The dictatorship of the body. How society influences the (self)representation of women
Perception of one’s own body, relationship with the other and with the male, and representation of the female body within society. How do women see themselves? The survey conducted by Eurispes, and realised in collaboration with the Associazione Filocolo, crosses individual, social and political aspects, to take stock of how the collective imagination has modified and shaped the perception of women’s self, so much so as to imprison them in some cases in “mental cages” from which it is difficult to escape.
The survey, which involved a sample of 1,048 women throughout Italy, between June and July 2023, equally distributed by age group from 18 years upwards, also favoured an intergenerational analysis of the data.
Several questions are raised by this investigation. Is a woman’s body finally her property or is she still a slave to “having to be beautiful” as a synthesis of political and anthropological subjection to the male eye and desire? Are women suffering from the “Grimilde syndrome”, anxious about the passing of time, ready to do anything to keep themselves young? In a world where the body is the centre of all interest, appearing a diktat, being on social media projects the body into a third dimension, how, then, does this impact on women? What is certain is that in modern society female beauty has become a social value, a constant ambition and a task to be fulfilled.
More than a third of the surveyed women, 36.4%, report a negative attitude towards their bodies. Women over 65 show a greater awareness of their relationship with their body, evaluating it more frequently in a positive manner (66%) than younger women (58.8%).
When, on the other hand, one moves on to the degree of appreciation regarding one’s outer appearance, the results tend to take a different form: 57% of women like themselves but 43% do not. Among women living in a couple without children, satisfaction with their appearance is more widespread than average (63.1%) compared to those living alone (53.7%) and single women with children (53.4%).
For the clear majority of women, taking care of their appearance is important (74.5%), yet one in four respondents (25.5%) do not think so.
For 74.1%, feeling beautiful is important first and foremost in the relationship they have with themselves, for 68.2% it positively influences their mood, while for 64.7% feeling tidy or unkempt affects the way they relate to others.
The majority of women (55.7%) also do not leave the house unless they have first taken care of their appearance. Almost half (49.6%) report that feeling beautiful is important first and foremost in their relationships with others. Feeling beautiful for some positively influences their work performance (42.5%), others state that liking themselves and feeling beautiful makes them appear more powerful (39.3%) and that it is important to be considered beautiful by others and to receive appreciation (38.4%). There are also those who confess that they often monitor the way they look through selfies, bathroom breaks, fleeting glances in a mirror or in a shop window (38.5%). All these aspects are strongly linked to the age of the women interviewed, i.e. they appear more important or predominant among the very young.
Beauty treatments chosen by women are mainly those aimed at combating weight gain and time effects
The most popular beauty treatments among women are specific treatments for slimming and/or toning – practised by the majority, 56.7% – and anti-ageing treatments/interventions (44%). Tanning lamps are popular (more than a third, 34.9%), non-surgical beauty treatments (34.8%) and passive exercise machines (33.1%). Less frequent are cryotherapy (24.3%) and ozone therapy (23%), which were however chosen by almost a quarter of surveyed women.
Practical or “hardcore”, women still do not give up self-care
More than a third of women say they spend 10 to 30 minutes each day looking after their appearance, 26% between 30 minutes and an hour, 20.9% less than 10 minutes, 15% between 1 and 2 hours, and 4.1% more than 2 hours. Just under half of the women, therefore, devote more than half an hour each day to their appearance, while one in five devote more than an hour. One fifth, on the contrary, devote less than 10 minutes to this commitment.
Beautiful at any cost?
For their own appearance care (cosmetics, hairdressing, depilation, nails, treatments, etc.) one third of the sample spends on average between 10 and 50 euros per month (33.2%), 29.5% between 51 and 100 euros, 19.7% between 101 and 300 euros. A 12.7% estimate their average monthly expenditure even below 10 euros, at the other extreme, 5% over 300 euros. One in four women devote more than 100 euro per month to their beauty care.
A quarter of women (25.3%) admit to having undergone cosmetic surgery (15.3% once, 6.6% twice, 3.4% three times or more).
Weight: struggling with the body
For women, body weight is an important part of their appearance (62.2%), many pay attention to their figure by controlling their diet (61.5%). The majority state that if they could they would change their bodies to some extent (57.2%), that they would like to be thinner (54.7%) and that they control their figure through physical activity (50.8%). About half (49.6%) believe that they would feel better about themselves if they reached their ideal weight. The thought of an ageing body distresses 41.1% of the women. More than a third of the sample (36.7%) report feeling frustration because they cannot reach what they consider to be their ideal weight and believe that if they reached it, they would feel better about themselves (35.3%). More than 1 in 4 women (27.5%) state that they would change their body a lot if they could. One in 5 women (19.9%), finally, would like to be more curvy.
Anorexia and bulimia, just under one in ten women have experienced them. A total of 22.9% have attacks of nervous hunger
Of the women who took part in the survey, 8.5% claimed to have experienced anorexia, either currently or in the past, and 7.6% bulimia. Much more common is nervous hunger, which manifests itself in compulsive eating, binge eating, experienced by 22.9% of the respondents. A further 14.6% report episodes of nocturnal hunger, 12.1% nervous orthorexia – the obsession with healthy, natural food. Picacism, the disorder that causes people to eat inedible things as a consequence of states of malaise and nervousness, is less common (4%).
The weight of other people’s judgement
Over the past year, the vast majority of women have been judged on their build (too slim, too rounded…) (72.8%); more than one in four even often or regularly, praised for having lost weight (69.4%), encouraged to take better care of their appearance (66.9%).
More than two thirds also happened to wear clothes favouring the way they emphasised their body rather than their actual comfort. In addition, there was no shortage of negative comments on appearance (55%). Women themselves practised a kind of “self-censorship” on several occasions by avoiding a social occasion because of dissatisfaction with their appearance (54.3%). Not a few women report having been encouraged to resort to cosmetic surgery to “improve” certain physical features: 43.8%.
Of the women, 63.8% feel envy towards women who are considered more beautiful (43% feel envy “sometimes”, 1 in 5 women feel it “often” or “regularly”).
More than 1 in 2 women (52.9%) feel a sense of inadequacy in relation to the female role models proposed in films, TV series, on social networking sites or in television programmes.
Generally speaking, the influence of other women in the family positively influenced more than half of the women surveyed (57.6%).
Four out of 10 women do not have a satisfying sex life
For 65% of women, appearance influences attracting a potential partner. The weight of physical appearance in a relationship affects it “a lot” or “quite a bit” especially according to women aged 25-34 (79.1%) and 18-24 (78.8%), a sign that young women are again subject to greater performance anxiety regarding their aesthetic characteristics.
Appearance influenced the success of one’s love life for 63.8% of the respondents. Of the women surveyed, 40.5% said they were dissatisfied with their sex life. The rate of dissatisfaction is highest among the over-65s (54.6%) followed at a distance by the very young between 18 and 24 years of age.
Confronting stereotypes
Among the women surveyed, 50.1% believe that it is a woman’s duty to keep herself beautiful and fit for her partner, and 45.2% “very much” or “quite a lot” agree that satisfying their partner is the ultimate gratification. A woman’s natural inclination during sexual intercourse is to indulge her partner: a minority of women, 38%, “very much” (7.8%) or “fairly” (30.2%) agreed with this statement.
Social judgement
Of all respondents, 53.4% of women say that they feel judged if they do not have a steady partner. One in two women (50.2%) has been told that her physical appearance or clothing attracts too much attention, while 60.5% of women have chosen one outfit over another to avoid danger.
Of these women, 64.6% have been subjected to unwelcome compliments, such as catcalling. Yet 63% say they feel flattered by such appreciations, albeit inappropriate, (“sometimes” 43.2% or “often/regularly” 19.8%). A total of 62.6% of the respondents stated that they did not know how to respond appropriately to unwelcome comments by men.
In addition, 47.1% of the women surveyed have found themselves in unpleasant situations, sexual or otherwise, in order to please a partner, while 53.7% have felt physically inadequate following a rejection or the end of a relationship.
Web or social network harassment
One woman in four (25.1%) has at least once received heavy physical appreciation on the Web or on social networks; 24.4% have received explicit sexual advances, 18.6% have been victims of body shaming, i.e. criticism or mockery of their bodies. They have received heavy physical appreciation on the Web 45.9% of young women between 18 and 24 years old, who are also the most exposed to body shaming (27.1%) and explicit sexual propositions (37.6%) occurring on the Web.
Harassment and discrimination in the workplace
Furthermore, 42.6 % have experienced insinuations about a career achieved easily thanks to their female body (often, 11.7%; sometimes 28.1% or regularly 2.8%). A further 44.4% have received sexual appreciation from a superior or a colleague (47,9%). Even more women (62.9%) stated that they had to work harder than a male colleague to be appreciated.
Feminism, information and media
Less than half of the women interviewed consider themselves feminists (46.3%, of which only 10.6% “very” and 35.7% fairly). It is mainly left and centre-left women who say they are feminists (on average 6 out of 10). A total of 46.3% of women have no interest in keeping themselves informed about what is happening in the world with regard to women’s rights.
There is a shared opinion among women that the media disseminate beauty standards that are difficult to achieve and that they do so more than in the past (60.3%), thus contributing to social pressure on physical appearance.
Patriarchy: a divisive concept
Having provided the respondents with a definition of “patriarchy” – understood as a social system in which men primarily hold power, predominating in terms of political power, moral authority, social privilege and control – the sample is divided in half between those who think they live in a patriarchal society (49.5%) and those who do not (50.5%). It is mainly young women aged 25-34 who most frequently indicate a society in which patriarchy prevails (56.8%).
The “duty” to have children
Voluntary termination of pregnancy concerns only and exclusively the woman and her body for about 56% of the women surveyed, while 43.8% are not convinced. Those claiming total autonomy of choice over the possibility of voluntary termination of pregnancy are mainly women aged between 18 and 34, with an average frequency of over 60% of responses.
Having children is an important choice in a couple’s life, but it is often taken for granted that every woman is destined to become a mother. In fact, only about one in five women say that no one has ever asked them when they were going to have a child as if it were a sure thing (21.8%).
On the desire to have children, the majority of the sample responds that they already have children (54.3%), 26% state that they would like to have or have had children, while 19.7% do not have this desire or did not have it. So, although the desire for motherhood involves about 80% of Italian women, it is not negligible that one in five do not share this desire.
Not desiring children is linked in 27.8% of cases to a lack of maternal instinct, in 19.9% to not wanting to limit one’s freedom, and in 14.2% it lies in the choice to devote oneself to work. For a little less than one in ten women, the lack of desire for motherhood derives from health reasons (9.5%), for 7.6% it is linked to issues concerning the couple’s life, and 7% attribute the choice to economic reasons.
Against all clichés?
When confronted with a series of clichés, these women expressed their opinions: almost half (48.2%) agree that it is difficult to live in exclusively female environments; a smaller but interesting number, 39.5%, are convinced that women themselves would be the first to be macho; a small number (22.7%) agree with the idea that one only really becomes a woman through motherhood; 35.5% agree with the statement that women are enemies because they compete for the male gaze. Surprisingly, a good 44.9% of women support the idea that there is a connection between menstrual cycles and being often moody and fickle. For 34.1%, a lonely woman would be more likely to be “sour” and unhappy, and for 35.2%, when there are allegations of harassment and abuse against a powerful man, it is often an attempt to gain visibility and money. Very few women endorse the view that it is mothers who raise future violent men (28%).
Finally, does solidarity between women exist? Overall, although not by a large majority, women are confident in the existence of genuine female solidarity (54.5%).
This research stems from the desire to take a snapshot of the relationship Italian women have with their bodies, in particular by investigating the perception they have of themselves, through an understanding of how much and how the gaze of others and their own subjective feeling influence self-representation. Starting from the observation that many political and communicative choices often feature – both as an object and as a vehicle – the female body, we asked ourselves how much women feel they perceive their own bodies, how much they know about them, and how much they consider them an integral and indispensable part of their experience of the world.
Our hypothesis is that the female body is not only an intimate and private matter of the individual, but that it inevitably carries with it a public dimension that distorts the personal perception of one’s own body, forcing every woman to come to terms with an external, often severe gaze.