'Miss Representation'

 

*****

Available for internet streaming/Cannot find evidence of DVD release

In this excellent documentary, Jennifer Siebel Newsom delves into the world of the American media and the portrayal of women in this format. As a new mother, she wants to discover if the world has changed in its depiction of the female from when she was a young woman and suffered sexual abuse and an eating disorder. What she finds is laid bare in this documentary, and it is far from comforting.

Newsom uses interviews from both men and women who are either in positions of power or play a role in the media, as well as academics. In between these very interesting interviews are deeply troubling statistics showing the truly dismal situation in the United States. There are also interviews with high school students, who openly dismiss media and its effect on young women – one girl comments on how her friends used to go to the bathroom between lessons to apply ’10 pounds of make-up [when] you’re at school to learn’. Without these short comments from young men and women, the documentary would feel preachy, but having the voices of those directly affected makes the world the adults are discussing more visceral.

Most shocking is not the statistics, but the clips from American news channels and radio stations wherein males openly demean female leaders, the female body and women as a sex. In one particularly affecting snippet, a female anchor tries to stop a clip of Paris Hilton from being shown as the lead story only to have her two male colleagues demand the clip and then comment on her Paris’ physicality.

Newsom looks at the way the media tells women that they are objects, and how they are effectively worth very little, which makes them feel they cannot achieve power, which in turn means there are no female role models to inspire the next generation of women. The documentary also looks at how the media depicts violence towards women and how some men then feel they have to brutalise women to be ‘masculine’. This section of the documentary is deeply troubling and could probably be explored to an even greater depth in its own film.

The film is perhaps a little one-sided (I by no means mean that female equality is anything but right, but there is no voice explaining why a woman was not elected into a certain panel etc – it would be interesting to hear this side). Similarly, the voices of the high-schoolers in the end credits veer into the preachy, but overall this is an eye-opening documentary about what it means and feels to be a woman in this century.