The Paley Center For Media
The auditorium we were taken to, here we takes with Caroline about the portrayal of women in the media.
On Tuesday, January 6 the pretty in pink group went to a scheduled class at the Paley Center for Media. There we were to learn about women’s body image and women’s portrayal in the media, which could be television, radio, or the internet. When we first got there we met up with a teacher there, Caroline, and she took us to a small auditorium room. It was only our group in the class so in a way Caroline could get more personal with us and help us based on our studies and social justice issue. Caroline started off the class by showing us a 10 minute video composed of clips of movies, tv shows, music videos, and even cartoons. Each of these clips had an element of either women empowerment or showed a negative portrayal of a young women and their negative relationship with other character, in this case it was mostly boys or men. One of the clips that hit almost personal to me was a clip of the powerpuff girls. In the section she showed the opening to the show, but what didn’t sit well with me with the show was to “create the perfect girl” the creators of the show decided it was “sugar, spice and everything nice”. And in reality these barely scratch the surface of what makes up girls and women. Not just that, but just the concept of being able to manufacture a girl is kind of messed up and that little girl automatically becomes an object. Though I still love the show and its characters, this just got me thinking, even at a young age I, even if I wasn’t aware at that point, was being showed part of a negative portrayal of young girls. It is also possible that many other girls could have heard what it means to be a perfect girl from, not just the powerpuff girls but any other show, and could have subconsciously though they weren’t good enough because they didn’t have these attributes. As she showed us many more clips, from various points in time (dating as far back as the ’60’s), it was an eye opener to see that it wasn’t just our generation and our time period that were being subjected to all these outrageous and wildly exaggerated (in a way) portrayals of women. Our groups main focus is to bring awareness to the people we can and show them the way real women should be portrayed, and its none of that perfect “sugar, spice, and everything nice”. Not at all.
