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Social Media and Objectification in Dance with researcher Dr. Tomi-Ann Roberts
124 Plays9 months ago
Yasi and Steven welcome prolific researcher and NEAMA Vice-President Dr. Tomi-Ann Roberts PhD to discuss her work on objectification and sexualization in dance. We also examine the negative effects of social media on one's mental health and how a simple three-day cleanse off of social media had surprising and powerful results. Our conversation delves into college NIL (name, image, and license) money and how this all connects with male athletes as well.
For more about "ways of Seeing" by John Berger, go to https://www.ways-of-seeing.com
For more on Dr. Roberts and her work, go to https://www.tomi-annroberts.com
For more info on Athletes and the Arts, go to https://www.athletesandthearts.com
Bio: Dr. Roberts has been covered in many media sources including the New York Times about how her experience of being sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein while a college student motivated her work on sexual objectification, contributing her scholarly voice to the #MeToo movement. In addition to her scholarly publications and teaching, she served on the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, the Task Force on Educating Through Feminist Research, and as President of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research from 2017-2019. She leverages feminist psychological science as a consultant for reproductive health related product brands, and as an expert witness in legal cases involving objectification and sexualization as forms of gender discrimination.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgment
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Athletes in the Arts podcast, hosted by Stephen Karaginas and Yasi Ansari.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, hello, everyone. It's once again time for the Athletes in the Arts podcast, along with Yasi Ansari. I'm Stephen Karaginas. We welcome you to our first show of 2024. So if you like our episode or just want to feel philanthropic, please drop a rating or review or any form of affirmation you can send online. Much appreciated. We also want to thank our sponsor, School Health, for their support.
Dr. Tomian Roberts on Objectification in Dance
00:00:42
Speaker
Check them out at schoolhealth.com for your medical needs. If you want more information on athletes in the arts, such as resources, papers, links, research, and more, please go to athletesandthearts.com. Now, for our episode today, we are talking with one of the preeminent psychology researchers in the United States, Dr. Tomian Roberts.
00:01:02
Speaker
Now, for the last 30 years as a professor at Colorado College, she has done monumental work examining the sexualization and objectification of women in society, something that applies in dance. She was part of writing the American Psychology Association Task Force on the sexualization of girls in 2008. She's been an advocate in the dance world for over a decade and is currently on the board of NEMA or nonprofit education and advocacy for the movement arts.
00:01:28
Speaker
She's also published research on the effects of social media on dancers, particularly the benefits of a social media cleanse or fast. Now, I know what you're thinking. Doesn't the United States have laws against torturing their own citizens for research? Well, it turns out that asking young citizens to voluntarily stay off social media for a short period of time is not a crime. And as it turns out, it has many surprising benefits. It's incredible stuff, actually. We want to dig in more with her.
00:01:57
Speaker
It's incredible stuff, actually, and we want to dig in more with her today. Just a side note, though, we will not be talking about abuse or sexual acts, but we will be talking about how young dancers are sexualized and objectified. So this is a trigger warning just in case. So Dr. Tomi Ann Roberts, thank you so much for being on our show today. It's great to have you. It's great to be here.
00:02:18
Speaker
So I've known you for a long time, various projects and work, but you've been working at the same college for 30 years as a professor in psychology. So the first thing I wanted to find out is like, as a full-time researcher and professor teaching psychology, what is like your week-to-week, day-to-day kind of lifelike? I mean, how much are you teaching, research projects? How does all that work for you?
00:02:43
Speaker
Sometimes I wonder how that all works for me to be frank. I work at a small four year liberal arts college. And so we only offer undergraduate degrees. And for that reason, Colorado College is a very, it's a very teaching focused institution. And so it's the kind of place where students have really good
00:03:08
Speaker
faculty to student ratios in their courses and so on. I teach my head off, I do a lot of teaching, but one of the great things about where I work is that my teaching and my research get to almost be one and the same. I have students join me in helping me do big research projects, some of the projects I'm sure we'll talk about today.
00:03:37
Speaker
But also, students themselves, especially the more high-achieving honors students in their senior year, will develop ideas for their own senior thesis research project.
Advancements in Psychology and Objectification Research
00:03:50
Speaker
And so my working with them is this wonderful way of combining
00:03:56
Speaker
teaching pedagogy, here's how you can be a psychology researcher, but also collaborating in many ways with them to see a project through. So I do everything all the time. I have a very high teaching load, but also as I'm trying to explain, I guess I have the great good fortune to have excellent students and time to do research projects with them. So what
00:04:25
Speaker
sparked your interest in teaching. Why did you get into this field? Yeah, when I myself was an undergraduate, I have this really vivid memory of
00:04:39
Speaker
It was the beginning of my senior year. I went to Smith College. I had an appointment with my faculty advisor. I was a work study kid, and I did a lot of research projects as part of my work study. After I got out of the dining hall kitchen for my work study job, I was able to do psychology research for work study. And I remember having a meeting with my professor and just sort of
00:05:07
Speaker
Picking his brain about it maybe even the question that doctor steven just asked me sort of what is your life like how how is it to do this career and it struck me as something that.
00:05:22
Speaker
allowed me to balance. In my heart of hearts, I'm quite an extroverted performer. I spent a lot of time in the theater. I was pursuing that kind of a career. I had a kind of crappy thing happen to me that derailed that. And then I thought, oh, well, you know, teaching and mentoring students is a way of
00:05:48
Speaker
It's a way of performing and also interacting in that performance. It's a way of sharing and co-creating cool things. So yeah, that's probably why.
00:06:03
Speaker
So back when I was doing psychology and undergrad, about 30 years ago, right when you started, the hot topic back then was like biopsychology and also decision processing. I did some research in those fields there. So these days in psychology, what, I mean, it was obviously with AI and social media and all these different things we'll talk about, like what are the new hot topics that people are looking at in the psychology world for research?
00:06:27
Speaker
Right. Well, what's so amazing, psychology as a field, of course, started in the late 1800s when Professor William James, the philosopher at Harvard University, said, maybe we need to branch off of philosophy and make a field of study that's about the human experience.
00:06:46
Speaker
and that we can bring scientific research methods to. And ever since its beginnings, psychology has kind of had two branches. One of those branches would be what I would call the functional branch. Those are the kind of like why questions, and those are the questions that I've always been interested. And the other branch is the what branch.
00:07:08
Speaker
And that branch, as you mentioned, Dr. Steven, with the word biopsychology, that branch has become what we now call neuroscience. And because in, you know, gosh, it's hard for me to believe in the 30 years that I've been doing this, how many advances we have.
00:07:27
Speaker
in the technologies that can enable the neuroscience wing of the business to now collaborate with the functional wing of the business. So now we can do things like functional MRI. We can have people's brains and bodies scanned while they are doing psychological processes, while they're thinking problems through, while they're making decisions, etc., etc.
00:07:52
Speaker
So, um, I would say that a lot of the hot topics have have come around partially because of The kind of technologies that we're able to use to collect our data So what is your next research project coming up? Yeah, I i've always got i'm always juggling several projects But the I would say that for me my projects always fall under the same umbrella um I once
00:08:22
Speaker
I found a little book when I was an undergrad. And the book was called Ways of Seeing. I was taking an art history course. And this was a small volume I recommended to anybody listening. Go out, spend five bucks
Impact of Social Media on Self-objectification
00:08:38
Speaker
to get the paperback copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing. And this was a game changer for me. This book was published in the 70s. And this art historian said that
00:08:53
Speaker
We look at the world and we look at art with a kind of subject-object perspective. And one of the chapters in this book said that we look at women's bodies, particularly, in a way that treats those bodies as objects of our scrutiny.
00:09:19
Speaker
and you look all around and from the fine art of the Titian's nude in a museum to a ballet performance to a common advertisement for beer, we see that women's bodies are, as he called it, objectified.
00:09:38
Speaker
And so that little book really sparked my interest in figuring out whether or not I could bring psychological research to bear on that question. What's it like not only to look at bodies in that way,
00:09:54
Speaker
But then also, what's it like to know that your body is being looked at in that way? Do you start to internalize that perspective on yourself? Does that internalization then become the primary way that you think about who you are and why you're a valuable contributor to the world?
Subconscious Objectification and Mental Health Effects
00:10:13
Speaker
And what would be the psychological
00:10:16
Speaker
you know, consequences and benefits of that. And so my research has ever since that little book, my research has really been about those kinds of questions. And it still is, still is. Is it more of an innate way of male to female gaze as far as objectification? Or is it more learned behaviors and mixture of both? Yeah.
00:10:42
Speaker
As a social psychologist, I would argue that it's learned behavior, absolutely. It may be because some of the work that I've done argues that there's a lot of different reasons why
00:10:57
Speaker
we tend to sexually objectify the female body. And it may be because, I mean, somebody might make an evolutionary argument that, I don't know, for heterosexual reproductive value, you have to look at this body as an object. I don't tend to buy it. I do think that we all conspire
00:11:27
Speaker
to create a world where we say that, I even have to correct myself from saying to my two-year-old granddaughter, you look so pretty, right? We all conspire to reward and to think about girls' main value as lying in their appearance.
00:11:53
Speaker
And if we tried to not do that, what could happen? Other things might happen, right? I believe that objectification and sexualization isn't something that only happens to people. It's something that we unwittingly do.
00:12:09
Speaker
And our research shows that, for example, when we show people videos from YouTube of young dancers moving in highly sexually subjective ways, that viewers
00:12:27
Speaker
without meaning to make assumptions about those dancers as having a little bit less humanity. When we view dancers who move in highly sexualized ways, we're more likely to presume, oh, that's a dancer who if they had an injury, they wouldn't be as hurt. That's a dancer who if they were a victim of a bullying scenario, it might have been their fault.
00:12:56
Speaker
We don't mean to do this.
00:12:59
Speaker
We do it. So the consequences of objectification are not about us having our full, we don't have full control over our implicit biases. That's why they're implicit. We do this in other realms. Football players are very objectified. They're almost like chess pieces on a field. Football players get bought and sold and traded.
00:13:28
Speaker
we then begin to think about the bodies, many of them black, of football players as just sort of not quite as human as other bodies because of that way of looking at what they do and what they stand for and what their job and their body is all about.
00:13:48
Speaker
So this kind of process has been developing, it seems like more so that even with more awareness of this issue, it seems like it's becoming more and more prevalent in like aspects of, especially now with gambling involved in sports, especially with the propagation of video and social media sharing of videos and dancers, the fact that dancers don't get paid hardly for anything they do professionally. Is that what you're seeing as well, that we seem to be reinforcing this
00:14:16
Speaker
this problem over and over again? Absolutely. I would definitely say that, again, sort of the other thing about being a psychologist is you have to keep your ears. You feel like you're running several steps behind the latest ways that people can objectify and self objectify.
00:14:35
Speaker
And obviously, with social media, I can remember many years ago when the American Psychological Association invited me to join a task force on the sexualization of girls. The main thing we were concerned about back in those days were these sort of toddlers in tiaras, these beauty pageants, right? And the thing that has now happened with a 24-7 news media feed
00:15:04
Speaker
And with many people whose work and passion is about how they move and use their body, being told that they have to brand themselves, they have to get people to keep looking at them, right? Now we have in the hands of very young people a device that's going to enable them to self-objectify.
00:15:28
Speaker
And they do it willingly because that's where they're going to be able to get the likes. And the currency of social media is attention and likes and shares. And so now you're participating with your own self-objectification in this attention economy because that's how you're going to get out there.
00:15:51
Speaker
So this is on steroids now, absolutely. And we see college athletes, dancers, all sorts of people whose livelihood and whose passions are about their bodies having to engage in a lot of self-objectification.
Self-perception Changes Due to Sexualization
00:16:13
Speaker
So this kind of goes along then with the recent NIL names, image likeness decision that was made two years ago where the NCAA now allows athletes to make money off their name, image and likeness. And the way you're framing things right now, it just occurs to me that you're literally in the title of that name, image likeness that is literally an objectifying description, isn't it? Absolutely, literally so.
00:16:42
Speaker
And these are all people making money off their own name, image likeness. So the objectification reward, I guess what you're saying is, is the money that you're getting paid to do this. So why would this ever even stop them?
00:16:54
Speaker
Why would this ever even stop them, right? So we know in the case of all your research in dance, we know increasingly in the case of we're using this example of American football, the kinds of injuries that can happen as we participate in these activities. But what we're only beginning to comprehend are the kinds of mental health injuries that can happen when you're
00:17:21
Speaker
when you are forced time and time again to take a position on your own body that's as an outsider, when you're asked to think more about your image and likeness than your health and wellbeing. And we find that when people are made to think about how their body peers, they have less access to how their body feels. There's only so many cognitive resources you have.
00:17:50
Speaker
the more you invest in the appearance, the name and image and likeness, the fewer resources you have when you finally show up to rehearsal or practice to be like, okay, wait a minute, let me check in with myself.
00:18:06
Speaker
So what are you seeing as far as the physical manifestations of sexualization, like in young women and dancers, because it seems like sexualization is, I mean, we talked about objectification with athletes, but sexualization is definitely a more concerning issue within the female population, especially in the dance world because of objectification. But from your research, it seems like there are some suggestions that there's actual measurable changes that occur when a woman is being sexualized.
00:18:35
Speaker
Yeah, I there are so we have sort of two lines of research one line that i've spent most of my time in Is what happens? psychologically To those of us who internalize a sexualized or objectified view on our body what and what i've just said is one of the things we give up is we we have fewer cognitive resources to attend to our bodies capacities
00:19:01
Speaker
and internal feeling states and so on. And we've got a lot of research to show all of that. We find that the more self-objectification, the less likely a dancer or a performer is to get into the flow of the experience of their body moving. They're so aware of the audience eyes on them,
00:19:23
Speaker
that they are less likely to lose themselves in the experience of the moving body itself, which is one of the most delicious spaces to be in, right? When we're lost in the creativity of our movement, that's something that I believe as we sexually objectify and sexualize young dancers,
00:19:46
Speaker
we're denying them that experience, right? We're making them be only performers and not have the well-being benefits of losing themselves in this activity that they presumably started doing because they loved it, right? So we're monetizing and objectifying, okay. But then the other line of research, of course, is how do we as viewers, what assumptions do we make when we are looking at
00:20:14
Speaker
sexualized or sexually objectified dancers. And what we're showing, again, back to the idea of equipment, we have an eye tracker at Colorado College and we have people come in and watch varying. We've come up with a system of choreographing some dance movements that either have a lot of sexualized movements in them or less sexualized lyrics in the music or less.
00:20:45
Speaker
And then we look at where individuals are looking on the bodies of young dancers in these cases. And then after they viewed the video, they answer some questions about, we say something like, you know, lots of times we get a sense of who a person's like by how their body has moved.
00:21:04
Speaker
and we have them make some evaluations. And that's, again, where we show that the more highly sexualized the movements, and our movements are things like self-touch, when a dancer touches their own body. One of our codes is not smiling.
00:21:27
Speaker
And a final code that may seem very silly is unbroken eye contact with the camera. And the percent of time that a young dancer is not breaking their eye contact with the camera seems to be associated with
00:21:46
Speaker
more of a view of the dancer as being sexualized and performing only for me, right? And with those three codes, greater self-touch, less smiling, and more longer unbroken eye gaze, we are finding that, especially when the dancer is young, we are finding that our viewers want to look away actually.
00:22:10
Speaker
they defensively look away from the dancer. And when we debrief them later, they say things like, oh, it was very uncomfortable for me. I needed to look away. What choreography is about having the audience be so uncomfortable that they look away?
Resources and Personal Experiences with Objectification
00:22:31
Speaker
But that sounds like more like types of movements and things that are like almost age inappropriate, right? I mean, you're talking about like 10 year olds trying to act like 15 year olds and 12 year olds doing things that like a college dancer or always a woman who's went through puberty or just doing it. So it sounds like there may be an issue with how age appropriate some of these movements are there being trained, right?
00:22:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that you know part of what my My work as a psychologist is i'm agnostic, right? Um, we can say Something like it's immoral. Yes, and and I would agree that it is it's immoral to train young girls to dance in a way That implies that they are adult sexual beings But what I want to do as a psychological scientist is give you evidence
00:23:24
Speaker
that it's not good. It's not good for the girls themselves. And it turns out, even a young, young seeming dancer who's making these kinds of movements, individuals who are viewing those make the same kind of dehumanized and objectifying attributions about that young girl as they would make of an adult. And we don't want that.
00:23:49
Speaker
Well, Dr. Tomian, how do you identify how the self-perception of the dancers, is there research that goes into how a dancer perceives themselves? Yeah, so there's a lot. My colleague and I published a paper that we titled Objectification Theory back in 1997. And this theory paper,
00:24:16
Speaker
has since launched thousands and thousands of studies looking at mostly the consequences of self-objectification. And there's quite a bit of research done specifically on dancers. We do know that dancers suffer from
00:24:36
Speaker
the consequences of self-objectification such as eating disorders at higher rates. So one of the downstream consequences of thinking about yourself as valuable only in terms of how you appear might be something like restricting your eating so that you appear the thin, acceptable shape, right?
00:25:00
Speaker
And so there are lots and lots of studies, most of them have not been done by me, but from all over the world that have looked specifically at the dance world and at how, what are the consequences of self-objectification starting to internalize that point of view?
00:25:17
Speaker
And I'm just going to give a little plug for an organization that Dr. Steven and I are a part of, NEMA. And dancer Kianu Ushida and I, my students are working on
00:25:33
Speaker
developing a hub or a library of resources on exactly these kinds of studies. We want people to be able to access the research that shows the sorts of consequences that can happen when we objectify or sexualize and then when we self-objectify or self-sexualize.
00:25:55
Speaker
And for anyone listening, NEMA stands for nonprofit education and advocacy for the movement arts. So something I wanted to ask about was why specifically dance for you? Like, why did you get into the dance world? And I'm going to...
00:26:14
Speaker
share a little bit like hearing you talk I'm just like listening and I don't even know what to say because I grew up in the dance world and I remember going to competitions and everyone had a different dance style and certain dance styles were given more praise and more awards and um
00:26:36
Speaker
And I feel like in our little dance group in San Jose, California, we all grew up a certain way and we never really had those kind of same movements or the same eye contact or
00:26:50
Speaker
And so I just think back and I'm like, whoa, that's crazy because what we wanted to change was our bodies, or we felt like we weren't as talented as another company, studio. And yeah, I just have so many questions, but let's start there. Right, also.
00:27:14
Speaker
And so you had happened to you what we have shown in our research, which is some years ago, we went and we collected some of the top choreographers in Los Angeles. And we went and we found these 10 top choreographers who work with young people in LA, right? And we found what were the YouTube videos that had the most likes
00:27:41
Speaker
and shares and so on, right? And what were the videos from those same choreographers that had the fewest likes and shares? And just as maybe you noticed when your San Jose group showed up to these conventions, as you might predict, those videos that had millions of more likes
00:28:01
Speaker
where the ones that are little codes of sexualization showed up more in those videos. So people like that more. And here you were a young dancer and your group showed up and you're like, wait a minute. All of the claps and all of the winning choreography involves these kinds of movements. And you felt like it sounds, Yasi, as though you took that on yourself. You said, oh,
00:28:30
Speaker
We're not doing it right. Right. Quote, quote, right. Right. We're quotes, right. We're quotes, right. Yeah. And a part of me wonders if, you know, I even, I was going to say when it was, because I grew up in a very, I don't want to call it religious, but it was very,
00:28:54
Speaker
was just like my parents never, they were very conservative. And so they were first generation Americans. And we, when I was watching certain artists perform, it was like, Oh my God, I don't want to watch this with my dad. But this is
00:29:13
Speaker
I'm like, Oh my gosh, like even today, I still feel the same way. But now compared to like what I have visions of Britney Spears dancing with her snake, I love Britney Spears back in the 90s. But