MissRepresentation

I saw the MissRepresentation documentary the other day after they used it in the 60s class, and was both pleasantly surprised and unable to keep from rolling my eyes a bit. The movie brings up many good points, some that have been said many times before, like the media's effect on girls' views of themselves regarding their weight and perception of beauty. But there were also some new perspectives that I hadn't considered. The statistics about the number of women in leadership positions, specifically in the media brought up issues of getting the women's perspective. When men run all the media and are making the decisions,  we tend to end up with stereotypical and over-sexualized images of women everywhere that fail to represent the reality. This makes me think of the Bechdel test, which is a test created in 1985 that has three simple provisions to check how women are portrayed in media, which only 56% of movies pass. The requirements are that there are at least two named female characters, they talk to each other, and that they talk about something other than men. Unfortunately, many films are still failing this test, Pacific Rim being one of them, not that it was a particularly revolutionary or "intelligent" movie in the first place, but either way women are still being portrayed in films in unrealistic ways. Passing the Bechdel test in no way means that a film is not sexist, about half the films that pass the test do so by having women talk about marriage and babies instead of men. And when women do talk it often seems to be about something superficial; when was the last time you actually saw two women in a movie talk about something intelligent, scientific, or academic in some way? Usually if any women is talking about that kind of topic to another, one of them is too stupid and shallow to understand, apparently there's only room for one smart woman at a time. Women are portrayed in an overly sexualized manner with shallow concerns, and strong female roles are almost universally masculine. Why can't a woman look good and be in a leadership role? Think about Sarah Palin (not that I'm arguing that she's the best role model but that's not the point), so much of the focus put on her was her appearance when she was running for office. And the attempts to portray Hilary Clinton as crazy and out of control of her emotions is ridiculous. How often do you see media reports of some man in politics getting passionate about an issue? And how often are those portraying him as crazy and unable to control his emotions? It happens to women politicians and women in every day life all the time. A woman's place in life is not to sit around doing whatever men tell her to just because that's what they want and so she isn't "crazy".