Miss Representation

Recently, I watched a documentary titled Miss Representation. The documentary detailed how women are portrayed in todays media and delivered a very compelling message about how the media portrayal of women must change in order to make true progress in todays society. They detailed this using many statistics about women in power and on television, as well as using actual examples of how women were degraded live on television. It also did a very good job of describing how women were mistreated in media, particularly through advertisement, and some of the ads they used as examples truly made me feel horrible. This documentary delivered an incredibly powerful message overall, and while I am in full support of everything it is advocating for, I believe that the documentary could have gone a better direction in terms of creating the ad.

            First of all, in many of the examples used with how women are portrayed negatively on the news and in politics, at least half and probably more of the clips that I remember all came from Fox news. While there were other news clips, the primary source was Fox news. I believe that this documentary could have been more compelling if it had showed that this discrimination on camera was this drastic across all of media, rather than just in one location. They did a very good job of showing that what happened behind the scenes was discriminatory, but the portrayal of what happened on screen showed only half of what truly happens by focusing on a specific area of news reporting. Staying on the topic of news and networks, the documentary also provided an example of a woman who tried to open a news station and was turned away because there already was a women’s news station. They then contrasted this to ESPN having 24 sports stations. I believe that the first example is compelling and hard to turn down, but the comparison to ESPN opens of the argument to a massive straw man attack, mainly because the two examples aren’t necessarily comparable. This is because, unless I missed it, the news example and ESPN are completely separate companies, meaning that what happens in one may not happen in another. Also, ESPN is a company dedicated entirely to sports, so it makes sense that it would have a lot of sports stations. My last main issue with the actual content of the documentary was the segment about working mothers and how there was no paid leave for parenting. However, I believe that this is an issue that extends to more than just women, as this issue also effects men. While I agree that it may affect women more, the documentary once again portrays the story too one-sided. Also, upon doing research on the topic, I found that many companies do offer at least partially paid maternity leave, and under California state law there is guaranteed 6 weeks of partially paid maternity leave.

            Second of all, the main argument I have against this documentary is that it goes about the change it advocates for in the wrong way. The way I would describe it is that this documentary is like a wall, hitting society. While many parts of society will be very accepting and embrace the wall, there is a part of society that hates this same wall and will constantly push against it. They describe this phenomenon in the documentary, talking about how even when a lot of progress is made, there are often steps taken in the opposite direction soon after. While the documentary accepts and portrays this, they simply fall into the same trap that stopped women’s equality from advancing before. They also advocate for women in leadership, which I agree would be an amazing thing, I also believe that this can’t happen at once. A good example of this is the past election, where there was a very progressive move with Obama becoming the first black president. However, this also demonstrates the conservative pushback by allowing for Trump to win over Hillary Clinton. Essentially, it’s too much of a good thing, which will ultimately backfire. The other issue I have is that this documentary will primarily be preaching to the choir. This is because many who will see this documentary will already agree with its views, and may watch the documentary simply because they believe it will reinforce their views. And, while the documentary is very good, it likely didn’t have much of an impact on those it was trying to effect, these people being those such as the directors of Fox news, who have shown that they truly don’t care about women’s portrayal on television.

            Lastly, this brings me to my solution as to what they should have done in the documentary. First of all, take out most of what I brought up in my second paragraph, as these segments in the documentary don’t truly enforce the overall message that the documentary is trying to bring. I found these segments to simply there to take up space or just miss the mark on the message they were trying to deliver. Also, far more importantly, you must change the target audience of the documentary. Currently, the documentary is rated MA, meaning that most of the viewers will be adults. By the time people are adults, they are often far more solidified in their beliefs than they were as children. I believe that to truly make a difference, you must focus on the youngest generations rather than society as a whole, as the younger generations are the generations whose brains are impressionable, and it is these generations that will truly be able to bring about the change that the documentary talks about. But, the current method of trying to change society by almost forcing it to change has not worked so far, and likely never will work in the way we want it to. So, you must focus from the youngest generations. The documentary provides a good solution to this towards the end, which is that advertisement must be regulated, especially advertisement directed towards younger generations. I believe that this approach, changing the mindset of younger generations is the best way to deal with the problem presented by this documentary.