Clothing can amplify women’s objectification, resulting in negative perceptions, which is also applicable in literature. For instance, in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, objectification negatively affects the supporting female characters. Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (hereafter Tomorrow) is primarily about how Sadie and Sam’s friendship evolves through playing and creating video games as well as their relationships with their family, friends, and romantic partners that influence them, including Sam’s college roommate Marx who becomes their producer, Sadie’s professor Dov with whom she has an affair, composer Zoe Cadogan, and Sam’s high school friend Lola Maldonado. Although Zevin describes her supporting…show more content… Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky describes how women live in a patriarchal society and contend with being “seen by.[a] patriarchal other.[standing] perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment” (34). Despite being called the “male” gaze, objectification is pervasive and is internalized by women or other genders. Smith and her team describe it as an “objective gaze.” Building off of previous research that established a correlation between sexualized dress and negative perceptions, Smith and her collaborators conducted a study that examined the sexualized gaze and the perceptions of women’s leadership competence and electability based on their appearance, using a campaign flyer for a student Senate president with an image of a model at a U.S. Mid-Atlantic liberal arts university, wearing revealing clothing. Smith and her colleagues found data supporting their participants across genders would baseline the model in similar amounts (678). Therefore, Sam and Marx have a biased view of Sadie, especially since both men have a romantic interest in her. Even so, Sadie is a well-rounded character because her perspective offers her thoughts and emotions.
