the dystopian mirror and the female body

To adopt these ways of understanding self-formulation, is to recognize that we can never see ourselves other than in the images reflected back to us by society, which becomes, in effect, the mirror itself. For women in white Western culture, the symbolic order is driven by capitalist patriarchal consumer systems which prescribe very specific and socially approved of ways of being female/feminine. Such prescription can be seen as not dissimilar to the negative social control evident in dystopian fiction.
The experiences many women shoppers have of change room mirrors expose a gap between privileged images of the feminine and female bodies and women's selfperception. Susie Orbach, amongst other therapists working with female clients battling poor body image, notes the anxiety that many women feel living in asociety that promotes idealised representations of the female body (Orbach 2009, 142). She writes: Throughout the world, girls and women grapple with the asymmetry of the images that are projected and their own attempts to find a place and a body that they can live from' (2009, 137). 
In her book Material Girls, Suzanna Walters notes: The fragmentation of the female body into parts that should be improved or worked on often results in women having a self-hating relationships with their bodies' (Walters 1995, 56). The multiple mirrored changing rooms arguably contribute to bringing into being and to sustaining in consumer culture, these body parts which then need to be manipulated and managed by consumer products.
Looking into the mirror for women is, in effect, to look at a double image - the ideal juxtaposed against the real; but it is the imaginary feminine (the ideal), that has the most powerful self-castigatory effect on the female subject. The ideal is contradictory, just as ideals often paradoxically prefigure control of the human subject in dystopian explorations. Barbara Brook writes that the imaginary female ideal is prescriptive, narrow, exclusive, but above all, seductive:
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