On Tuesday, January 5th, we took a class at the Pale
The auditorium we were taken to, here we talked with the teacher about the portrayal of women in the media and saw multiple clips.
y Center for Media. Walking into the class we were mostly curious to hear about the topic we have been learning about for the last couple months from a real expert. We learned about the problems of how women are portrayed in the media. We learned a lot about how from a very young age, girls are expected to be sexy and mature, but not slutty. We watched clips from television shows, movies, advertisements and more to see what is shown to children and young adults. We talked a lot about how the ideas and stereotypes we are exposed to, we are oblivious to and often do not notice how horrible something is because we are numb to it. Not many the problem with the way women are portrayed in the media, but the topic of women in the media affects adolescents more than any other age group. The teacher raised important points and brought attention to topics and ideas we had not even considered.
Before we had the chance to take the class at the Paley Center, we were kind of stumped about what fieldwork we could do. The topic we chose was really broad and many of the fieldwork opportunities we had looked into had not worked out. The class was really helpful and made it easier to narrow down our topic. We learned we could really do something about the way women are portrayed in the media by noticing everything that we see as objectifying and demeaning that we are exposed to everyday. During our class, we got to talk about many of our own opinions on gender based stereotypes and share a lot of the research we have done for our social justice project. Something that was discussed that I had never even considered before was that opinions and stereotypes have barely changed since the invention of the television. People can are so numb to the way women are portrayed in the media that truly horrible things often fly over people’s heads. The clips we watched and the way we talked about them was inspiring. I felt angry enough to make a difference in the world and to stop the way society is exposing women. Overall, I think that we could not have left the interview more inspired, newly educated and excited about further working on our social justice project.
