Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice (Hold the Sugar and the Spice)

You’re a boy- you get blue!

You’re a girl- you get pink! 

(But what if I like green? TOO BAD)

From the day you’re born your identity has already been constructed by the society you live in.

Boys get cool toy cars and tool sets, while girls get easy bake ovens and dolls. (They’re already training us to be mothers and to be the chefs of our home.)

( I for one will not be the only one who cooks in my house when I get older, frankly because I hate the idea that because I’m a woman it’s assumed that that’s my job. It’s going to be an equal partnership. 50/50)

From a young age we’re already been assigned gender roles.

Just flipping through a children’s toy catalog you can see the radical differences of types of toys that children are marketed. (Basically boys get all the awesome toys).

Society constructs a world that creates a set of rules for what roles boys and girls should have.

 A main contributor to this worldview is the media. Ads, commercials, television, and films create standardized roles of women and men.

I’m going to take this even a step further by saying that the media perpetuates a world of sexism.

(Yeah you heard me correctly).

The media sexualizes, demeans, and objectifies women and children are extremely impressionable. They imitate what they see and the images they view in the media impacts how they think of themselves, their body image and their relation to boys.

I recently came across a great trailer for a documentary that addresses many of these issues.

The film, Miss Representation examines the gender discrimination that exists in society.

Its garnished great reviews by the press, universities, and elementary schools.

The Hollywood Reporter stated,

A relevant and important doc that deconstructs the insidious role of visual media in the widespread, unbalanced depiction of women and girls.

It shows how women are misrepresented in the media and in the political world. It brings up some great points about how the media pokes fun at powerful and important women in our country such as Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Sarah Palin and how if the media can’t even take the strongest women in our country seriously then what does that say about our society?

The film shows us some saddening statistics on women in the film industry and in politics.

• ·         Women only hold 3% of positions of influence in entertainment, publishing, advertising and telecommunications.

• ·         Of the top 250 grossing films, only 7% of directors and 13% of writers are women.

• ·         The US is 90th in terms of women in national legislatures in the world.

• ·         Women make up 51% of the population yet hold only 17% of the seats in the House of Representatives.

 It also shows us statistics on the influence that the media has on body image.

• ·         Cosmetic surgery performed on youth 18 and younger tripled in the ten years between 1997 and 2007. For the same period, liposuction nearly quadrupled and breast augmentations increased nearly six-fold.

• ·         65% of American women and girls have an eating disorder.

Hopefully the film will bring awareness to the depictions of women and can have a significant social impact on people.

(I mean media has a huge impact on people, but for some reason positive messages seem a lot harder to get across…strange right.)

I hope because of the praise this film has gotten that people will see it and recognize that a change needs to occur.

(I doubt all the executives at the major studios, ad agencies, and networks will gather around and watch this film together and decide that they will change the way they portray women)

….so you ask where does the change occur?

Perhaps the change can occur in the media viewers by making them aware of the messages the media feeds them and educating them on how this is not an accurate depiction of their role as women and men.

The creators of the film have begun an initiative that would bring media literacy education to children in schools.

This may not change the industry forever but I think it’s at least a step in the right direction.