I shave my legs, wear a bra and tight clothes; I watch romantic comedies, I usually wait for the boy to text me first and expect him to pay for dinner on a date. I don’t hate men or demand that we change “mankind” to “womankind,” but I still consider myself a feminist.
As a women’s studies minor, I find that much of the women’s studies department is dated by what most consider to be stereotypical feminism. Certain classes are still entirely focused on aspects of blatant female oppression and male dominance like the suffrage movement in the 1920s and the sexual liberation of the 1970s. We talk about the women who didn’t shave, burned their bras and publicly protested, and we’re all thankful for the social progress that they incited. Women today can vote, wear pants, have jobs, play professional sports, curse publicly, be rabbis and eat ribs. Society as a whole has pretty much gotten the memo that women can do anything that men can do. Finally. But that kind of sexism isn’t the issue anymore. Now we’re threatened by a much less noticeable form of oppression.
Images of starved women sell us products every day on billboards, trucks, televisions and movie screens, showing us what we should be and telling us we aren’t. How can we feel beautiful when we are constantly told we aren’t good enough, that we aren’t pretty or skinny or sexy enough? And consequently, how can women feel empowered to become respected leaders and intellectuals when society tells us that a woman is only worth caring about or listening to if she meets an impossibly slim standard of beauty?
According to a study conducted by Self Magazine and the University of North Carolina, 65% of women today have disordered eating behaviors. That’s two out of three girls. The United States ranks 90th in the world for the number of women holding government positions, and women hold only 3% of mainstream media positions. The media can be a terrifying tool of powerful subversion and persuasion, and we’ve only got 3 people out of 100 representing the interests of 51% of the population. How is no one talking about this?
Jennifer Siebel’s documentary Miss Representation exposes the extreme inequality we live with every day but fail to recognize. Underrepresented in American leadership, constantly bombarded by images of impossibly skinny women, defined by sexuality, youth, and physical appearance, women are demeaned so often by media and absent so frequently from positions of power that we do not even notice it.
The film challenges women to see the oppression we unknowingly ignore and to work towards change and progress both for ourselves and for future generations of women. We wouldn’t be wearing pants if our predecessors hadn’t recognized and fought to solve social problems. Now it’s our responsibility to do the same.
Miss Representation will be shown this Thursday, February 9th in Morse Auditorium (602 Comm. Ave). The movie will run from 5:30-7:00 PM, followed by a panel discussion with distinguished experts in the field. Doors open at 5:00 PM.
This generation has the potential to make serious social changes in the way women are represented in the media. But that’s just it; it starts with us. As the film slogan reads, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”