Miss Representation: A Documentary Analysis

When I was eight, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. At the time, the 2008 elections were in full swing, and Hillary was becoming a common name even for small children like me. I remember answering my teacher that I wanted to be President of the United States, but not now, maybe in the future. Curious, she asked me why. “Well,” I replied then, “I don’t want to be the first female president.” I am 15 now, and I no longer dream of becoming President at all. For the longest time, I thought nothing of it. Sometime over the years, I had come to think of the title of “President” as being unattainable, and that was reasonable. But Miss Representation, the documentary we were shown in class, put things in an entirely different perspective. The documentary states that at the age of 7, an equal number of boys and girls want to be president. By the age of 15, the number of boys who want to be president is far greater than the number of girls. I was shocked to realize that my thoughts were not natural, and that they were instead a product of the subtle sexist undertones in almost all of media today. One of the problems in media is the lack of role

I had always thought it was normal for women on reality TV shows to be screaming at and insulting each other, but I had never considered the thought that this was not a reflection of how people actually acted until Miss Representation showed me various reality TV shows depicting women at their worst. I had also never questioned why shows hosted by a female were typically about home improvement or cooking and why there were very few shows that did have women taking the spotlight without being sexualized. Even though I had never consciously recognized this, somewhere in my subconscious I had accepted all of the misogyny, and it had influenced my current thought