Our second field work was going to the Paley Center for Media. We went to go be a part of a workshop/conference about women’s portrayal in the media. A woman named Rebecca greeted us and she brought us to a small theater room. The conference lasted two hours and was extremely interesting. We started off by talking about what we thought media made the “ideal woman” look like and then we talked about how that has changed throughout the years. Then, Rebecca showed us a video with clips and then several independent videos, mostly advertisements, movie excerpt and music videos that portrayed women badly and then we talked about them. The last, and most recent, video that she showed us was a video made by the brand always. It is the #likeagirl campaign. This one really shocked me because they brought teens, girl, and boy and they would ask them to “throw like a girl”, “run like girl” and “fight like a girl”. All of the people would run, throw and fight really lazily and purposely weak. Then they asked children under the age of ten to do the same thing and the children responded by running, throwing and fighting with strength and energy. All of this was to show how once children reach the age of puberty, their thoughts on how powerful women are just plunge. I am wondering if the #likeagirl campaign holds anything for the public to help out on and if so, I think that it would make a very interesting fieldwork, I would also like to show this video at the teach-in. Overall, the Paley Center was an amazing experience and our group learned a lot of new and interesting information on women in the media.
