Inner Mean Girl Cleanse: Media Matters

The final week of the Inner Mean Girl Cleanse challenges you to go media-free for a week to understand the effect media images have on you, and to become more powerful than them. I went back through some old Undomestic 10 interviews where I asked the question: "How do media generally portray women? What is a good example of this?" Here's just a sampling of the answers I received:


"Like second class citizens."


"Very incompletely."

"We are somehow different from the norm, femininity and 'female issues' are not on the same level as masculine normality (whatever that is)."

 

"In film comedies, women tend to either be affably clumsy leads of rom-coms or good-natured set dressing in mainstream comedy films where men get the jokes and also get to be fat."

"No matter how far we come, women are reduced to caricatures."

"I think this question gets answered within five seconds of turning on a television."

"More troubling to me are the shows that appear to break away from the old stereotypes, disguising the fact that they're just introducing new ones."

"Too few older women are given the chance to speak, or allowed to speak with authority."

"Ironically, by swinging too far on the continuum from housewife to male-bashing career woman, brands can be just as wrong as if they’d featured a woman baking cookies and making her husband’s shirts white."

"As a mother of a young child, we have been so distressed by secular images of women - particularly the sexualization of young women and girls - that we got rid of our TV!"

"You’re either alluring because you’re doing it upside-down from a trapeze, or you’re alluring because you’ve never done it before. Don’t get me wrong, being kinky or virginal isn’t problematic, but most women probably aren’t either of those things."

"All is not lost; we grew up with Topanga from Boy Meets World, and Hermione and Ginny from Harry Potter, and they kicked ass."

And one of my all-time favorite responses:

 

You are probably white. It’s hard for you to be pretty and smart. You are skinny and employ a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps you from being threatening. Still, no one can get close to you! (The Proposal, Ally McBeal, Gray’s Anatomy). If you are very smart and have a great job, you’ve repressed some elemental part of yourself that requires 1: confronting your mother, 2: giving up your lucrative job, and 3: using lots of money to travel to “simpler” places (the south of France, rural America, the “East”, take your pick) where you will be rejuvenated/fall in love at last (Baby Boom, A Year in Provence, Sweet Home Alabama). Even then, you are probably still white. If you are Black, you are urban and struggling but dignified and can whip out rejoinders that make gay men blush—but you have relationship problems and rarely get the main storyline. If you are Asian, you are quiet but very, very spiritual. Since you are also boring, you will probably die at some point—though gracefully—and everyone will feel bad and will learn an important historical lesson (Luan on The Young and the Restless, Miss Saigon). To counteract this sad stereotype, you are increasingly being given the role that the black girl originally had, except you are allowed to have more sex (Ally McBeal, Grey’s Anatomy). Every now and then, if you are Black, you get to be the spiritual one, but you too must suffer and often die. This is so your character can have “something to do” (Battlestar Galactica, ER). Real life is much more complicated...Mind you—I don’t think the media does justice to men either.

 

How do you feel about media's portrayal of women?

Thanks for tagging along with me during this journey! Self-reflection is an ongoing process, but you have to start somewhere.

See all Inner Mean Girl cleanse posts here.


Disclosure: I am receiving a thank-you gift for participating in this project.

Inner Mean Girl Cleanse: Judge Judy

We all do it, whether we're conscious of it or not: we judge people. Silently, in thoughts that we quickly push away, in backhanded compliments that slip out of our mouths too quickly, or in heated arguments, quite blatantly. The Inner Mean Girl Cleanse asks, "Who do you judge the most?" I think judgment comes from two places: jealousy, and moral/political disagreement. We may judge someone for wearing something or acting in a certain way, only because we're jealous that we don't have the courage to do the things they do, or the confidence to put ourselves out there so boldly. We may judge someone because they have religious or political convictions that are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from us, and we are frustrated that they can't see things the way we do. If I couldn't overcome political disagreements, I wouldn't be able to talk to my family (I represent the Rachel Maddow school of thought, and my parents prefer Fox News). To overcome these differences and focus on our relationship, we each have to ease our judgments of the other. When my family and I got into a heated debate about abortion around last year's health care talks, I stopped to ask my dad if he still thought I was a good, moral person, even though I was pro-choice. "Well, yes, you are," he said. "I still love you even though you're a liberal." And I still love him even though I refuse to watch Hannity with him. It's a give and take.

Jon Stewart said the same the other night at a talk in New York, that people can be opponents, but they don't have to be enemies. In fact, discourse between two opposing sides may actually help to move things forward. I was reminded of this at a conference I attended last weekend, where we were asked to both speak and listen to others on a given topic, then think about what we agree and disagree with, and where we might begin a conversation from common ground. The old adage in activism is to "meet people where they are." If we can stop judging others for not being like us or not believing in the things we do, we can work from what shared community we do have, and focus on solving problems, rather than exacerbating them.

Who do you judge? How do you think we might best work away from judgment?

See all Inner Mean Girl cleanse posts here.


Disclosure: I am receiving a thank-you gift for participating in this project.