Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Mirror Mirror or Your Wall

I’ve written a bit before on here about how I tend to prefer videos of myself to photos, and this TV segment on self-esteem follows that pattern, so I’m particularly pleased to share it with readers. Broadcast journalists Debra Pangestu and Malgorzata Wojtunik, graduate students from CUNY’s channel 75, produced this five-minute segment on women and self-esteem, using my month-long mirror fast from last May as one of the anchors of the piece.

Courtesy Malgorzara Wojtunik and Debra Pangestu;
if this doesn't load, you can watch it at Malgorzara's website

So! This is what I sound like! (You should watch the whole video, but if you're just dying to hear my voice, I come in around 0:55.) I do not have vocal fry! And I apparently wear far more bright colors than I had realized! And I laugh when I’m talking, that is when I’m not looking very very earnest! This is actually the first time I’ve been on video with this caliber of filming (when I say I prefer myself on video, I’m referring to goofy vacation clips of me singing “Allentown” while IN ALLENTOWN), and it's neat to see what a difference good lighting makes. (I tried to hire Debra and Malgorzata to follow me around with their lighting kit, but they had "work" to "do.") In any case, here I am.

But the segment has a greater message beyond just proving to you that I’m not actually a middle-aged monk named Brother Frankie who's just posing as a ladyblogger for kicks. It gets into questions of how we determine our self-esteem, and how much control we actually have over our own image. Setting up a contrast between our self-image as determined by the mirror and our self-image as determined by social media, the reporters talk to Amy Gonzales, a researcher whose work indicates that social media may have the potential to increase our self-esteem. (Yes, this runs somewhat contrary to that study last year that got everyone talking, about how the more photos you had on your profile, the lower your self-esteem, which just seemed like bollocks to me and other like minds.) Study participants were put in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure self-esteem. Some participants had access to their Facebook profile while filling out the survey, others had access to a mirror, and the control group had access to neither.

The TV segment reports that the mirror group scored lowest on the self-esteem survey and the Facebook group scored highest, which is true, but that’s not what grabs me the most. (The mirror group’s score was lower by a negligible amount.) What grabs me is how the ways people used Facebook affected their scores: People who viewed only their own profiles scored higher than those who looked at profiles of other people, and those who made changes to their profiles during the study had the highest self-esteem of all. Which is to say: It’s not affirmation from others on Facebook that leads to a self-esteem boost; it’s the ability to gaze at and manipulate your own image. A little like...mirror-gazing and applying makeup, you might say.

I’m pleased with the segment and think the reporters should be too—they reported on a widely done topic (self-esteem) with a fresh spin, and they did it with professional panache. But there’s one sentiment I somewhat disagree with: “We cannot control what we see in the mirror, but we can control what others see on social media networks like Facebook.” One of the biggest things I learned during my mirror fast was exactly how much I do control what I see in the mirror: My “mirror face,” for starters, which ensures I’ll always be seeing a wider-eyed, poutier-lipped version of myself than what you might see when you look at me. Then there’s makeup, hairstyles, lighting, angles—not for our Facebook photos, but for the mirror. (I’ll spend more time looking at my reflection in a fitting room that’s softly lit, with mirrors hung in a way that captures me at my best, as opposed to a harshly lit dressing room that makes me look dumpier than I probably am...I hope.) And then there’s mood, moment, preexisting conditions, daily events, chance comments—we take in all of these, and they shape what we see in the mirror. It may not be conscious, but we absolutely control what we see in the mirror.

One of the main differences might be that with the mirror, we control what we see; with social media, we control what others see. But even with this, the differences are blurred. It wasn’t until my mirror fast that I had to accept—really accept—that my mirror face isn’t the face any of you would see when talking with me. I thought I could control my appearance because I could control my visual image of myself, but in fact I can do nothing of the sort. After the mirror fast, I realized there's a reason I prefer videos and candid photos of myself: I'm not posing. In trying to control my appearance whenever I knew I was being photographed, I was robbing myself of the very thing that makes me appealing (besides my ever-present scent of daffodils)—my warmth. How warm can one be when arranging one's face into a series of manipulations designed to avoid all points of insecurity? I needed to divorce myself from that image entirely before I could understand that there was something to divorce myself from. The only person I'm fooling with my mirror face is myself. There's much to say about Facebook and authentic representations of the self—but in this particular way, social media might be a more accurate reflection of ourselves than what we see in the mirror.

16 comments:

  1. NICE! You look and sound amazing. Very interesting video. I shall share it.

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  2. Thanks, Cameo! I kept trying to remember what we learned in that camera acting class but it didn't work; I keep moving!

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  3. You seemed like a natural! I think it is very neat that that you were part of that segment. I think it is great what you did. To be honest I feel more like myself when I don't look at mirrors. I even feel prettier.

    Thanks for posting the video : )

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    1. Thanks, Kourtney! And that's exactly how I felt when I took my month "off": more like myself. I'm thinking I'm going to do it again this year, even if I don't write about it as much. It was good for me.

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  4. Eeeeeee, it's great to "meet" you--- not to mention peer into your bookshelves and bathroom. I can almost smell the daffodils.

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    1. Rest assured, that "Joy of Cooking" has never been cracked. But now I will never need another cookbook! For all the not-cooking I do!

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  5. I always feel so bad, or weird, because I don't participate in the same rituals it seems other women do. When I first got FB, I used real images of myself - mostly because I though I had to. But as I progressed in using my FB, I decided to reject using images of myself and preferred placements. Like pictures of Pokemon, or of other characters I really enjoyed. And I always lament being tagged in photos because I'm not photogenic, and I hate the way I look in pictures.

    It also surprised me that people were deliberately rejecting mirrors, when I've been avoiding them since puberty. I hate mirrors; and normally had this type of dissonance when I would see myself but not look at myself. So I was shocked that there were women who would purposefully spend time in front of the mirror.

    I don't like the way that I look, and give very little thought to how I physically come off to others. While I certainly feel a certain amount of self-consciousness, I am always surprised to discover when people actually pay attention to me or "see" me, as it were.

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    1. ParisianFeline, that's interesting about using icons on social media--I don't mind sharing my photo, but I also know that it's sort of restrictive in a way, that people will filter what I say through my presentation. Which is fine IRL but part of the whole idea of being online is that it's the content that matters, right?

      I heard from some other women who felt the same way you do about mirrors, and some of them were all, "Wow, I can't imagine it being *difficult* to not look at yourself." I wonder what the reverse experiment would be like--making a monthlong deliberate attempt to look in the mirror more. Hmm...

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  6. Nice video - thinking that I could use it next time I'm tutoring. Great to see better coverage of what gives us greater control over the construction of our own image and self-image. And great to hear your voice after months of reading the blog! Maybe now I'll hear your voice when I'm reading the posts, like in movies when a letter is read out!

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    1. Gingerbread, heh, I'd love to be your mental soundtrack for The Beheld! Glad you liked the segment. (And I'm looking forward to more GingerbreadFeminists!)

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  7. Great segment...and you do look lovely! I watched the entire thing and reflected that I don't spend much time on Facebook. I check message and friend requests (mostly from students) once a week at most. But after my recent 3-month hiatus from blogging, I realized that checking in with others, even when I'm controlling my images, had become important to my sense of self.

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    1. Thanks, Terri! I'm like you--not much on Facebook. But yes, subtly controlling our sense of self through blogging has indeed become important. I think that's usually posited as something to be wary of, and it is, when it takes over. But it's also just another way of being conscious of the impact we actually have, and the sort of houses we construct for ourselves here.

      And welcome back!

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  8. Lovely video, I really enjoyed it! I'll be sharing it, and this post on my next Link Love :)

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