Case Study 31.1: The "Bra Burning" Myth and the Evolution of Feminist Responses to Objectification

Background

On September 7, 1968, approximately two hundred women gathered outside the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest what they described as the pageant's reduction of women to bodies evaluated for male pleasure. Protesters threw symbolic "instruments of torture" — girdles, high heels, eyelash curlers, copies of Playboy, and yes, bras — into a "Freedom Trash Can." They did not set the trash can on fire. No bras were burned that day.

The image of bra-burning became, however, one of the most enduring and distorting symbols of second-wave feminism — seized upon by a press that was, at best, ambivalent about the movement's goals and, at worst, actively hostile. The myth served to trivialize the protest as absurdly self-defeating (women burning practical undergarments) while avoiding engagement with the substantive critique the protesters were advancing: that public beauty pageants instantiate a specific and harmful way of seeing women.

The Pageant Critique and Objectification Theory

The 1968 protest was remarkably sophisticated about what we would now call objectification theory — years before Mulvey's essay and decades before Fredrickson and Roberts. The protest literature identified the pageant's harm not as the mere existence of female beauty, but as the practice of displaying women for competitive evaluation of their bodies. The protest's formal "No More Miss America" manifesto listed ten complaints, including that the pageant promoted a narrow and racist beauty ideal, that it treated women as objects, that it was tied to military and commercial interests, and that it enforced a consumer beauty culture that profited from women's insecurities.

These are recognizably objectification-theory claims. The protest explicitly called out the gaze — the structure of public visual evaluation — as the source of harm.

The Evolution: From Second Wave to Body Positivity to Liberation

Feminist responses to objectification have evolved substantially since 1968:

Second-wave feminism (1960s–1980s) tended toward critique and refusal — analyzing objectifying imagery, consciousness-raising about appearance pressure, and in some strands, anti-pornography activism. The dominant mode was analysis and rejection.

Third-wave feminism (1990s–2000s) challenged the sex-negativity of some second-wave approaches, arguing that women's enjoyment of fashion, beauty, and sexuality could be reclaimed as empowerment rather than complicity. This shift was productive but generated new tensions: when is self-presentation empowerment, and when is it internalized self-objectification?

Body positivity (2010s) moved via social media to challenge the specific content of beauty standards — particularly thinness ideals — rather than the practice of appearance evaluation. Hashtags like #EffYourBeautyStandards and the rise of plus-size influencers represented a genuine cultural shift in whose bodies were visible and valued.

Anti-fatphobia and disability justice movements pushed further, arguing that body positivity had been co-opted by commercial interests and needed to radicalize into body liberation — the claim that all bodies deserve dignity regardless of appearance, not merely that a wider range of bodies should be considered attractive.

Discussion Questions

1. The 1968 protest was misrepresented in ways that served to trivialize its message. What does this episode tell us about how media frame challenges to objectifying norms? Can you think of contemporary examples of similar misrepresentation?

2. Where is the line between "reclaiming your sexuality" as empowerment and performing self-objectification under cultural pressure? Is this distinction always meaningful, or is it sometimes a rationalization?

3. Body positivity has been criticized for remaining within an "attractiveness" framework — arguing that more kinds of bodies are attractive, rather than challenging the centrality of attractiveness as an evaluative criterion. Do you find this critique persuasive? What would body liberation (as opposed to body positivity) look like in practice?

4. How has the feminist response to objectification changed with the rise of social media? Has the ability to control one's own image and reach a large audience changed the power dynamics of the gaze — or simply added a new layer?