Name: Sydney Hurley
Social Justice Group: Women’s Role and Representation in the Media (print/ads/tv)
Date of Fieldwork: February 2, 2023
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):The Paley Center
Type of Fieldwork: Workshop / Teach-In
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:
On February 2nd, our group accompanied the Mental Health group and went to the Paley Center for Media and did a workshop. We met with Rebekah Fisk showed us a ton of clips from movies, TV shows, and music videos. We started off with a clip from a sitcom from the 60s, where a girl’s dad sent her on a date that she didn’t want to go to, so she did her best to make herself appear “ugly”. She uses compressed air to make a sort of fat suit, and the laugh track in the background was very loud during the scenes where they were making fun of women. We talked about the Bechdel test, and how if you put most TV shows or movies to it, majority of them fail. The Bechdel test is a test where 2 women are featured, that those women talk to each other, and that they discuss something other than a man. It was interesting to see how shows will degrade women in order to make the show more “funny” or “relatable”. In the music videos, Rebekah Fisk mentioned how in the music videos, “sex sells” and for a lot of female artists, it was hard to sell any albums without being sexual in the videos and album covers. We didn’t just look at clips that were negatively portraying women, we also saw an ad by always, the pad company, asking a young boy how he thinks that girls run and fight, and the difference in how he acted and young girls acted was incredible. It shows how much sexism is in the media and how young kids internalize it without even realizing. This experience was new and helpful for our research, and helped us get some information on how long this media representation really has been going on. I also thought more about how much media we consume daily and how that the things we see just live in our brains, almost subconsciously. It’s understandable that young people will see this content and try to look a similar to them or act a similar way. This helped us understand that the stereotypes of women that are portrayed in the media affect the way young girls think of themselves, but also how young boys and men view the women in their lives.
