I was at the beach this past weekend with some old friends. One afternoon I was sitting on the beach, watching the water, in a conversation, and people watching simultaneously, like most of us do on vacation.
Then I saw something I can’t shake.
Where it Starts
A cluster of girls, maybe twelve or thirteen caught out of the corner of my eye. Their swimsuits styled like adult lingerie, string bikinis leaving little to the imagination. Then they did something that caught my full attention: those same girls readjusting constantly, tugging on a strap, pulling at a bottom, crossing an arm over a chest that just started developing.
You know what that adjusting is. We don’t need a citation to recognize they felt exposed in the bikini, uncomfortable at a level that was obvious, trying to convince themselves they look great and love it. But let’s name the framework anyway, because this is our territory.
This is self-objectification. Fredrickson and Roberts named it almost thirty years ago: the chronic habit of watching your own body from the outside instead of just living in it (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Their theory puts puberty as the starting point. The moment girls become visible objects of the male gaze, whether they consented to that visibility or not. Those girls weren’t relaxed. They were feigning ease, while their bodies screamed something else. That’s what the split objectification theory describes. Half your attention on living while the other half on being watched.
What it Costs
That split attention comes at a cost. Fredrickson’s own experiment found that self-objectification (in her study, just trying on a swimsuit instead of a sweater) increased body shame, which then predicted restrained eating (Fredrickson et al., 1998). The APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls took this further. Sexualization undermines confidence in your own body and is linked to eating disorders, depression, disrupted sexual self-image (APA, 2007).
None of this is abstract to us. It’s the raw material a lot of our adult clients bring into the room, years later, stripped of its original context. This research is twenty years old! What would they find now with the impact of social media?
That’s exactly the kind of pattern our field exists to name.
Here’s what I need to be clear about. None of this is the tween girls’ fault. They didn’t design the swimwear. They didn’t build the algorithms that reward a mature body before puberty even finishes. They didn’t invent the idea that being “checked out” means being valued. They inherited it. From an industry that profits off fast fashion, from feeds that don’t check anyone’s age, sometimes from parents who grew up in the same pipeline and don’t see it anymore because it’s normal to them.
Not a Choice
And it’s not a choice, not really. Twelve and thirteen sits right in the window where kids are most susceptible to peer pressure and least equipped to resist it. Steinberg and Monahan found that the ability to resist peer influence barely develops between ages 10 and 14. It doesn’t climb until 14 to 18 (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). So that twelve year old picking out a swimsuit, or already on the beach, isn’t short on willpower. The machinery to resist the group hasn’t come online yet. Opting out isn’t a neutral choice to her friends. It would be a bold statement against the grain. An invitation to be questioned or judged. Asking a twelve year old to accept that emotional and relational cost isn’t fair! Most don’t have the self-esteem or support to try anyway. So what happens? She wears the bikini, accepting her discomfort as part of life, and adjusts it all afternoon.
My sexologist brain won’t let this go. The discomfort lands on the person with the least power in the whole chain, the young girls. They carry the shame, the hyper-vigilance, the mental load of watching, comparing, and critiquing themselves. But they didn’t cause any of it. The causes started upstream from them where they have no impact. A market and a culture decided a developing body is fair game to model an adult silhouette, before the body is even developed!
I’m not here to shame parents either. Most are working inside a market where the sexualized option is the default one at the store. Fighting against this sexualization costs more money, more energy, more friction with peer pressure than most families have on a random Tuesday.
And it wasn’t only the tweens. Further down the beach, women in their twenties were doing the exact same thing. The same tugging, same repositioning, same crossed arm, same feigning ease masking immense discomfort and insecurity. That’s the detail that changes the whole picture for me. Puberty is where this starts, not where it ends. What I saw wasn’t a tween problem girls grow out of. It’s a condition that gets carried forward, just with a better performance layered on top. The twelve year old and the twenty five year old are running the same script. Watching themselves from the outside. She just had more years to get good at hiding it.
That’s exactly the kind of pattern our field exists to name.