By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, M.B.A. ’18
Competition between siblings is not uncommon. That desire to be different, to stand out, to get better grades, or to perform better in various activities is a prominent driver in many adolescent relationships.
All of that is heightened for identical twins.
Every physical feature is analyzed from birth as a means to tell them apart. Common acquaintances look for a tell-tale mole or a little more roundness in the face to try and distinguish one from the other. Even close family members often have to do a quick scan to verify who they’re interacting with. Regardless of who, or when, or what, though, the overwhelming go-to critique involves a review of physical attributes.
Lexie and Lindsay Kite are best-selling authors, prominent speakers, founders and co-directors of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined, 2006 Utah State University graduates, and Ph.D. holders from that crimson-colored school a little further south.
The Idaho Falls natives are also identical twins and have accomplished these things together each step of the way. Which, in hindsight, is a bit surprising, considering that coming out of high school, they didn’t like each other all that much.
“I would say that our relationship and the way we came together through this started very reluctantly,” Lindsay recalls with a laugh. “When we were at Utah State, we were still competitors to each other. We were not best friends, we were not our greatest allies, we saw each other as competition. We still wanted to be the better one, the smarter one, the prettier one — all of that stuff.
“We were trying so desperately to be different, while still ending up in the same major with these very similar interests and passions and skills. So, we reluctantly agreed to join forces when we went to grad school, and we had not intended to go to grad school together.”
At USU, Lexie (Journalism and Speech Communication) and Lindsay (Journalism and Women’s and Gender Studies) were both profoundly impacted by their studies during their first year. Especially by a host of faculty members who played prominent roles in their development.
Former journalism and communications department head and emeritus professor Ted Pease and his wife, emeritus professor Brenda Cooper, had a significant impact on the duo. Emeritus professor Nancy Williams, along with current communication studies’ professors Jennifer Peeples and John Seiter, also left a lasting impact on the Kites.
“They taught us to be brave. They taught us to ask questions, and to think critically. And that is the foundation of everything we did,” Lexie says. “I mean, it was easily one of the greatest times of our lives, and we’ve had great lives. Utah State was just such a formative foundational experience in being able to critically question what the impact of all the media we consume is, and even more broadly, to be able to really consider the kind of impact we can make on the world.
“And I know Lindsay and I were so driven at Utah State to do good, to make a difference in the world, and to help people understand their power. And we learned that for ourselves while we were there.”
The seed for many of those foundational experiences and much of that critical thinking was planted during Cooper’s media smarts class. Developed with Pease in the early 2000s, the class was USU’s first media literacy course. In that course, Lindsay remembers how the sisters both had “this incredibly inspiring kind of goose-bumpy experience,” during a discussion about the impact of media and how certain body types are presented more positively than others.
They realized body types they resonated with, and felt like more closely resembled theirs, were often portrayed as villains or the butts of jokes in the media — or oftentimes just left out altogether. As they delved further into their studies and really began to critically deconstruct the media and cultural messages being delivered, it became apparent they had fallen into the trap. As Lindsay says, they had become competitors instead of allies.
“That was kind of the first steppingstone to see OK, maybe the things that we believed about our bodies and our worth through all this time could be questioned, could be chipped away,” she remembers. “That was the beginning of a really deep interest in media studies generally, but also in women’s studies in particular.”
Both Cooper and Pease remember the Kites fondly and expressed pride in the work Lexie and Lindsay have done, as well as the women they’ve become.
“I can remember them as being unusually engaged in class,” Pease recalls. “They were excited about the material and it’s clear that something happened in their intersection with that class that set them on a certain trajectory.”
Lexie says it almost felt like a calling.
“We felt so driven to, I mean, liberate might be too cheesy of a word here, but to really help girls and women see the objectification that had become so normal in the wallpaper of our lives,” she recalls. “It was the way we spoke to each other and about each other, the way we bonded with our family members over dieting, and how other people looked how we wanted to look. It was just that objectification of women was so ingrained in our culture that we couldn’t see outside of it.”
It’s no wonder the duo became leading experts in the field of body image resilience and media literacy.
Specifically, they say there are a couple unique things that set their work apart from what others in the space have been doing. The first thing, and it’s something they said they first realized during their initial studies at USU, is that many of the interventions or things people are employing to help girls and women fix their body image issues and improve self esteem aren’t working. In fact, they say, many of those interventions can actually exacerbate the problem because they center on beauty as the the fix to a woman’s self-esteem or body image.
A common message or theme presented by the media and other literature is the notion that your flaws make you beautiful. Your stretch marks or your acne or your weight, these are all unique to you, and you’re beautiful just the way you are.
On the surface, that seems like a positive shift away from the perception that you need to look a certain way to be considered beautiful, but as the Kites point out, this still frames beauty or feeling beautiful as the measuring stick for a confident self-image.
“We want girls and women to feel beautiful, sure, but we want them to know they are more than beautiful. They are more than bodies in need of fixing,” Lexie explains. “We want people to be able to … get back inside their own bodies, to see their bodies as an instrument for their own use, their own experience, their own potential first.”
The second thing the Kites say sets their work apart is the way they approach the pathway out of that cycle of body shame so many people live with throughout their lives.
That cycle goes something like this: many people live in a comfort zone that is deeply uncomfortable but is the only zone their bodies have known. They don’t really feel great about themselves, but do little things — diets, workouts, minor cosmetic procedures — to “fix” themselves, or they will hide themselves as necessary by avoiding social events or the pursuit of a promotion at work.
Eventually, though, something will shake people from this comfortably uncomfortable zone. And the Kite’s research shows that people generally respond in one of three ways:
1. Sink deeper in shame and turn to self-harm such as cutting, drug and alcohol abuse, or disordered eating.
2. Do whatever it takes to cling to their comfort zone, which generally involves another round of fixing and hiding, such as kicking off the next fad diet or scheduling the next cosmetic procedure.
3.Address that shame and pain instead of pushing it further down and turning to one of the above options.
“I think some of the biggest changes we’ve seen are in the activism spaces,” Lindsay says. “In a lot of those circles, we pioneered the idea of focusing more on body neutrality, on the instrumentality of your body, as opposed to the beauty of your body and trying to fit ourselves into these roles of objectification where we gain power from being beautiful or feeling beautiful.”
The Kite’s research is cited in numerous studies and books, Lindsay delivered a TEDx Talk in 2017, and the pair has delivered several speaking engagements including at major companies such as Nike and Amazon, as well as dozens of universities. However, the culmination of their work — at least to this point — is their book, More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament, which was released in 2020 and has sold more than 80,000 copies.
More than an overview of their research, the book helps “arm people with the tools to build resilience in a culture that objectifies and commodifies bodies,” according to the More Than a Body website. The sisters also released a companion workbook to More Than a Body earlier this year.
“I wish that I’d had their book when I was teaching. It’s really an excellent resource for students and professors in the academic setting, but importantly, it’s something that all girls or women can relate to,” Cooper says. “I think their starting with their personal story of how they also struggle with [body image] from an early age is something that women can relate to. It’s such a personal way that they start presenting it, that people can relate to that much easier than they could any book I would have found when I was teaching the [media literacy] course.”
To date, their book has been translated into three languages, Lindsay’s TEDx Talk has been viewed nearly 400,000 times, and they’ve spoken cumulatively to hundreds of thousands of people. However, despite that unequivocal success, Beauty Redefined and all of its accoutrements is just a passion project for the duo.
In other words, it is not their day job.
Lexie, who lives in Salt Lake City, is a senior director of development and alumni relations for the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, while Lindsay, who lives in New York City, is a development director for the Clinton Foundation.
“It has been interesting how their lives have paralleled each other against their wishes almost, because they were trying so hard to be separate,” recalls their mom, Gina Kite. “I think it’s really hard to be an identical twin because you’re a unit, and people look at you as one. And so, to find your own identity, it’s a little bit difficult. I think they made an extra effort to try to be different, but they’d always land back on the same page.”
For their part, the sisters say they didn’t want to rely on their passion project for their paycheck because they felt like it would take the joy out of it. And it’s clear the passion they have for their work is part of what resonates so well with others, just like it resonated with them so many years ago in Logan.
“I feel like that class put words to their feelings … and that’s what they do now for women, they put words to our feelings and make things make sense and help us change,” says Gina about her daughters’ work. “They can describe what we go through, why we go through it, and why we don’t have to go through it. It’s just a matter of putting words to these frustrations and feelings and things that are our normal, and they don’t have to be our normal anymore.
“They’re helping women be better and more accomplished because we can step outside of ourselves and do what we need to do to not be so focused internally.”
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