Miss Representation Film Summary

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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” …show more content…

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

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