookies, she said. Whether they were lean or plump had
nothing to do with their feelings of shame or their refusal of the cookies,
she said.
-
- Before the swimsuit experiment, women
were asked what matters to them about their body? How healthy it is? How
strong? How pretty? Those who defined their body by how it looks felt most
ashamed or disgraced when they donned the swimsuit, she said. "We
had super-skinny women saying they felt ugly and disgusting."
-
- Roberts said she hopes her study will
help adolescent girls appreciate their bodies for what they can do -- not
for how sexy they look.
-
- She celebrates small victories. "Participating
in sports, wearing comfortable shoes, not buying a Miracle Bra," she
listed. "Little acts of rebellion everyday, so their bodies belong
less to the public and more to themselves."
-
- Roberts knows that many women enjoy wearing
short skirts because they look good in them, and many others don't begrudge
themselves the hours they devote to looking as good as they can.
-
- "Sure," she said. "But
we want them to know there's a cost to that. You don't have as much mental
energy to devote to things that could be really satisfying to you.
-
- "When you sit in a board room and
look like Ally McBeal, with your skirt up to your crotch ... how good of
a lawyer can you be if you're worrying whether too much leg is showing?"
-
- The study, "That Swimsuit Becomes
You: Sex Differences in Self-Objectification, Restrained Eating and Math
Performance," cost very little money, said Roberts. Participants were
from introductory psychology classes.
-
- Given their choice of participating in
the experiments or writing term papers, most chose the experiments, she
said. The main costs of the experiment -- buying swimsuits and cookies
-- were footed by department budgets.
-
- Colorado College is a liberal arts school
of 1,900 students and was considered too small to recruit students for
a large-scale study, she said.
-
- The study appears in Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology.
-
- (By the way, 30 times 1/8 is 3 3/4.)
|
