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.