My thoughts on Miss Representation

I'm in this women's Bible study group with my church, and for the past two weeks we've been watching a documentary called Miss Representation.  This is all about how women are viewed through the media and what effect this has on women.  I planned to write last week on it, but I was simply too angry to make a reasonable post.  Now I feel like I've had sufficient time to cool down and I'm able to write and get myself all upset all over again. :)

Week 1 The Media and Body Image

The title itself will explain why I was so upset.  This segment was an in-depth look at how the media makes women feel as though they are not measuring up to these invisible standards.  Through computer enhanced images of naturally beautiful, women hold themselves in comparison to other women who literally do no exist.  It also touched on the fact that women are often very hard on other women.

Week 2 Women in Leadership

Women in politics or on television are constantly barraged by men and women in other forms of media.  If it isn't about their clothes, it's about their hair, or did they or did they not get a boob job.  This is an awful mistreatment of women who have important things to say about important issues.  Women are either sexualized for being pretty and feminine or they are described as the battle ax woman who crushes men and is constantly being a bitch.

This has led me to think about the differences these ideas create in our society.  They are basically setting relationships up to fail.  According to this documentary the message that women are getting from the media is, "You have to look like Miss America, have sex like Samantha from Sex in the City, and think like June Cleaver".  Women have movies about women, that are seen as for women with powerful lead characters.  Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own are both mentioned in this documentary.  Media such as this gives women a positive outlook on themselves as multidimensional human beings.  However, in movies that are geared towards men, women are simply hot bodies wearing skimpy clothes and have one dimensional characters.  To an extent, this even extends into the 'nerd mainstream culture'.  Batgirl, and Supergirl are simply female versions of their male counterparts.  Wonder Woman was designed after the dominatrix mistress of the original cartoonist.  Even in the latest Avengers movie, Black Widow is hardly in the film, yet she is sexualized when she does appear.  How are women and men supposed to make meaningful relationships together when both sexes are taught to see women and sexual objects that are less than their male counterparts.

These two weeks of study have led me to think a lot about how I grew up in this media drenched society and how I continue to work in the world I live in.  As you may or may not be aware, I have a skin disease that alters my appearance.  I was diagnosed when I was the most susceptible to the media.  I went through my middle teenage years believing that I was worth less than my 'normal' female peers.  I was taught by the boys I knew that I was less, and that my disease was something that would hinder me from meaningful relationships with men.  I was told that why would anyone want to bother with me when I was deformed.  Repeatedly I was shamed by my male peers to try and get me to sleep with them.  Later in life, I became a novelty.  Guys wanted to take me out because I was different.  It had nothing to do with me.  This degraded me to the subject of locker room talk.  To them, I wasn't a full and meaningful person, I was a small disfigured hand for sexual favors.  Neither of these versions of me had anything to do with me as a person, but they both had everything to do with the ideas put out in the world by the media.

I was not, and technically am not, the ideal media friendly version of beautiful.  And that's crap.  It's not just women who have to deal with this either.  Men who are not the ideal form of 'classically handsome' are written off.  Men and women are being written off as less because of how they look on the outside.  In this system, who actually wins?  It certainly isn't the beautiful people, because beauty fades.  It isn't the young, because age does catch up with you.  It isn't the ugly, or the less than perfect, or the people with physical differences.  It isn't men, and it isn't women.  So why do we continue to buy in to this idea where everyone loses?  It's hard enough to find who you are without all this pressure to be something that you have so little actual control over.  One high school girl in this documentary got it exactly right, "When will it be enough?"