On Monday January 27th, both women’s groups in the eighth grade went to the Paley Media Arts Center. The Paley Media Arts Center keeps recordings of radio broadcasts, television shows and commercials. Our goal from this visit was to try and gain information about women and how they are portrayed in the media and how that relates to my groups topic of violence against women.

Once at the Center, we met with Rebekah Fitz. I’m going to lie, I haven’t idea what her job is specifically, but I do know she works at Paley. Rebekah screened several commercials and and clips from television shows for us relating to body image and women’s rights. Rebekah showed us clips from television shows such as Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gidget, Facts of Life, Brady Bunch and many others.

In the clip from Gidget, it was a scene with Gidget, her friend LaRue and two boys who were in LaRue’s guitar class. Gidget was going just to help LaRue not be so nervous, then leave her. (Note: Gidget was in a two-piece bathing suit and LaRue was wearing a full body suit.)

Once Gidget and LaRue were with the boys, the boys ignored LaRue and only paid attention to Gidget. They asked Gidget to play with them. Gidget insisted that she wasn’t musical, but LaRue was. The boys insisted that Gidget could play the tambourine. Gidget felt slightly guilty for taking the attention away from LaRue, but she liked the attention from the boys.

The scene then cut to another scene of the two boys and LaRue playing guitar and Gidget playing the tambourine with a crowd around them. One of the people in the crowd said they he liked their music and wanted them to play at some sort of concert. Gidget said that she wasn’t even in the band and that’s she didn’t even really do anything in the band, either. The two boys said she didn’t have to do anything because she was the “tambourine girl”. They said that she didn’t have to do anything because she was cute.

The two boys from Gidget reduced her value solely to her looks. Unfortunately, this happens a lot in the media. If you are interested in that, then I suggest you read a blog post by someone in the women in the media group. Their group members are Daria, Sophia C., Bella, Lexi and Eve.

We learned several interesting things about body image. One statistic we learned was that the average age girls start to become dissatisfied with their body image is at ten years old. This was shocking to me because ten in still a very young age, they haven’t even hit puberty yet.

Although I didn’t learn very much about my topic, I learned a lot about the portrayal of women in the media.