"The very blunt truth is that men still run the world," said Sheryl Sanders, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, in her interview on CBS's 60 Minutes (Sandburg).  Throughout history, women have had the issue of being "second" to men.  Even back when America was first established, women could not vote or even own property.  Nowadays, we have gained many rights back, but there is one in particular right that I believe we deserve: the right to be treated equally on an emotional level.  People may say this is something every person gains individually based on the way they treat others, but there is a huge factor holding back even the strongest of women: because other women objectify themselves, it has become common for all women to be seen as sex figures.  This has been a huge factor in the development of eating disorders and spread throughout the lives of many women without them even realizing it.  After all, we do not know any better.  However, I am a woman, and I refuse to keep people so uneducated on this subject.  We as women can be very powerful.  There are actions that can take that power away from our gender due to our past history.  Sexual objectification is one of those actions.  To make a distinct argument, I want to look at the most physically powerful of women: professional female athletes.

Long ago, it was very rare to even see a female athlete.  Before 1972, the year in which a law passed to push equality for both genders called Title IX, only one in 27 girls played a high school sport (Title IX).  Nowadays, women are playing professional sports.  This is a huge privilege the feminist movement has given us.  Not only does it give us the ability to play sports on a higher level, but these ladies can be great role models for many adolescent girls when it comes to body image.  In fact, it has been proven that there is a positive correlation between young females reading sports magazines and greater body satisfaction (Exposure).  However, there are numerous female athletes who are putting this possibility in danger.  Who am I talking about?  Some of the nation's top athletes that pose nude in magazines such as NASCAR's Danica Patrick and golfer Natalie Gulbis who pose in FHM, volleyball player Misty May and swimmer Dana Torres in Maxim, and swimmer Amanda Beard in FHM, Maxim, and Playboy (Daniels and Wartena).  What these women are doing is not promoting themselves as athletes; it is promoting themselves as sex figures.  This is the kind of behavior that promotes self-objectification in young girls.

By self-objectification, I am referring to the picking and probing at one's self as if it is an object (Kroon Van Diest).  A simple way to explain this uses a scene in the movie Mean Girls.  Because Lindsay Lohan's character Cady Heron had been homeschooled and lived a very sheltered life, she did not understand why the other girls were looking at themselves in the mirror and complaining about their "man-shoulder" and "huge hips."  The only thing she could complain about was her bad breath (Mean Girls).  The girls looking in the mirror in this scene had been exposed to media and been in social situations that had made her feel as though she is an object, not a human.  The movie does this because this way of thinking has become so common in women.  After all, the entire movie is a satire about teenage girls.  It's common to hear, "it's a girl thing," but as a nineteen-year-old female, I'm tired of that excuse.  80% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies (Bissell, Porterfield).  Why is it so "normal" for women to be so critical of themselves?  This self-objectification is something that needs to stop.  I have witnessed first-hand how this attitude affects girls because I was a girl with an eating disorder in high school.  My weight could decrease nine pounds in nine days, followed by a quick rise up again.  The worst part is, when I try to tell people about my experience of how I let my poor body image take over my body, I've had remarks such as "I respect you for being able to lose weight so quickly."  That is not something I'm proud of.  Losing weight that quickly is never healthy, and no one should respect me for it.  We need more girls who have not gained this terrible perspective -- like Cady Heron.  As crazy as it seems, female athletes have the ability to stop this.  They are so physically strong; they could be great role models for young girls.  However, they are posing naked, and promoting themselves as sexual objects results back to self-objectification.  After all, if men see women posing like this, along with their history of superiority; they subconsciously see themselves just as superior as they were when we did not have the right to vote.  This then leaves women in social circumstances where they are treated as objects.  This along with thin-ideal internalization -- the obsession with a thin image as a result of the media's emphasis on the subject -- can contribute to the start of an eating disorder (Kroon Van Diest).  The estimated amount of women with an eating disorder in the United States at the moment is about ten million women (Bissell and Porterfield).  This is a number we can bring down if we could only educate women on the effects of self-objectification.

The critiquing of a female body has been known to start young.  Dr. Elizabeth Daniels, an expert on the subject, has noticed, "As girls mature, their bodies are increasingly looked at, commented upon, and otherwise evaluated by others."  (Daniels).  This has resulted in baffling numbers of young females wishing to be thinner -- 42% of first to third grade girls (Bissell and Porterfield).  This means from this young age, young girls are being told that they are inferior to who is evaluating them, the boys.  However, I have seen much worse comments.  My best friend, Leah, who I considered to be a sister, was in a battle with cancer, which she eventually lost when we were in middle school.  Through chemotherapy treatments, she was losing weight rapidly.  I have never seen someone so thin.  Girls would say they "wish they could lose weight so fast."  She was infuriated.  When adolescent girls are wishing they could lose weight like a cancer patient, there is something wrong with our world.

This self-objectification has been affecting women for ages, making them feel horribly about themselves. How does it affect women so awfully in sports?  Athletics is one of the many rights women gained during the feminist movement as stated earlier.  Participation in such activities can make women physically stronger, which in course brings strength and confidence to many aspects of their lives.  Men on the other hand, find it to be the perfect area to make it known that they are still at the top of the social ladder.  When women make themselves seen as sex objects in the world of athletics, it is, "The reinforcement of their status as second class citizens in one of the most powerful, economic, social, and political institutions on the planet," according to The Nation writer Mary Jo Kane (Kane).  What she neglects to mention is that it is also international recognition of that as well.  After all, you don't need to speak a specific language to see that a woman appears sexy, not athletic.  The disrespecting of their own body is not helping other women climb the ladder to be up there with men.  Women's volleyball as a sport saw a direct example of this as a result of their 2012 Olympic uniforms.  After the news that Muslim players were not forced to wear the skimpy uniform because it was against their religion, a New York Post writer stated, "Now competitors can wear whatever they want -- although it could wind up making the Olympics' sexiest sport to look more like a weekend rec league." (Buzinski).  Based on that statement, I assume that is evidence that he only watches women's volleyball because he believes it is "the Olympics' sexiest sport." Basically, as long as women allow themselves to be seen as the "Olympics' sexiest sport, they are not going to gain respect as athletes, only sex figures.

Critics may argue that this is the only way they know they can make money because after all, the profession of a female athlete does not come with a large salary.  Well, it does not help the sport gain fans.  As much as the "sex sells" argument may work with some people, when it gets down to the stone cold truth, as Mary Jo Kane wrote, "Sex sells sex, not women's sports." (Kane).  It's true.  Studies were even done to prove that an athlete (both male or female) that is known for their looks more so than their athletic ability is perceived by the public as, "less talented, less aggressive, and less heroic." (Daniels and Wartena).  Therefore, once again, it has been proven that these women are not helping the sport.  The woman wearing the skimpy uniform without an argument is making the entire sport look weak.

So why would these women who are supposed to be some of the world's physically strongest allowing themselves to look weak?  Well, many scholars believe that "sexy" is found in women who are weak and vulnerable because they need to make themselves "object and prey for the man." (Jackson and Lyons).  It is something that has been considered for years.  On television and in movies, it is not uncommon to see a powerful woman still single and struggling to find a man who fits her needs because men are scared off by that physique.  Many women would rather do what makes them attractive to men instead of what is better for us as a gender because no one wants to be lonely.  After all, as Dr. Elizabeth Daniels has said, "Women's bodies are scrutinized as objects for the pleasure and evaluation of others." (Daniels).  With this constant scrutinizing, it becomes difficult for any woman to directly feel these evaluations affecting her.  Even these athletes who are so strong and beautiful want to be seen as sexy.

This fear of the powerful woman was also found in an experiment done with a picture of a former member of the U.S. National Women's Soccer team, Brandi Chastain.  The photograph was shown to adolescent boys and girls.  As a general rule, both genders had similar reactions to the photograph: they saw her as a powerful, respectable woman.  However, a minority of boys felt intimidated by her.  One boy actually said, "She's asking me: can you kick as hard as me, and I feel funny."  (Daniels and Wartena).  This is the reaction female athletes would get every time they were seen in the media if that media did not include pornographic or suggestive photographs.  This is the reaction these female athletes deserve.  They deserve to be seen as dominant because if they are playing a sport at that level, they are a dominant person.  After all, women throw themselves at Tiger Woods as we discovered when his wife threw a golf club at him.  He is a powerful man.  Why are powerful men so attractive and powerful women so scary?

Perhaps the media has something to do with this.  As Jennifer Knight and Tracy Guiliano said in their article, "He's a Laker, She's a Looker" in the academic journal Sex Roles, "They do not reflect the public opinion, they shape it." (Knight and Guiliano).  After all, these are the people putting out magazines and articles where women are perceived as the object, and men the alpha male.
So how do we stop all of this?  The woman who I quoted at the start of this article may be our first chance.  Sheryl Sandburg, the CEO of the Facebook phenomenon that has changed our world is trying to make her own change: she wants to reignite the feminist revolution.  Sandburg has spent her very successful life noticing the differences between men and women.  For example, she notices, "Women attribute their success to working hard, luck, and help from other people. Men will attribute that-- whatever success they have, that same success, to their own core skills."  Even Sandburg, one of the world's most powerful women, has a hard time saying her own core skills have attributed to her own success.  This may contribute to what I found to be the most interesting part of the interview: the difference in genders when it comes to taking a job offer.  When offered her job by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, Sandburg wanted to take the first offer given to her.  However, her husband told her she was out of her mind not to negotiate.  This was a key difference.  Women do not see themselves as worthy of a better offer.  They think to themselves, "That's a huge number so why would I not take it?"  Men on the other hand think, "Well that's a huge number so I can probably get an even bigger number."  (Sandburg).

Sandburg may be the next Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, or Kate Chopin.  However, she cannot do it alone.  She needs the help of someone, and I believe the first women she should go to should be female athletes.  They are physically strong and have the ability to turn this world around.  After all, as Mary Jo Kane said, the sports world is "one of the most powerful, economic, social, and political institutions on the planet."  Female athletes may not have much power now, but given the opportunity, they can do wonders.  There is benefit from an eating disorder or the low self-esteem many women feel.  Our gender will overcome these issues and be treated as equals, it will just take time and effort from the nation's most powerful women.
