On Monday, January 27, our group went with the other women’s group to the Paley Center for Media. We learned a lot about how women are represented on TV and in the movies. Usually women are represented as weak and not able to do things themselves. They are often saved at the end by a prince. We saw many clips from movies and TV shows that showed good and bad representations of women. One clip that really stood out to me was called Girl Talk. It was a commercial for a game called Girl Talk from 1995. Girl Talk is a game of truth or dare. If they decide not to take the dare, they have to put a “zit sticker” on their face. The ad started off with boys saying things like, “She would never kiss and tell” and “She’s more sophisticated.” The commercial then cut to the girls saying things like, “My first kiss? Sure I’ll tell you” and “Call a guy and tell him something gross? Never! I’ll take a zit sticker!” Another interesting clip was an episode from Veronica Mars. At first it started out good; a girl asked a teacher for help with something and he told her to find the “girl with the blue hair” because she could help. The girl with the blue hair was really smart and knew how to do hard things on the computer. The clip seemed good because it represented strong, intelligent girls. However, it quickly ended when one girl said, “Yeah I know about him. You should see the way he looks.”
Some interesting statistics I learned are that 80% of girls at ten years old are afraid of being fat and 63% of girls think body image is unrealistic in media.
A really interesting fact I learned was that only five out of the ten academy award-nominated movies have a scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than a boy. Currently women are paid based on images of their bodies, and there is a lack of diversity of images of women in the media. Movies about women are labeled “for women only,” and this is not true for movies about men. However, women’s action movies are created for men. One of the things that’s missing in the media is that women can be strong in more than one way.
