Alexa Campagna's post to Miss Representation

I can honestly say that I have not been affected as strongly by a documentary as I had been while watching “Miss Representation.” My mother received a degree in law; my aunt is a successful entrepreneur; my grandmother became the first female vice president of her local bank. I, first hand, have seen what powerful and independent women are capable of and am saddened by the fact that women of power are being underrepresented and misrepresented in the media. These skewed images of women as individuals who are constantly being judged by their physical appearances, who are being portrayed as sex objects for the male gaze, or who are shown on television as too ditzy and emotional to hold positions of power, are inescapable and detrimental to impressionable young girls. It is becoming more and more difficult to successfully shield children from these images considering the prevalence of iPods, television sets, and computers in a household, which tend to go relatively uncensored. Even with the knowledge that such young children have access to all these devices, the statistic that an individual spends an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes per day consuming media through these sources, was extremely shocking and rather frightening. If I have a daughter, like the narrator in the video, how will I protect her from these images of girl-on-girl cat fights, women who discuss spending money on a face lift that could pay for one year’s worth of college tuition, or advertisements of models who are so painfully thin that they resemble skeletons more than they do people? I can’t cover my child’s eyes every time he or she passes a billboard on the side of a highway or casually flips through a fashion magazine while waiting in line at the grocery store, but how else are we going to protect our children from these harmful images?

            What I was most struck by while watching the film was the footage of a billboard advertisement model getting digitally enhanced. The first image was of a woman with natural curves and a natural-looking face, untainted by pounds of makeup. As she became digitally enhanced she began to look less and less like herself, almost as if she was morphed into a different person completely. Her eyes were lifted and made larger; her already thin frame was made even thinner, and even the smallest blemish was removed from her body. This image of this model is not real. It is a cartoon of a model. If a little girl or woman sees this image she will strive for a level of beauty that is unattainable simply because it does not exist. This constant overemphasis of the thin ideal is really beginning to become a huge problem in the media, especially since there has been such a massive rise of eating disorders in women of all ages. I flipped to a page in US weekly, a tabloid magazine, a few days ago and stumbled upon an article entitled, “Beauty at Every Age.” It consisted of pictures of celebrities ranging from 18-50 years old. Each was in a bikini and each was rail thin. This is sending a message to woman of all ages that they will only be considered beautiful throughout their lives if they maintain a certain weight.