Living in a Woman's Body
- Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S
- Aug 13
- 12 min read
The Question of Agency Over a Woman's Body
What does it do to a person to live in a body that the culture continually treats as public property?
From girlhood onward, a woman learns that her body will be noticed, evaluated, compared, commented on, desired, criticized, and sometimes endangered.
Over the years, I have asked quite a few men whether they ever worry about leaving the house alone. Do they think twice about going for a run by themselves? Do they feel uneasy crossing a deserted parking lot at night or walking through a darkened parking garage?
Every one of them has said no.
For most women, the questions are almost absurd. Of course we think about these things. We notice who is walking behind us, avoid running alone after dark, park beneath a light, and lock the car doors as soon as we get inside. Some women carry pepper spray or personal alarms. We text someone when we get home safely. Often, we do these things without even thinking of ourselves as afraid. They are simply part of the background calculations of being female: Is that man walking behind me or following me? Where did I park? Do I have my keys? Should I cross the street? A low hum of vigilance runs underneath ordinary life.
This, too, is what it means to live in a woman’s body.
And long before a girl has language for any of this, she begins learning to look at herself from the outside. Am I too big? Is my stomach flat enough? Do I have a thigh gap? Am I attractive enough? Too attractive? The questions change as we age, but apparently the examination is never adjourned. Do I look old? Do I look like I am trying too hard not to look old?
At some point I find myself wanting to ask: Why do we behave as though a woman’s body is public property? Why does her size, shape, age, attractiveness, clothing, sexuality, and every visible sign of aging seem to be open for discussion? And who, exactly, gave the rest of us jurisdiction?
I recently watched a Facebook Reel from a 2012 interview with Scarlett Johansson during the promotion of The Avengers. A male interviewer asked whether she was wearing underwear beneath her Black Widow costume. She looked at him with what I can only describe as the expression of a woman who has suddenly realized she is going to have to explain something very basic to a grown man.
“Since when did people start asking each other in interviews about their underwear?” she asked.
Exactly.
Then she told him she would leave the answer to his imagination.
What struck me was that she refused to accept the premise of the question. She did not become embarrassed or try to answer politely. She made him uncomfortable. She made him account for why he thought he was entitled to ask. It is difficult to imagine a female interviewer leaning toward Chris Hemsworth and asking what kind of underwear he had on underneath his Thor costume. More to the point, it is difficult to imagine anyone believing the answer had anything whatsoever to do with his work.
And then there is the most literal version of all of this: the extent to which a woman is permitted to make decisions about her own body. We now live in a country where legislators, still disproportionately male, can determine what medical treatment a pregnant woman may receive, even during a medical crisis. In some states, physicians have faced laws that restrict their ability to end a pregnancy until a woman’s condition becomes sufficiently life-threatening, even when the pregnancy cannot result in a healthy birth or continuing it places her health in serious danger. There is something profoundly unsettling about a woman lying in a hospital bed while people far removed from that room have already decided which risks she must endure.
Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist philosopher, writer, and feminist theorist, was writing about the larger question of who gets to define a woman more than seventy-five years ago.
In The Second Sex, published in 1949, she wrote the now-famous sentence, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
I have always found that sentence remarkable. At first it sounds almost too simple, but the longer you sit with it, the more it unfolds. We may be born female, but much of what it means to become a woman is taught to us by the culture we enter.
She was not saying that biological sex does not exist. She was talking about everything that gets layered onto the female body afterward: what it is supposed to mean, how it is supposed to look, how much space it should take up, how desirable it should be, how modest it should be, what it should conceal, and what other people apparently believe they are entitled to say about it.
De Beauvoir argued that man had traditionally been treated as the human default. Just a person. Woman, on the other hand, was defined in relation to him. He was the subject. She became what de Beauvoir called the Other. He moved through the world; she learned that she was being looked at while she moved through it.
That distinction matters. A girl learns that her body is the place from which she experiences the world, but she also learns to imagine how that body looks to somebody else. Long before Instagram, filters, Botox, TikTok, influencers, or the ability to enlarge a photograph until you can inspect your own pores, women were learning to see themselves through other people’s eyes.
Scarlett Johansson’s interviewer was not simply being tacky, although he certainly was. His question reflected something much larger: the idea that a woman’s body is never entirely her own business.
Decades after de Beauvoir wrote about this, I would see a version of it in a very different setting.
Earlier in my career, I specialized in treating eating disorders in a hospital program. I worked as part of an interdisciplinary team with a physician and registered dietitian, and I sat with girls and young women who had become painfully estranged from their own bodies.
Eating disorders are complicated illnesses. Biology matters. Temperament matters. Family relationships, trauma, anxiety, perfectionism, genetics, and many other factors can matter. No magazine cover, television program, or beauty standard “causes” an eating disorder. But culture provides the backdrop. And sometimes it provides a remarkably unforgiving mirror.
Again and again, I met intelligent, funny, creative young women who had somehow come to believe their value could be calculated in pounds, calories, clothing sizes, and minutes of exercise. Hunger became weakness. Appetite became failure. The body became something unruly that needed to be brought under control. Taking up less space became an accomplishment.
That is not simply about food.
Susie Orbach knew that. When the British psychotherapist and psychoanalyst published Fat Is a Feminist Issue in 1978, she challenged the idea that weight was simply a matter of calories, discipline, and willpower.
She asked a much more interesting question: What does food mean in a culture where women are expected to care for everybody else while having remarkably few needs of their own? Women are supposed to be pleasing but not demanding, attractive but not vain, competent but not intimidating, nurturing but not needy, successful but still likable. And God forbid we should be hungry.
There is also the old Madonna-whore split: women are expected to be desirable, but not too sexual; nurturing, but not sexless; attractive, but never trying too hard. Somehow, we are supposed to know exactly where the line is—and stay on the acceptable side of it.
Orbach used appetite in a much broader sense than hunger for food. We hunger for rest, attention, pleasure, freedom, creativity, sex, recognition, time alone, and a life that feels like our own. Yet women have historically received rather mixed messages about wanting things. Too much food is gluttonous, too much attention is selfish, too much ambition is threatening, too much sexuality is dangerous, and too much anger is unattractive. Even female anger is apparently supposed to arrive nicely groomed and speaking in an indoor voice.
So the body sometimes becomes the place where all of this gets worked out. Food can comfort. It can protect. It can numb. It can protest. It can punish. Restricting food can create an experience of control when the rest of life feels uncontrollable.
Orbach’s great contribution was not to suggest that every woman eats for the same reason. Of course we do not. She simply moved the conversation away from “What is wrong with this woman?” and toward another question: What has this woman been taught about having a body?
Years later, in Bodies, Orbach wrote about the way the body itself has increasingly become a project.
Not a body. A project.
There is always something waiting to be tightened, flattened, lifted, injected, tucked, waxed, colored, filled, reduced, enhanced, concealed, or removed. The perfectly ordinary human body, with its softness, hair, scars, asymmetry, wrinkles, veins, folds, and inconvenient tendency to age, can begin to feel like a first draft that somehow slipped past the editor.
Susan Bordo, the American feminist philosopher and cultural theorist, took up similar questions in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Bordo was interested in the way cultural expectations become written onto the body through dieting, exercise, beauty rituals, fashion, and relentless self-discipline.
Our culture likes to present the ideal body as a personal accomplishment. If you work hard enough, eat correctly enough, exercise enough, buy the right products, follow the right program, and maintain sufficient moral character around carbohydrates, perhaps you too can achieve it. And if you cannot? Well, obviously you need to try harder.
The beauty of this arrangement, at least for the culture selling the ideal, is that the impossible standard never has to defend itself. The woman blames herself.
It becomes even more absurd when you notice that the ideal keeps changing. In some cultures and historical periods, a fuller female body signified fertility, health, prosperity, and access to food. In other eras, especially in affluent Western societies, thinness became the status symbol. Thinness suggested restraint, leisure, discipline, and the resources required to maintain it.
Women have been expected to be rounded, then slender, then boyish, then curvy again, but only curvy in the correct places. Large breasts. Small waist. Flat stomach. Long legs. Smooth skin. Firm arms. Generous hips, except during the decades when we were not supposed to have those. We should look youthful but not surgically altered, toned but not muscular, sexy but not as though we know we are sexy, natural but preferably after forty-five minutes in the bathroom.
The specifications keep changing, yet somehow women are expected to arrive in the correct body.
One of the most striking examples of how quickly these ideals can take hold came from research in Fiji. Western television arrived in Fiji’s Nadroga province in 1995. Traditional Fijian culture had generally valued robust bodies, hearty appetites, and communal eating, and eating disorders had been extraordinarily rare.
Psychiatrist and anthropologist Anne Becker and her colleagues studied adolescent Fijian girls after Western television programming became available. Within several years, researchers saw significant changes in the girls’ attitudes toward their bodies, including more dieting, greater body dissatisfaction, and self-induced vomiting.
The study did not prove that television causes eating disorders. It does not. Fiji was also undergoing broader economic and social changes at the time. But I have always found the study haunting. The girls’ bodies had not suddenly changed. What changed were the eyes through which they saw them.
And television now seems almost quaint.
Today a thirteen-year-old can carry thousands of carefully selected, posed, filtered, altered, and sometimes completely fabricated bodies in her pocket. There was a time when we worried about actresses and models being Photoshopped before their images appeared in magazines or publicity photos. That almost seems quaint now. Cindy Crawford once famously said, “Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.” At least there was an actual woman underneath the hair, makeup, lighting, and retouching.
She is no longer comparing herself only with actresses and fashion models. She is comparing herself with classmates, influencers, celebrities, friends, strangers, and increasingly with images created by artificial intelligence that may depict women who do not exist at all. She may not even know which is which.
Someone may take forty photographs, choose one, smooth the skin, change the lighting, reshape the waist, and post it as though it were an ordinary moment. Another image may be entirely AI-generated, with flawless skin, impossible proportions, and no actual human body behind it. A girl looks at these images while sitting in her pajamas and wonders why she does not look that way. She may be comparing herself to a standard that was never physically possible in the first place.
Sandra Lee Bartky, a feminist philosopher who drew on Michel Foucault’s ideas about discipline and surveillance, was interested in what happens when women and girls internalize what the culture expects of them. Eventually, no one has to stand over us and tell us how we should look or behave. We begin monitoring ourselves.
We check our stomachs, rethink what we are eating, notice our roots, straighten our posture, examine photographs for flaws, and wonder whether we should lose five pounds. No one may be visibly judging us at all. The expectations have already been absorbed, and we have learned to carry out the inspection ourselves.
A woman catches her reflection in a store window. She sees a photograph from a wonderful evening with people she loves and immediately looks at the size of her body. She notices the softness beneath her chin, the new line beside her mouth, the gray at her temples. No one has asked her to conduct the inspection. By then, she hardly needs anyone to.
This is not to say women have no agency. Of course we do. I like clothes. I like getting my hair cut. I paint my toenails. I exercise because I enjoy moving my body. Women can genuinely enjoy makeup, fashion, fitness, hair color, cosmetic procedures, or any number of ways of presenting themselves.
The question is not whether women should stop doing these things. The more interesting question is how freely any of us chooses when physical attractiveness has been connected, sometimes quite explicitly, to belonging, employment, sexual desirability, social status, and even the amount of ordinary kindness we receive from other people.
The most powerful cultural expectations may be the ones that no longer feel like expectations. They simply feel like what we have to do before we are willing to leave the house.
And then a woman ages.
Now the body commits its most unforgivable offense. It reveals that time has passed.
Skin loosens. Hair changes. Gravity, which has apparently been waiting patiently all these years, finally gets its turn. A woman who has spent decades being told that part of her value rests in being seen may discover that, as she ages, she is seen less and less.
But she must not try too visibly to prevent aging, either, because then she risks being mocked for that. Age naturally, but do not look old. Remain attractive, but do not appear vain. Accept yourself, but please continue purchasing improvements. Be authentic, but perhaps not quite that authentic.
De Beauvoir wrote about aging too, and there is a painful symmetry in her ideas. Women had long been treated as the Other. Older people were also treated as a separate species, as though old age were something that happened to an unfortunate group of people rather than the possible future of every person currently making jokes about them.
An aging woman can become Other twice. First because she is female. Then because her body makes visible something our culture is remarkably determined not to think about: time passes.
Perhaps this is why I am a little wary when women are told that the answer is to “love your body.” I understand the intention. Truly, I do. But sometimes body love starts to sound suspiciously like one more assignment.
Now, in addition to having the correct body, I am supposed to gaze lovingly at every wrinkle, scar, sag, fold, and age spot and experience unqualified gratitude?
That is a lot to ask before breakfast.
We do not have to find every part of our bodies beautiful. Beauty was never meant to be the price of admission to our own lives.
Maybe the deeper work is not learning to admire the body constantly. Maybe it is learning to live inside it again, to reclaim the body as the place from which we experience our lives rather than the object we continually hold up for inspection.
This is the body that carries us toward the people we love. It responds to music, holds a child, creates art, walks through the woods, laughs, has sex, grieves, survives illnesses and surgeries and losses we once thought we could not survive. It tells us when we need food, rest, movement, warmth, touch, solitude, or comfort. It has been there through every ordinary Tuesday morning of our lives.
The feminist thinkers who came before us gave us language for the strange process by which women learn to step outside themselves and look back at their own bodies. De Beauvoir asked us to consider what it means to become the Other. Orbach asked us to think about hunger and need. Bordo showed how easily culture disguises its demands as personal choice and personal failure. Bartky described what happens when those expectations become internalized and we begin doing the watching ourselves.
I find all of that enormously useful. But I think the question it leaves us with is actually quite simple: Who has authority over a woman’s body—and why have we ever assumed that the answer should be anyone other than the woman herself?
A woman’s body is not a problem she has been assigned to solve. It is the place from which she has lived her one irreplaceable life.
