20 December 2013
Fundamentals of Sociology

“You can’t be what you can’t see.” the tag line for documentary, Miss Representation, a film that looks at the media’s impact on the American discourse of women’s bodies, women in power and the effect of internalization of being sold the same standards of what women should be, year after year. This is thought-provoking, explicit film that I wish my words could even give slight justice to – one that every woman should be required to see. I felt it is more than a film, it is a start to a much needed reform of education, collective thinking, and a continuing of the great work of powerful women leaders in this country.
This same media influence is shaping the dominant political discourse, predominant cultural views of what women should look like and should be, and as shown in one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of the film, affecting young men and women in increasingly negative ways. Charles Horton Cooley used the phrase looking glass self to mean a self image based on how we think others see us. That is what the media has set an example for women to have that perfect body which has now left every women or girl feeling insecure on how they look to other. In the film, In an interview with several San Francisco high school students, none older than sixteen, each described the internal and external pressures they face to “look good,” and the frustration of not being appreciated for anything outside the realms of the physical. We are introduced to a young woman whose younger sister is teased for being “ugly” and cuts herself. The older sister feels responsible for her younger sister, cries at wanting her to stop, yet struggles with the very same issues and feels no power to give a positive message. Viewing this scene alone is one of the reasons I felt frustrated that as a viewer I cannot reach out to her and tell her that she is beyond this garbage; that she and her little sister are worthy and no one should ever make them feel otherwise.
These are all jaw-dropping statistics presented in Miss Representation, and yet the predominant message we hear over and over is that women have broken through the glass ceiling, that feminism isn’t necessary and above all, that empowerment for women is by having control of a sexualized, “good” body.
One of the most indelible arguments of the film is by Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media & News and author of Reality Bites Back, where she talks about reality TV being the backlash to women’s empowerment; showing women as bitch, catty, over-sexualized gold-diggers, often kept in a harem-like environment to vie for the affections of some man they have not spent more than fifteen minutes with. Pozner says, “The fact that the media is so derogatory to women in power, what does it say about the media’s ability to take women seriously?”
Miss Representation explores cat-fights and “the fighting fuck-toy,” and how the majority of women on TV are under the age of 31 when the majority of women in this country are over the age of 45. Media has made women so conscious that they themselves don’t step forward at a certain period. The film also tells us how movies with female protagonists exist, but the protagonists are really just looking for a man or to be looked at by a man. How animated characters in G-rated movies on average wear the same amount of clothing as female characters in R-rated movies. These are sly attempts to convince us that women are present, but they exist really just as decoration, as objects, as eye candy. There is Condoleeza Rice talking about the inanity of being the only woman in the room when the suggestion that Title IX should be reinstated, and how she and a handful of other female senators were the only ones to argue against it. Katie Couric talks about her dilemma of wearing what she wants or wearing clothes to be serious – somehow she can’t be presumed to do both. Each woman has an eyebrow raising story of