Miss Representation confronts media portrayal of women

Miss Representation, a documentary on the portrayal of women in media, was screened on Monday in the Charles Commons Ballroom as part of Women's History Month at Hopkins.
The film, which argued against what it saw as the constricted, disparaging and frequently objectifying portrayal of women in the media, was hosted by a collaboration of the Hopkins Women's History Month Committee, Alpha Phi, the Counseling Center, the Office of the Dean of Student Life, Feminist Alliance, Panhellenic Council and Students Educating and Empowering for Diversity (SEED).
A 2011 Sundance Film Festival Selection, written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Miss Representation addresses the notion of femininity that is perpetuated in the media surrounding powerful women. The film asserted that it is this image that inhibits women from taking on high-powered roles.
Newsom began the film by questioning how she was going to bring her daughter into a world that belittles or degrades women so acutely. She also questioned how it was possible for a woman to be fulfilled emotionally and professionally in a world that attacks successful women.
The film sought to empower women against what it saw as the emphasis the media places on physical beauty rather than intellectual strength.
The film addressed the insecurity that women feel about their bodies, starting at a young age. Some studies show that 53 percent of 13-year olds are unhappy with their bodies, and 65 percent of women and girls have an eating disorder.
Miss Representation contained multiple montages of explicit, revealing images of women's bodies from television shows, movies, magazines, ad campaigns and video games as examples of the media exploiting women's bodies in order to appease advertisers and other capitalistic endeavors.
Hypersexualization conditions young men to accustom to objectify women and assume the mindset that they must overpower women. Additionally, young girls are hypersexualized; women traditionally wear similar clothing, or lack thereof, in G-rated and R-rated movies.
The film also argued that women in American culture have withdrawn into subordination; for example, women comprise 51 percent of the population and only 17 percent of Congress.
"If people knew that Cuba, China, Iraq and Afghanistan have more women in government than the United States of America, then we'd get some people upset " Gavin Newsom, Lieutenant Governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco, said in the film.
If women do hold leadership positions, the media primarily observes and fixates on their physicality, not their credentials, the film stated. The film continued to argue that women hold only three percent of clout positions in mainstream media, so most of what is depicted in the media is from a male perspective.
The film featured interviews with famous female politicians, entertainers, activists and academics about their experiences with misogyny. Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson and Gloria Steinem, to name a few, gave interviews on their perspective of women's misrepresentation.
The event drew a large crowd, filling the Charles Commons Ballroom with at least 100 students, both men and women. Following the documentary, a group of thirty students remained to discuss the movie.
Many of the students discussed how some of the facts the film presented surprised and impacted them.
"I think that what really shocked me was, it wasn't even a stat, but the fact that more women are represented in governments in places such as Iraq. . .that's sad," a member of the audience said.
"Clips from music videos and commercials, just seeing people around me cringe was so interesting because we see that all the time but we never cringe," another member of the audience said.
One of Hopkins's sororities, Alpha Phi, co-sponsored the event and brought a large crowd of sophomores to the event so that they would learn about becoming positive, empowered role models.
"We had it as a requirement for the bigs. . .to try and raise awareness and get people to see the movie especially since the idea of the big is to mentor the new freshman," junior Alison Bellows, a member of Alpha Phi, said.
The rivalry between women on campus was also a topic of discussion, illustrating the lack of empowerment among women and abundance of competition.
"Women create a lot of the problems ourselves. We objectify each other and ourselves. To a large extent that is prevalent in the media and how we're portrayed in the media, and we internalize that and perpetuate it more than I think any of us would like and more than I've realized before because I do it myself. . .in sororities, how we sort of go against each other and disparage each other, and we shouldn't," Bellows said.
"You know that our biggest fundraiser. . .is the penny wars. The way you win that is by putting the most amount of money, like dollar bills, in other people's jars. It's sororities versus sororities and fraternities versus sororities. We raised a ton of money, but it was because we were literally bringing each other down," a student said.
Many students said that the film inspired them to evaluate the media more critically.
"I'm going to try to be more critical of TV shows, movies, advertisements and try to bring up, if I'm with my friends, 'Hey, I can't believe they're actually saying that' or 'I can't believe that they're showing her wearing absolutely nothing'. . .people who saw the film will just naturally do because now we're more aware of things like that," Bellows said.