On Monday, January 27 my group and I went to the Paley Center of Media to discuss how women are portrayed in the media and how it affects women. We were first told a few facts, that REALLY surprised me. One was that 80% of girls, who are 10 years old believe that they are fat. This amazed me because I found it very upsetting that girls that are really young already begin to feel that they are “not good enough”. It is disgusting that the world around us promotes girls who are fake. We set this standard of perfection that can NEVER be reached. We teach girls that if they don’t look like the retouched girls in the magazines, they are ugly. The fact is that the models we see in magazines don’t even look like that in real life. If these models aren’t as perfect as they are portrayed, then how can we be perfect? Another thing we discussed was the effects of low self esteem. The effects are anorexia, bulimia, obesity, sexual promiscuity, binge drinking and eating. All these things are self harming. The media doesn’t only effect how we look at ourselves, but it also effects how we treat ourselves. The person who was presenting this information then showed us a series of clips from television shows and commercials. The clips began from shows and commercials in the 1960’s. Some of them showed empowerment of women and others showed stereotypes or the gender roles women should play. As we began seeing these scenes we saw the expectation many have for women, which is awful. We are shown that we must be polite, gentle, delicate and soft spoken. We must also like “girly” things, like the color pink, or painting our nails and focusing on our looks. In many of the shows they played on the idea that women are meant to be the one taking car of the house and the kids. In commercials it showed that girls like to gossip and hang out with friends, instead of doing things that actually have an effect in the world around them. In many of the shows they did not put the woman in a role which portrayed a girl who was smart and strong. We then began to discuss the idea of race. We looked at how many women of color are portrayed as a “bitch” or a “slut” in a TV show. We also discussed the idea of tokenism that many shows and commercials have. Tokenism is something that TV shows and commercials use to show that they are “diverse,” although they aren’t. Tokenism is when a commercial or TV show has one person of color and then the other people are white; therefore they are playing on the idea of “diversity”, when they really aren’t.
Overall I think that this was a really interesting and thought provoking fieldwork. It was interesting to learn the mind games the media world plays on us. I hope that I will be able to go to the Paley Center of Media again, to learn even more about the topic of the affects of media.
