Name: Cydney Klass

Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Mental Health and Teens (Covid, Access to Mental Health Care/Health Care)

Date of Fieldwork: February 2, 2023

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):The Paley Center for Media

Type of Fieldwork: workshop

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 2, 2023, we visited the Paley Center for Media and took an interactive class with the Women’s Representation in the Media group. The class was called “Girls, Body Image, and the Media.” We started off the class by talking about the age that girls start to notice beauty standards. I personally was shocked to realize that it was really young. As we were talking about it I realized that girls as young as 6-7 or even younger notice it. I realized that for me I probably started to notice it around 6, because as a kid I loved shows and movies with princesses, so that was registering in my brain as the image of beautiful. Especially things like earlier Disney fairy tales like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, where there is a beautiful girl who has a prince come and rescue her because she can’t rescue herself.

After this conversation we watched clips from movies and TV shows and looked into the ways that they reflected women. In most of the clips it showed the girls talking about how they needed to change themselves in order to get a boy to like them. They talked about things like make-up, losing weight, even as far as plastic surgery. This struck me because of how far they were taking things. Especially when they were trying to lose weight, they took it so far that it wasn’t even healthy anymore.

Everything that we saw and talked about really struck me and made me think. Especially now with social media, these unrealistic beauty standards for women are just flat out unhealthy. It’s also almost the only way that you see women depicted. On social media you won’t get popular unless people like your video’s, and the things people like have all of these unrealistic standards woven in, and because people like this more and more girls are seeing this, causing them to feel self conscious about themselves.