Review of Miss Representation (2011) by Caroline F — 21 Sep 2016

Miss Representation does an excellent job of highlighting what is wrong with how media depicts women in society and how debilitating the media's messages to women and girls are. It shows how much pressure is put on women and girls to look and act a certain way and as a result, they are not appreciated for their intellectual abilities. Important to note, is that media places a women's value in her body. Miss Representation supports the notion that children learn through what they see in the media and their parents do as well. It shows that as media models how girls are supposed to look and act, that will only be reinforced throughout society in the workplace, in school, and even at home. If the media continues to showcase the images of females that it has been for years, girls will continue to be judged for how sexy they are and what mood they are in. A clip from "The O'Reilly Factor" with a guest commentator (male) shows the guest's very clear opinion that a woman cannot be in the oval office because of PMS and mood swings. Just from this one clip, the documentary shows that there is an even bigger problem in society for women in addition to the extreme pressure to attain a very specific ideal image of beauty. A female's biology is also scrutinized. In addition to society's aversion to a female's reproductive system, by expecting a female to have a flat stomach (one of many expectations) society is essentially taking away her uterus.

Miss Representation also places importance on the fact that men who are exposed to images of females in the media learn to compare women who they meet to those images. They learn to expect from women what the media expects from them.

Overall, the documentary does an effective job of showing that media's portrayal of gender is a problem. And since this documentary has been produced, I am sad to see that there has been very little change.