2 Steps Forward, 1 Step Back

Miss Representation, an organization dedicated to bettering the representation of women in the media, recently posted a video on Youtube entitled How the Media Failed Women in 2013, which I found to be very interesting. The video starts with good things that have happened to women in the media this year, but that list is very short and not exactly substantial. The video then goes into all of the ways that women have been portrayed in negative ways this year. The video, in a way, is showing how our culture makes two steps forward in terms of positive representation and then take one step back. However, looking at what is presented in the video, it looks more like one step forward and one step back, leaving us right where we started.

For every woman that gets a CEO job, there will be a woman in a Carl's Jr. advertisement eating a burger in a sexual way. For every African American woman that is nominated for a prestigious award, there will be a perfume advertisement in which a women doesn't exactly seem to be giving consent. For some reason, this is the way American media culture is.

Now, the video shows some examples like Miley Cyrus, as a bad representation of women. I'm not exactly sure where I stand on this. I believe she should be allowed to do whatever she wants with her body, whether that be to display it to the world or to keep it private. However, this has to be a decision she makes on her own. I do not think that if some male CEO asked her to do things at the VMAs to get viewers and discussion brewing that it would be okay. I'm not exactly sure what the video implied by putting her on the list, but I think I can see where they are coming from.

This video was something very interesting, because I was able to relate it to things that we saw in class, including the video with all of the examples of women in advertising. That video was made in the early 2000s I believe, yet many of those examples still hold true today. This definitely shows that we have not made much progress in the representation of women in the media if society is still accepting these representations. Sure, some women (including myself) are enraged at some of the over sexualization of women in advertisements for things completely unrelated to sex, but apparently there are enough people in our culture who either don't care or maybe even love this representation.

This needs to change. Videos like this need to be more well known and people need to understand the lack of progress we are making in the media. I feel like the information is out there, and a fair amount of people know, but there is a lack of care and effort. There is a huge mentality of "but I can't do anything, I'm just one person." We need to change this mentality and unite to change this. Hopefully the Miss Representation video in 2020 will be significantly less disappointing.