the male gaze observes. the algorithmic gaze observes, violates, and reproduces.

the past two-ish decades of social media made something abundantly clear—algorithms can define what women should look like. the earliest filters on snapchat— and later instagram— made this explicit, with women being able to overlay the ideal on top of their self-image. this was an extension of the traditional objectifying gaze perpetuated in mass-media and the digital modification made possible by photoshop. now, women could photoshop themselves with apps like facetune, or pre-determined filters that smoothed and slimmed. they could post their idealized self to be seen, it could garner all the likes, be pushed by the algorithm, seen by others, and perpetuate an unrealistic standard of beauty. these social media algorithms made objectified representations of women appear normal, but they at least required actual women, or at least images derived from them, to do so. gen AI has changed that.

Subscribe now

this new era of objectification has it all. women are recorded and uploaded with meta glasses non-consensually. men use grok and ai to digitally undress and violate women, stealing their physical likeness and keeping it devoid of their personhood in a gross violation of privacy.

AI influencers perform the identity of “woman” without the human experience, filling our feeds with bodies detached from personhood. women without women. siri, alexa, and other agreeable ai assistants are perpetually compliant, likely shaping perceptions of women's availability, responsiveness, and autonomy. unlike a human observer, the algorithmic gaze operates at immense scale, continuously learning from billions of interactions while remaining largely invisible to users.

like traditional objectification, this new era of techno-facilitated objectification is built on the ownership of another, denial of autonomy and subjectivity, the ability to violate, and treating women as fungible. but, the algorithm transforms objectification into an infrastructure. rather than being enacted by a single observer, objectification becomes built into the systems and technologies themselves. and now, with the proliferation of surveillance technologies (meta glasses, flock cameras) the potential of being surveilled, watched, or worse— non-consensually recorded and uploaded— is endless.

but there’s something even more frightening to me about this new era of objectification. thanks to ai enabled deepfakes, women's bodies and identities are detached from the women themselves. their faces, voices, and likenesses can be endlessly reproduced and repurposed, but it’s women without women. everything about us—our faces, freckles, voices— is a dataset. it’s used to recreate visual representations of women, but it’s a woman without personhood.

as a result, AI is producing an entirely new class of digital women. AI influencers populate social media feeds, selling products, documenting "a day in my life," building followings, and partnering with brands. they perform femininity convincingly enough that many users don't realize they aren't real. they have the appearance of women, but none of the interiority that makes someone human. no history, no desires, no agency, no capacity to consent. this proliferation of AI-generated women perfectly showcases the line between woman and object that objectification theory has always warned about.

This new era of AI tells us that there actually is no line between woman and object. AI doesn't just reduce women to objects, it manufactures objects that look like women while simultaneously extracting real women's bodies, voices, and identities to create them. the result is a digital landscape where women are increasingly represented without their personhood, and where personhood itself is not needed.

we've been preparing for this for years. before this gen ai boom, we were being taught to normalize feminized technologies designed to be perpetually patient, agreeable, and available. siri, alexa, cortana — voice assistants that apologize when interrupted, respond warmly to commands, and never assert boundaries of their own. they familiarized us with a version of femininity defined not by personhood, but by service. true objectification. together, these technological developments and digital environments teach us what a woman is— something that can be generated, customized, surveilled, commanded, and consumed.

i leave you with Martha Nussbaum’s 7 features of objectification to mull over in this context:

these are the beginning thoughts for a book chapter i’m drafting on the objectification of women in digital spaces. this was a word-dump to start to organize my ideas, it’s unpolished and not comprehensive, but i needed to get words to metaphorical paper <3

Subscribe now

Share

If you have taken an introduction to psychology class you have probably learned about these founding fathers—the pioneers who shaped the field to be what it is today. I thought little of this framing as a bright-eyed, fledgling psychology student but as I advanced through social psychology, sociology, and anthropology courses, I had a simple realization: many of the theories we learn as explanations of “human nature” were developed by men, studied primarily in men, or interpreted through a male lens.

Take the classic Stanford Prison Experiment— a study you probably know of even if you’ve never taken a psychology class— that is used as evidence that people can behave in cruel and inhumane ways when given power over others. Just one caveat—Zimbardo only studied men. How about Milgram’s obedience experiment? Of the 780 participants, only 40 were women. So are these classic studies really demonstrating human behavior? Or are they demonstrating men’s behavior?

Questions like this changed how I think about psychology and our role as researchers, and shaped my research program as a feminist social psychologist. They led me to a broader question: what happens when we take women's experiences seriously enough to let them challenge our long-held beliefs?

The answer, it turns out, is that we often arrive at different conclusions. Sometimes we discover that classic findings about human behavior were actually findings about men’s behavior. Other times, we uncover ways that women’s perspectives have been dismissed, overlooked, or devalued—not just within individuals studies, but in how we think about science itself.

The studies below explore both sides of this story. They they reveal how gender bias shapes whose knowledge is taken seriously in the first place, and revisit foundational psychological findings through a lens that actually considers women’s experiences. Together, they point toward a broader lesson: when a field is dedicated to understanding the human condition but has systematically excluded and devalued women, that tells us something important about the human condition itself.

Subscribe now

Share

The “women=soft science” effect

Who we study shapes what we know. The Stanford Prison Experiment, for example, studied men, and tell us something about men. But there is another side to that story: who we value shapes what we consider worth knowing.

For centuries women’s experiences have been dismissed as niche, emotional, frivolous, or subjective. From our hobbies, to our leadership, to occupations associated with women, what is feminine is silly, and what is masculine is serious. These assumptions do not simply affect how individual women are perceived; they influence how entire disciplines are evaluated. They influence what knowledge is deemed worthy of knowing, and shape the way women’s participation in knowledge is evaluated.

This was beautifully and comprehensively demonstrated in a paper that I love, which across four studies demonstrates that fields associated with women are perceived as less scientific, taken less seriously, and deemed less worthy of funding than fields associate with men. This is driven by 1) non-scientists and 2) the pervasive stereotype that women lack competence and ability.

First, researchers manipulated the perception of various fields as women or men-dominated by giving participants descriptions to read. Here’s an example. To present a field as dominated by men, participants read: Earth Science— The study of the earth or one or more of its parts, i.e. ocean, rock, atmosphere. There are 66,000 men in this field compared to 15,000 women. For women dominated: Earth Science— The study of the earth or one or more of its parts, i.e. ocean, rock, atmosphere. There are 15,000 men in this field compared to 66,000 women. After each description, participants indicated whether they thought the field was a hard science or a soft science. They found that participants labeled fields described as majority-women as “soft sciences” more often, and tended to label fields described as majority-men as hard sciences. They were the same field!! With the same descriptions!!

The researchers wanted to know why. They wanted to know which specific stereotype(s) about women underlie the women=soft science effect. They also wanted to know who is perpetrating this bias— is it people with science backgrounds, or non-scientists? They find that for nonscientists, negative stereotypes about women's competence and ability in STEM predict the “women = soft science” bias.

Here’s the kicker: not only does “women=soft science”, but “soft science =women”. As another component of this paper, participants read about the same field, but either described as a hard or soft science, and then were asked to indicate the proportion of women they believe are in the field (example of manipulation below). Unsurprisingly, participants estimated greater representation of women in fields labeled as soft.

Finally, they wanted to know the downstream consequences of this bias. Without cueing gender, participants were asked to give their general impressions of hard vs. soft sciences- how important they are to be federally funded, how difficult the coursework is, how likely they are to listen to experts from the field, how reliable they find results from the field, and how prestigious they find the field. Across all five dimensions, soft sciences were devalued relative to hard sciences, and were given less funding in a hypothetical NSF budget allocation exercise.

This isn’t just about thinking a field has more women than men. It’s about the way that stereotypes about women shape the way people think about knowledge. Fields associated with women are seen as less rigorous, less trustworthy, and less deserving of resources compared to the same fields that supposedly have more men.

If psychology’s reputation suffers because it is associated with women (which this paper itself demonstrated), then there is a certain irony in dismissing the field. When women are excluded from science, our understanding of humanity is incomplete, but when women enter science and expand that understanding, the work is devalued. Some of the strongest psychological research (in my opinion) of the past few decades has emerged from feminist scholars asking questions that earlier researchers never pursued.

Consider one of psychology’s most famous findings about casual sex. For decades, it was treated as evidence of a fundamental, evolved difference between men and women. Then a feminist psychologist came along and asked a remarkably simple question: what if we asked women “why”?

Subscribe now

How feminist researchers clarified a seminal study on human sexual behavior by simply considering women’s POV

Imagine a stranger approaches you on the street and asks you to have sex with them. Imagine you are a woman, and you say no thank you. Imagine a researcher taking that response as evidence that women evolutionarily dislike casual sex, without even asking you why you said no. Congratulations, you’ve just conducted a widely-cited study in the field of psychology!

In 1978 and 1982, Clark and Hatfield assembled teams of researchers who approached students on a college campus and asked them three things: 1) would you go out with me tonight; 2) would you come over to my apartment; 3) would you have sex with me?.

Across two studies, they found that when the request came from a man (meaning the request was directed toward women), 0% of women accepted an offer for casual sex. In study 1, just 6% of women agreed to go to a man’s apartment, with that dropping to 0% in study 2. Men, on the other hand, readily accept offers for casual sex (75%, and 69% respectively).

As they say in their discussion, “We now know that this is so. We are not quite sure why this is so. It may be that, as sociobiologists suggest, women are eager for love and commitment. Men are eager for sexual activity.” They lightly explore the possibility that women experience greater risks with this type of behavior, but do not investigate any further. Women were present as participants in this work, but their experiences weren't treated as informative.

This paper has been cited by thousands and has been used by evolutionary psychologists to support the stance that men and women are evolved toward different preferences in sexual behavior. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, blah blah.

Evolved and inherent, or social and learned?

Feminist psychology centers social structures and power and questions historical research approaches that treat men as the default and their experiences as the norm. On a topic like casual sex, evolutionary psychologists would wager that our men and women ancestors faced different adaptive problems which challenged their ability to survive and reproduce, an that men and women likely developed distinct psychological mechanisms to survive. For example, women are more invested in reproduction, with a 9-month gestation that limits their physical abilities; birth is risky, nursing is lengthy; and there are brief windows of fertility that is limited across the lifespan. Women therefore may have evolved to be more selective in choosing a partner, they may be motivated to find a long-term committed partner to help during pregnancy and child-raising, and they may prefer a mate with resources and stability.

This would, of course, provide compelling explanation as to why women tend to decline casual sex with a stranger, compared to men who evolutionarily should be inclined to spread their genes widely with little regard for partner selectivity. Evolutionary perspectives assume that these sex differences are passed on genetically. Feminist psychologists on the other hand, do not deny that these differences emerge, but examine if observed gender differences tell us something about women’s (relative to men’s) cultural power and status. So maybe we should ask women more about why they decline casual sex with a stranger. Dr. Terri Conley and her team spent years on a line of research doing just that. In her own words from a 2011 interview:

“I think a lot of my work is just about applying common sense,” she says. “Are we really going to believe women do not like sex as much as men?”

Women don’t dislike casual sex. They dislike bad, risky sex (and prefer casual sex with women).

In a 2011 set of studies, Conley replicates the finding that women are less likely to accept a casual sex offer, but investigates several factors that explain the gender difference. She finds that male proposers were perceived as more dangerous and less likely to provide sexual satisfaction than women proposers. So, women decline due to fear of danger, and fear of bad sex. But then she did something really interesting— she recruited bisexual and lesbian women participants. First, she found that bisexual women were more likely to accept a casual sex offer from a woman than a man. Then, comparing gay men and lesbian women, she finds that the gender differences disappear entirely; lesbian women are just as likely to accept casual sex offers from another woman as gay men are from other men. By studying bisexual and lesbian women, Conley’s research isolates sex with men as the unappealing aspect of casual sex. I, personally, find this very funny.

Conley and her team expanded on this in a 2014 paper exclusively investigating casual sex acceptance among both bisexual women and men. They find that both women and men bisexuals find male casual sex proposers as less appealing and less sexually capable than female casual sex proposers, and this predicts offer acceptance/declining. Let me repeat that: When bisexual men are given a choice between men and women, they too show a preference away from casual sex with men. L O L. By including non-hetero men and women, Conley and her team were really able to tease apart the source of this “gender” difference. It seems the real gender difference at play is men being perceived as dangerous and unskilled lovers.

In 2012, her team dropped another paper and continued to untie the knot of casual sex differences. This time, they focused on the sexual double standard women often face related to sexual activity. First, they found that when reading about a college student who agrees to a casual sex offer, participants judged a woman acceptor far more harshly than a male acceptor— when participants read about '“Lisa”, she was rated as less intelligent, less mentally healthy, more promiscuous, less competent, and more risky than “Mark”. This was reflected in women’s own ratings of how they think they would be perceived if they accepted a casual sex offer, overall suggesting that women carry more reputational risks associated with accepting casual sex. Tying it all together, they find that fear of stigma can partially explain the observed gender difference in casual sex offers.

Across these papers, Conley and her team not only identify why the gender difference from Clark & Hatfield’s seminal study emerges, but they show that the gender difference disappears under certain conditions— when women aren’t concerned about safety, when they don’t think their reputation will be damaged, when they think the sex will be good, and when they’re being approached by a woman. It’s not an inherent, biological difference — it’s a learned protective mechanism that practically disappears when women feel safe.

It would be easy (and would fit within patriarchal narratives) to defer to the straightforward gender difference result, chalk it up to evolution, and say that men are women are just ~built different~. But asking the “why”, and considering the sociocultural forces that shape women’s experiences refocuses the research away from men. It gives power to the experiences of women, it helps us understand women as people who like to have sex (shocking!), and highlights the necessity of pleasure and safety in women’s sexual experiences.

What strikes me most about Conley’s work is not just that she reached a different conclusion than Clark and Hatfield, because she really didn’t. She found the same gender differences, at first. But the she asked “why?”. Rather than assuming women’s behavior reflected an innate biological preference, she asked women about their experiences. She considered the social realities of being a woman: safety concerns, sexual stigma, and the likelihood of pleasure. She treated women’s perspectives as valuable data.

That, to me, is what feminist psychology is really about. It is the recognition that men’s experiences are not the whole story. It is the recognition that if we want to understand human behavior, we cannot treat women as deviations from men, too complex to study (like in clinical trials where women’s hormones are just too difficult to account for). Psychology studied men and called it human nature. Then, women were present, but not centered. Researchers like Conley remind me that when we focus our lens on women’s experiences, we get better, more complete science, even if it is dismissed as “soft”.

Subscribe now

Share

When I registered the date, I immediately remembered how I felt in the midst of the academic job market. I had no idea where I would live or how much I would be paid. I was hopeful for a shot at a stable (lol), respected career. I was excited to prep new courses and work on books, and I was so, so excited to mentor students. Then, I remembered how I felt when I realized that would not happen, at least not that year. I remembered the complete unknown of applying for and interviewing for non-academic jobs, and I remembered how numb I felt when I received an offer from a corporate research company.

For someone who was really open to non-academic work, this offer was a dream in many ways: remote, good pay, good benefits, and social psychology adjacent. But for me specifically— someone who wanted to keep working on my own research and build up my social media presence— it came with a steep trade-off. Due to the company’s policies, I had to halt my independent research. I also had to stop posting about topics deemed “controversial” on social media, which covered, essentially, every topic I post about. I took the contract to a lawyer, I tried to negotiate terms, but the policy was not flexible. I could have kept applying, but I was truly exhausted.

I took the job and fully embraced it, which meant legitimately coming to a screeching halt on all of the side projects I had been building for years. I stopped posting online in the same way, I stopped working with brands, and I took a step back from trying to publish academically. Not only did I feel like a career path had been taken from me, but I felt like my outside-of-work passions were being taken from me, too. It was a lot to grapple with and there were days that I cried and cried and mourned the life I had imagined having.

But at the same time, I felt free. Free from thoughts of earning tenure, from having to fight for grant money, from needing to building a lab from scratch. Free to move wherever I wanted, free from feeling like my success at work defines my success as a person. I felt financially free and was earning more than any of the academic jobs were offering. My brain was given a break I didn’t know I needed. And, I was able to really put down roots in Tampa. Even though I spent six years there in grad school, I felt transient—I was always thinking ahead and mentally preparing to move for a faculty job. But with my new freedom to settle in, I started exploring new hobbies, I started making new amazing friends, and I started re-evaluating my career goals.

I’ve since left that position and am now in a role that allows me more freedom over my personal work (like having this Substack), but looking back, I am so grateful for that first position. It forced me to stop and just exist. I got to focus on my life outside of academic work, and intentionally re-evaluate what I wanted my career to look like. I also got to see how a social psychologist can thrive in the corporate research world, and learned more about the kind of work I wanted to do.

Two years later, my career looks nothing like the one I imagined during the last semester of graduate school when I was flying across the country for tenure-track interviews. In many ways, that's still something I'm making sense of. But it has also given me opportunities, perspectives, and freedoms I never would have discovered otherwise. Now that I’m here, I want to share five lessons I’ve learned these past two years.

What Two Years Taught Me

1. A job does not have to be an identity. Man was this a nasty thread for me to untangle, but I am getting there! For seven years,"feminist psychology" wasn't just what I did—it was who I was. I was a feminist psychologist. Leaving academia forced me to figure out how that part of my identity could still show up in my life. Turns out, I am still a feminist psychologist.

2. A career can have multiple chapters. When you’re trained to aim for tenure, you view a job offer as a permanent home— that offer means you will have a place to build a lab and a research program that will ultimately define your career. Turns out, it’s really nice to feel like you can leave a job. Jobs are learning opportunities, and you can quit — the skills, relationships, and experiences you build will travel with you <3

3. The skills are more transferable than you think. I worried that a niche focus on social, feminist psychology had prepared me for exactly one job and would be a hard sell for the industry jobs I was applying to. It turns out that research design, data analysis, writing, presenting, and asking good questions are useful and in-demand almost everywhere. I jumped from grad student to Research Principal and now I get to be a ~Director~.

4. Industry treats you as the expert that you are. Holy fucking shit balls y’all. “Graduate student”, “post-doc”, “assistant professor”. You’re basically in training and seen as not-quite-an-expert despite having advanced degrees, teaching experience, publications, peer reviewing experience, experience leading a lab, and everything in between. Even when you land a TT role, it’s a quest to prove yourself as worthy enough for tenure. Well, not outside of academia. On the first day of my corporate research job, I was introduced to the team as Dr. Felig, and it was publicly stated that I was an expert in social psychology and had a lot to contribute to the research streams. That really shouldn’t be groundbreaking, but it sadly was.

5. I needed a life, not just a career. When I was in grad school and on the academic job market, almost every major decision was made with my career in mind. Friendships, hobbies, relationships, and even geography often felt secondary to publications, conferences, application cycles, or the possibility of moving for a position. When I left, I was devastated by some of what I lost. But for the first time, I invested in things that had nothing to do with work. I built deeper friendships (ily Cody, Siobhan, Becky, Rich (ranch), Chandria, Annabelle, Emily, New York Brian and the Crisis Crew). I explored new hobbies simply because they were fun (hello candle making! hello pole dancing!). I became part of a community without wondering how long I would stay, and I decided where I wanted to move when the time felt right. It’s not that academia was wrong for me, or that industry is better. It’s that I needed a full, multifaceted life that could hold my career without fully hinging on it.

Here are some gems from the archives:

The point is, they get defensive, they dismiss the study all-together (or social science in general for that matter), and they take it personally. #notallmen

Typically, it’s the women in my comment sections thanking me for sharing research that feels so personally relevant and validating to them. It’s women who defend the work as meaningful and necessary in a world that diminishes the value of research about women’s experiences. It’s women who push back when men are dismissive in my comments, who advocate for listening to experts, who value evidence.

At least, that was the case. Until I talked about botox.

I found the third rail

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon a video where a woman was talking about botox and how it restricts facial expressions and therefore silences women. Me being me, I piggy-backed off of it in a video of my own, said “yep, this woman is spot on”. I brought in decades of science on facial expressions and emotional experience, objectification, and botox, and I tied it all together.

I covered the science. I explained how botox doesn’t just restrict facial expression, but by discussing something called the “facial feedback hypothesis”, I added that it actually inhibits women’s emotional experiences. I tied it all together through the lens of objectification theory (my area of expertise), and ended the video with a disclaimer:

I’m less interested in judging women who get botox than I am in questioning and trying to identify why as a culture we are so obsessed with women becoming smoother, younger, quieter, less expressive.

Check out the video here:

@naia_papaiaI could talk about this ALL DAY @Laura ⭐️

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Weeeeeell. I learned something from posting this video. Botox is apparently an off-limits topic. But not for men— for women. I've talked about rape culture, objectification, and sexism online for years. Somehow, none of those topics were quite as provocative as botox. Third-wave feminism? More like third rail feminism am I right ladies?

Botox, girl code, and how a science-based critique felt like mutual betrayal </3

The comments started rolling in. Lots of “wow this is so interesting”, and “thank you for sharing”. Yes!! You’re welcome!! But then, as the video got more and more views, the comments started to feel…off. Dismissive, hostile, and insulting. To my absolute horror, it was coming from women themselves this time.

I had done it. By calling out the demonstrated consequences of Botox, I had violated an unwritten rule. I wasn’t just sharing research; I was apparently betraying women by not enthusiastically supporting a beauty practice many of them participate in and find comfort in.

Suddenly, the research was a problem, the evidence became offensive, the conversation itself became unacceptable, and I needed to shut up, grow up, and stop demonizing women’s choices. The video itself barely touched on my personal opinion; I was synthesizing research the same way I would if I were writing a literature review or an introduction for a peer-reviewed paper. But I was told point-blank that I was misleading and fear-mongering in pursuit of “personal ideology”. I mean, yeah, my personal ideology is to talk about science and share research related to women’s experiences, so that’s what I was doing. And, obviously, a three-minute video lacks nuance of every possible scenario and I never have enough time to say everything I would like— sometimes that means talking in generalized ways, or leaving out caveats and limitations— which usually people understand because again, it’s a three minute video. But this just felt different.

In many ways, these comments tell a story about mutual betrayal. Some women felt I had betrayed them by publicly dissecting a beauty practice they valued, or by using science to fear monger about their beloved botox. But I felt betrayed by how quickly some women abandoned the very principles—curiosity, evidence, critical thinking, respect for expertise—that had brought us together in the first place. A commenter named “curiousity” telling me to shut up feels particularly funny.

Of course, this isn’t to say that women— or people of all genders who see my videos— should never take issue with what I say, or push back, or ask questions. But the amount of “shut ups” left in the comments tell me this wasn’t just skepticism of the research. Skepticism asks for more information, but "shut up" asks for less, and that's what really got me. These women weren't saying, "I don't think this research is correct"; they were saying, "I don't want this conversation to exist." It felt too paralleled for comfort to the comments I get from men who don’t want to hear about sexism, sexual harassment, or the patriarchy.

In retrospect, their comments make perfect sense. Beauty practices don't just exist outside of us, on our skin, our faces, our nails and hair. They become woven into our identities, our routines, our friendships, our self-esteem, and our understanding of who we are. And when these choices feel so personal, they become difficult to even discuss, because critique of the practice feels like critique of the person. I am not in the business of critiquing women’s body choices. I am in the business of sharing and contextualizing the research so that women can make those choices in an informed way. And that’s what I am going to keep doing <3

Share

Subscribe now

If you want to check out the research I cite in that video, here are the sources:

Citrin, L. B., Roberts, T.-A., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). Objectification Theory and Emotions: A Feminist Psychological Perspective on Gendered Affect. In L. Z. Tiedens & C. W. Leach (Eds.), The Social Life of Emotions (pp. 203–224). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coles, N.A., March, D.S., Marmolejo-Ramos, F. et al. A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1731–1742 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01458-9

Lewis, M.B. The interactions between botulinum-toxin-based facial treatments and embodied emotions. Sci Rep 8, 14720 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-33119-1

Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.768

Boy was I wrong. Upon doing some research to prepare for a post, I learned the actual history behind the naming of Denim Day. It is somehow both more disappointing than previously imagined, and yet entirely unsurprising. The name stems from a 1992 rape trial in Italy in which all charges were overturned because the victim was wearing jeans. Why, might you ask? Great question, which I absolutely hate to now know the answer to. The Italian Supreme Court deemed that since the victim was wearing tight jeans, she must have helped the person who raped her remove them, thereby implying consent. I beg your finest, most absolute pardon? In response, wearing denim has become a symbol of solidarity as well as an act of protest against victim blaming. To read more about the history of Denim Day, check out https://denimday.org/ .

The denim paradox: No matter what she wears, the system adapts.

I started truly spiraling while reading about this incident—not just because of how awful and disappointing the trial turned out to be, but because this particular instance of victim blame was so paradoxical that it made my head spin. Typically, women are held responsible for violence enacted against them when they’re wearing revealing clothing. We all know the classic lines – “Well what did she expect wearing something like that?”. “She should have covered up”. Okay, so a woman wears jeans. Jeans that cover her whole lower body and apparently are too difficult for one person to remove. She does all the “right” things. And she’s still raped. So now the story is both: If she shows too much skin, she’s responsible and If she covers her body, she’s responsible.

I would love to introduce you to two psychological concepts:

1. Cognitive dissonance: the mental discomfort experienced when holding two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or attitudes, or when behavior conflicts with beliefs. This theory suggests people are motivated to reduce this tension by changing, justifying, or ignoring the conflicting information.

2. According to system justification theory, people are motivated to defend, bolster, and justify prevailing social, economic, and political arrangements (i.e., the status quo). It explains why individuals– even those disadvantaged by the system– often support unequal structures to satisfy deep-seated epistemic, existential, and relational needs.

The arc of the patriarchy is flexible and it bends to preserve itself, not justice.

When the case at hand doesn’t fit the usual script, it creates a problem, not for the logic, but for the broader system. It induces cognitive dissonance, but when the goal is to defend the status quo (e.g., women are at fault for their own sexual violence), it leads to new explanations that can reconcile these contradictory beliefs while still maintaining the system. Enter, the denim paradox. Instead of this case leading the court to question the premise (e.g., “maybe clothing can’t signal consent”, “maybe women aren’t to blame for violence committed against them”), it just leads to a new explanation. But, it must always lead to the same conclusion as to not disrupt the system: she is responsible.

This is what cognitive dissonance looks like under patriarchy. Flexibility, back-bending, and jumping through hoops. The paradox is the point. It allows the system to hold two or more opposing ideas at once, as long as they both lead to the same outcome: blaming women.

@naia_papaiaI dont know how I didn't know this, but now I do.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Subscribe now

Share

Author note. As I furiously drafted this, irate at the world and how the justice system treats women, I was at least doing so outside during a beautiful spring day. POV you are watching me draft this post:

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Jost, J. T., & van der Toorn, J. (2012). System justification theory. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 313–343). Sage Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249222.n42

Subscribe now

Welcome to the inside of this feminist scientist’s brain.

After finishing my PhD last year and not landing an academic job, I took a step back to decide how I’d keep my ties to the feminist psychology world, and more importantly, how I’d continue sharing research that I find valuable and worth discussing.

After months of “who am I? what do I want?”, as well as feeling the burnout of making video content on soul-draining apps like TikTok, I’ve decided one place to channel my feminist ramblings is here.

1. Science + Cultural Commentary + A Feminist Lens

Have you seen my videos on the objectification of women? What about my videos linking teaching evaluations to gender bias? Or maybe my videos on the way reproductive care fails to take women’s pain seriously? The ramblings are all over the place, but one thread links them— highlighting how gender bias colors the everyday moments of our lives.

Just as I’ve been creating video content linking these seemingly mundane experiences back to gender bias and highlighting the science behind them, I’ll be writing about it here. You’ll get my unfiltered thoughts on how everything (and I do mean everything) fits together, through the lens of feminist theory, with science to back it up.

2. You’ll love it here if:

Across my platforms, I’ve built a community of 150,000+ who find value in understanding the science that propels gender bias. These are folks of all genders, ages, and backgrounds, who want to look at the world through a more nuanced lens. You’ll fit right in if you enjoy: social and cultural commentary, gender equality, psychological science, and a snarky host who far too often ties things back to sexism.

3. What you can expect from me:

Bear with me as I get used to my Substack training wheels and get in a rhythm of writing. This is new to me, and I’m not sure what my cadence will be. Support at this beginning stage, as well as input on things you’d like to see my write about, would be greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to follow along on this adventure, and thanks so much for being here.

Subscribe now