Thirty years ago, as an aspiring actress in New York City, Tomi-Ann Roberts met Harvey Weinstein at a restaurant where she was waiting tables. In a scenario that now echoes the reports of many other women, she says Weinstein invited her to the apartment where he was staying to discuss a potential script. According to Roberts, when she arrived, Weinstein was in the bathtub, naked. As she told The New York Times, Weinstein encouraged her to take off her clothes, too, because the role he envisioned for her might include a topless scene.
She left the apartment, but the incident never left her. Instead, it was among the factors that prompted her to pursue a doctorate in social psychology and to study the objectification of women. Today, Roberts is a respected expert on feminism and gender who co-authored the 1997 paper that established objectification theoryopens in new window—the idea that a culture that objectifies women trains them to view their bodies as sexual objects, which can lead to shame, anxiety and mental health concerns.
Roberts has been calling attention to the culture that holds women and girls back by fueling a preoccupation with appearance. She shared her thoughts on the ways that psychologists can contribute to the conversation on harassment and be part of the solution to end it.
What has been the reaction to your story?
For the most part, I have received positive feedback. But there has been some ugliness, like all-capital-letter email threats calling me a liar. And it has been unnerving to see some of the comments on videos that I am featured in—comments about hating women that then devolve into anti-Semitism. I feel sick to be connected to that. There have also been a lot of reporters who just wanted the sordid details of this story.
But most of the interviews I did were respectful, and I was able to turn the topic to the larger issue of sexual objectification. It has been amazing to add my voice to what's now starting to feel like a battle cry.
How did the encounter with Weinstein lead to or influence your focus on objectification?
In the early years after that incident, I would often find myself in groups of women speaking of experiences of sexual harassment, but I would not share mine. I stayed quiet, yet I considered myself a feminist psychologist!
One day, I asked myself why I felt my experience didn't count, and it forced me to recognize two things.
First, my shame, which got me thinking about how I had internalized what Simone de Beauvoir called my "second-sex" status—this was the treatment I ought to have expected, reaching for something like a part in a movie, and I was ashamed to speak about it. Second, I acknowledged that these experiences and our responses occur regularly and on a continuum from seemingly benign to traumatizing. Women do what we need to do to cope. A voice inside of me got me out of that apartment. Here was a resilience that struck me as worth studying. Girls and women shouldn't have to endure this kind of treatment, but we do.
It also occurred to me that we all participate in a culture that treats girls' and women's bodies as consumable objects, and that girls and women are often raised to expect and endure this kind of treatment. We single out men like Harvey Weinstein as a way of turning a blind eye to this cultural arrangement—pathologizing individual men lets us all off the hook regarding our participation in the objectifying culture. Since the publication of objectification theory, I have spent 20 years studying the psychological consequences of the sexual objectification and sexualization of girls and women and their internalization of this treatment. My scholarly work has been my way of shining a light on the costs of immersing women in a culture that values our sexualized appearance over what we can contribute. It's my way of shouting a big, feminist "No!" to that.
Where should the next phase of research on harassment and objectification go?
I am very excited about work by psychologist Rachel Calogero of Western University on the idea that self-objectification serves what she calls a system-justifying function. In other words, the more we convince women to invest in their appearance, the further away women get from any sort of outrage about a sexist society.
We also need to do more work to understand how women of different races and ethnicities experience harassment and to take seriously the work being done on precarious manhood, or the notion that manhood is easily lost, so men view aggression as a way to hold on to it.
Let's study why men are doing this. I am sick of the old, "It's natural and they can't help it" attitude. They can.
What can psychologists do?
Psychologists are in the unique position of being able to ask the deeper questions about why women are treated this way and why some girls and women would participate in their own objectification. Women aren't looking in mirrors a lot because they are vain—they are looking in mirrors because their appearance makes a difference in the outcome of their lives.
There is a brain drain here and we are losing many women and girls to a preoccupation with how they look. We are losing their participation in other amazing walks of life.
Read more in APA's new two-volume 2017 Handbook of the Psychology of Women , which includes a chapter co-authored by Roberts on objectification theory, www.apa.org/pubs/books/4311534 .
