On January 6th, My Social Justice group and I went to the Paley Center for Media. For those of you who don’t know, The Paley Center is basically a museum, but instead of having “stuff”, they have media and online documents (old news reports, tv shows and clips, ect). We signed up for a class called Girl’s Body Image, with a woman named Caroline. We didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into when we signed up for the class, but we figured that it was worth a shot.
When we arrived at the Paley Center we were led to a small movie theatre that was completely empty. As we sat in the front row, we started to talk to Caroline, the lovely lady who was meeting with us. We touched on many topics together before we started watching some clips. We talked about who our role models were and what it meant to be a role model. The names Lena Dunham, Michelle Obama, And Beyoncé all came up and we had similar reasons for why we looked up to them; they are all talented, independent, funny, beautiful and giving women. However, when we started to talk about some women that we thought were “supposed” to be our role models, the only words that came to us were “Sexy” and “Pretty”.
After our discussion on role models and society-set-standards, Caroline pulled a video montage onto the big screen. Within this montage was video footage traveling from the early 1900’s to present day. This footage included tv shows, commercials, movie clips and more. In this montage I saw things that I had seen before; I recognized some of the tv shows, and remembered seeing some of the commercials. The thing that was different about seeing these videos now, was that suddenly they weren’t harmless; they conveyed a message that I hadn’t seen before. While some of the sexism was incredibly visible, for example the numerous videos of women washing cars, half naked, with suds all of over their bodies, it was harder to see the sexism in some of the footage. For example, one of my favorite shows is The Vampire Diaries, ( If you are not familiar with The Vampire Diaries, here is a quick summary; a beautiful young girl from a small town falls in love with a vegetarian vampire, but then his badass brother comes along and steals her heart, all whilst werewolves and ghosts and witches are trying to kill each other. Classic.) and In this montage is a clip from the show. The clip is of the main character, Elena, trying to learn how to kill a vampire. She is incredibly weak and cannot even puncture the surface of the dummy she is trying to stake. When she is asked why she wants to learn how to defend herself against vampires, she says it is because her vampire-boyfriend dumped her…..not because you know….vampires are dangerous and stuff. When I had previously watched this episode all I was thinking about was how I pitied the relationship, but as I watched it in a different setting I realized the misogynistic undertones. I think this just goes to show how important you have to be when consuming media, because you never know what might me affecting you.
