Writer/Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom, with Lisa Ling, Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem, and more....
As recently as Spring 2011 I was still teaching Composition at a state university. Over the ten plus years of developing my composition course a lot of things changed, including general characteristics, interests, and attitudes of students. It's with gladness I write here that increasingly young women developed astute awareness of the way that media bamboozles them with untenable images of the female body. I read many a composition in which young women students argued a connection between the way women are portrayed in the media and their friend's eating disorder.
The relatively recently released film documentary Miss Representation delivers both alarming statistics and thoughtful analysis of the media's objectification and hypersexualization of women's bodies, discussing both the personal and social consequences by taking the argument one step further to show how these portrayals dissuade girls and women with developing identities from becoming powerful people.
The documentary develops its thesis primarily through a mosaic of interviews with women well-known for their roles as feminist spokespersons, as well as with highly engaging young women, who through their participation in this film are launched toward becoming such spokespersons for their own generation.
If I were still teaching Composition I would not hesitate to show this film documentary as fodder for discussion and writing because I already know my students would find it interesting. (I have to admit I do sometimes miss teaching Composition, after all. Who would have thought it?)
For more about this film, follow this link
to the Web site for Missrepresentation.org's info about the film documentary of the same name.
