Watching the film Miss Representation was a productive
experience for me, the film tied together many issues and ideas I had
personally and had been taught about over the years in school. I was also kind of blown away by all
the statistics the film could point to in regards to their argument, most
notably that the rates of depression in women have doubled between 2000 and
2010, but more on this later. The
film started out making the point that the most common way people give up their
power is by thinking that they do not have any. I found this statement incredibly true, after all when the
media is the controller of the message and the messenger to young girls, and
they do not send any messages or examples of strong women role models, where
are girls to find out that such people exist? Many people may say that kids should find those examples in
their family and friends, but as the film points out, an inordinate amount of a
person’s time is spent in front of some kind of screen or print media. Sadly the only examples of strong women
in the media are always torn down over their looks, or the way they speak, or
what they wear. Why would young
girls want positions of power in the USA if all they see is that women who
stand up for a cause or have opinions are personally attacked and torn
down? The film also brought up the
point that in media women are not valued for their contributions to society or
their brains, but rather exclusively their looks. The media tells women that being strong. Smart, and
accomplished is not enough, that they must also look the part. Yet no way a woman looks is ever good
enough for the media. The film
used the examples of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Regardless of my opinions on their politics it is true that
they are both women in politics trying to affect policy, the film showed how in
trying to be successful politicians these two women presented themselves in
specific ways to try and please the media. Clinton takes an approach that the media deems to masculine,
and Palin takes an approach that is branded too feminine and therefore is
sexualized. So no matter how a
woman looks it is never what the media wants. It is no wonder that 65% of women and girls have an eating
disorder. This idea that women are
never good enough was the main theme of the film, and showed how women are
brought up to be fundamentally insecure and that girls are conditioned by the
media to see themselves as objects.
This point in the film left me wondering why the media is so horrible to
girls. Then the film brought up
the fact that this unreachable ideal of female beauty and acceptance is a huge moneymaker. This disgusted me. In the name of money the media
conditions girls to believe that men hold status and power over women and that
women can never measure up and that they are never beautiful enough for
anyone. As Katie Couric points out
in the film about the media’s conditioning of girls ideas of normal weight and
beauty: “we get conditioned to think this is what normal is, but its not, its
body dysmorphic disorder.” The
film showed how in the early days of film women were “allowed” to be
multidimensional characters. Yet
today society does not question why only 16% of protagonists are females, and
why when a woman reaches 30 or 40 in Hollywood her value as an actress and
artist’s plummets. This film did a
great job of conveying their message to the audience, because at the end it had
evoked the emotions of anger and sadness in me, leaving me feeling much the
same as a young girl in the film named Maria who asked “when is it going to be
enough?” After seeing the film I
wonder what is enough? And why is
this happening, why are we letting this happen to our girls? The only answers I could come up with
is that the negative affects the media has on society is the price we pay in
the name of capitalism, and it seems that depression and eating disorders are
an acceptable price to pay in the name of profits, at least according to the
government and all media outlets.
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