Reflection 6: Gender Documentary
“Miss Representation” had me in tears by the end of the documentary.
I watched Jean Kilbourne’s “Killing Us Softly 4” in a previous class and was excited to see her once again in “Miss Representation.” I remember being completely enthralled by Kilbourne’s work because what she was showing — gender stereotyping and objectification (the message) in the media (the messenger) — is so obvious; I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere.
Women are policed so heavily for their appearances. They’re shown to be thin and makeuped and body-hairless and sexy. Older women are completely taken out of the picture. We get botox and use anti-aging creams because God forbid a woman look her age, meanwhile, on the flip side, there’s the George Clooney effect where older men are deemed attractive. Women are called emotional, b-----, beautiful, psycho, hot, bossy.
Then there’s men. They’re cool, calm and powerful. They have the authority, they don’t cry, they don’t express weakness, they don’t act like women. Men are doers. They get things done. They provide for their families. Men are called smart, strong, stoic, self-sufficient, sexual, tough.
Real people don’t fit into such rigid boxes. We can try to buy all the products in the world or we can try to suppress our tears but these labels sell us short. The construction of gender is supposed to organize to make life easier. People gravitate toward power structures because then we can create a predictable system i.e. division of labor and assigned responsibilities. After all, our brains love to categorize.
Gender means sameness; all men or women share such stereotypical characteristics. Gender also means difference; men and women are opposites (but evidently unequal). In actuality, there’s no genetic predetermination for these kinds of labels and our system of organization has failed us. It doesn’t make things easier.
All people have emotions, all people have brains and that’s blatant. The problem with seeing stereotypes represented again and again is that, when you tell someone something enough times, they start to believe it. The illusory truth effect in the media keeps people “doing” gender and when they’re only given one narrative of who they can be, they’ll listen.
Even though the system is destructive, it’s powerful and profitable. Companies continue to keep making money off of people’s insecurities that they aren’t living up to their gender and its many roles through their promises of solution products. As Jennifer Pozner said, “Nobody wins in this model, but women particularly lose in this model.”