Do I look okay?

These days all of my work is online, both via telephone and video. Whether with Zoom or Skype of FaceTime, not only do I see the person I am working with but also myself. It was disconcerting for me at first to see my own image while listening or talking with another. I realized that ordinary concern about looking okay is heightened this way.

 This heightened awareness of appearance called to mind John Berger’s book, Ways of Seeing, where he writes:  

“A woman must continually watch herself.  She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.  Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….  

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

I have realized that I rarely leave the house without asking my husband “Do I look all right?” though he never asks that question about himself. And when I do, I am still scrutinizing myself, still assuming I have to meet some external standard in order to be okay. Now I see it in myself every time I see that small image of my face on the screen.

How about you?