Miss Representation Film Summary

Miss Representation is a documentary, directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, that premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2011. The movie addresses the negative portrayal of women in the media. Throughout the film the audience is shown how the media trivializes and sexualizes women; even successful and accomplished women are constantly ridiculed, often by men, about how they look and act. We are tirelessly taught by the media that women are only valued for their beauty and sexuality, which in turn leads to the undervaluing of women in our society in general.
In nearly every form of media women are portrayed as sexual objects that are essentially, for men. These women are more often than not young, beautiful and thin. The thin “beautiful”

women are generally portrayed as happy, fun-loving and well put together. The women shown in media who do not fit societies beauty ideals are often portrayed as unhappy, lonely, and often times used as a vehicle for humor. Even a woman who is not in the media strictly for our entertainment, say a woman running for public office, is mercilessly scrutinized for everything she does. Many times these disparaging comments are being made by men, and often they have to do with the woman’s appearance. In turn these women lose credibility because everyone has become so focused on what they look like.
So of course young girls and women see this vastly inaccurate and objectifying portrayal of women in the media and, in turn, strive to be like the fun-loving happy girl who portrays our societies beauty ideals. This level of beauty is impossible to achieve thanks to the manipulation that occurs before we see the finished product. This is an immense issue because these girls are striving for something that is unattainable. It is not difficult to see how this could all lead to not only a negative body image but even an eating disorder.
This has all become so commonplace that we see it as normal. You would be hard pressed to find a magazine cover in which the model wasn’t edited and retouched in some way. A huge part of the issue is that advertisements and magazines are free to edit and manipulate the model’s body to points that are humanely impossible; they also do not have to disclose that this has been done. So when a young girl see’s an unrealistically thin woman on the cover of a fashion magazine, she is taught that this is what she is supposed to look like, and thus the problem has begun.
This problem is also deeply bedded with our patriarchal society.

The view that women are there to serve men leads to their objectification and vice versa. Women are vastly underrepresented in the media industry. Men are creating what they know, and so we get non-stop images of sexualized and objectified women with little substance.
This movie was immaculately done. I was completely impressed at this films ability to make me truly angry. By the end of the film I had already googled their website and was looking through the different ways that people have gotten involved with the cause. Everything was presented in a way that was easy to understand while still driving home its point. The movie covered how this issue not only negatively affects women but men as well, which is incredibly important.
There was only one thing that I felt could have made this documentary better; a huge theme in the movie was that there are few regulations for the media. The problem is that it is very easy to cross the line from regulations to censorship. For me, it would have added to the movie if they would have discussed how they felt we should put regulations in place in order to maintain the health of our society, without it turning into full blown censorship. This is a difficult question to answer and there may currently be no solution to this issue. I would have just been interested to hear the different ideas and propositions that the movie’s participants might have on this

topic.
This movie could easily be used in classrooms along with open discussions as an important teaching tool in the topic of media literacy, as well as to teach children at a fairly young age how highly manipulated nearly everything you see in the media is. Although eating disorders are not the main topics of the movie it does tackle one of the main culprits in causing negative body image and eating disorders. This movie does a fantastic job of bringing to light how warped the media makes things appear. I think that this could be a wonderful resource to include in required middle school health classes for all genders. Not only could it teach girls that the women they are shown in the media are unrealistic, but it shows boys this as well. This is important in the fight to stop the objectification and sexualization of women.
I would give this movie a five star rating. If anything it deserves it due to it’s ability to really get the viewer angry, because when people are angry they will incite change. Besides the movie’s success in invoking a response from it’s viewers I also felt that the movie was entertaining as well. It really captured your attention and then managed to keep it throughout the entirety of the film which is especially important ind documentary style movies. Overall this was a fantastic movie and an excellent teaching tool.