*****
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.
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