The Role Of Women In Miss Representation

Women are rapidly gaining more positions in power and influence in America, but yet are still vastly underrepresented in our media. In Jennifer Siebel Newson’s film, Miss Representation, she challenges the media’s perspective on powerful women. She illuminates the limited and often prejudicial representation of women in the media and discusses how this directly affects women in their goals to achieve personal empowerment. This film uses the sociological imagination in examining how the media socializes women and puts them at a disadvantage before their lives have even begun. Just in the last few years, there has been a dramatic spike in eating disorders, depression, and self-harm in young women. With such evidence, self-objectification is considered a national epidemic. All of this is due in part to the way the media presents women. Miss Representation examines how digitally altered images and the excessive portrayal of one particular body type creates mass amounts of body dysmorphia among young …show more content…
In 2011, only 11% of protagonists in films were female. Among these 11%, most only had the purpose of finding love. Meanwhile, male protagonists routinely are written to play much more diverse roles. Even if a woman is playing a more “masculine role”, such as women in superhero movies, she’s almost always the running joke of the movie and her character depth is completely diminished by being a sexual object for the protagonist. One of the speakers in Miss Representation defined the term “symbolic annihilation” as the underrepresentation of a group leading to individuals suffering from role ambiguity. For example, a woman may have an inclination towards public service and government affairs, but because of the lack of representation of women like her in the media, she’s unsure on what her role as a woman actually is. Often times this leads to women not achieving their full