Women and Power: Miss Representation

This past Thursday, Jennifer Seibel Newsom’s film Miss Representation made its television debut on Oprah’s OWN network. The documentary discusses the pervasive sexism in media, and was praised at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The objectified images we see of women in magazines and on television harmfully affect the ways women see themselves in real life, as women who possess youth, beauty and passivity dominate the media landscape. As girls learn to judge themselves and other women primarily by physical attractiveness instead of their intelligence, boys are also learning to judge women by the impossible standards of beauty set by the media. Even on the news, gender inequalities are reproduced, as the reporters often look like “someone’s grandfather and his much younger second wife.” The idea that media is made for men, who are a more desirable and evasive audience, is ‘justified’ by the myth that men won’t watch stories for and about women, Twilight be damned. And what’s worse is that we’re numb to it all.

The film also addresses the critical issue of the lack of women who produce media. The documentary provides dismal statistics, which show that merely 16% of film directors and 7% of scriptwriters are women. Only 3% of positions of clout in the media industry belong to women. The lack of diversity behind the scenes is one of the main reasons we still see such stereotyped images in media; the other reason discussed at length in the film is the emergence of female political figures. The most fascinating subject discussed in the film is the realization that as women are becoming more powerful in the real world, they’ve become more hypersexualized and objectified in the media, as if to take away that power. This phenomenon ripples over into the ways media judge female politicians primarily by their looks, from saying Nancy Pelosi needs a facelift to photographs of Sarah Palin at the podium angled between her legs. The film’s tagline, “We cannot be what we cannot see,” eloquently captures why as girls become older, they stop wishing to become future presidents. In order to take back that power, Miss Representation encourages women to show their discontent – with their pockets, as women make up 86% of the consumer power in our society. In this way, the media can be used to change the ways women are shown.

Of course, Miss Representation is not without its flaws. I found Jennifer Seibel Newsom’s personal story to be unnecessary, and her narration is extremely monotonous. Several critics mentioned that the film gives too much credit to the media as the cause of sexism in our society. But what really bothered me is that the film misses a great opportunity to discuss how women from ethnic minorities are depicted in the media. Even though Miss Representation includes commentary from Condoleezza Rice, Rosario Dawson and Margaret Cho, nearly all of the images dissected in the film are of white women, and the topic about the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype is only mentioned in passing. It’s a shame that the film meant to critique the media industry’s narrow depictions of women also leaves these marginalized groups invisible.