Family Moab

Family Moab
In Arches National Park

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Miss Representation

I saw the documentary "Miss Representation" (www.missrepresentation.org) on Saturday. It's fortunate that I went with a group of fifteen strong, well-educated women, and came home to an emotionally intelligent and receptive husband or I might well have drifted into media-induced depression. Consider the following:

- "In a climate of a 24-hour media cycle and the proliferation of infotainment and reality TV, media has become the predominant communicator of cultural values and gender norms"
- "An individual's brain does not fully develop until the age of 24, which means our children and our young adults are our most vulnerable class of citizens"
- "Reality TV portrays women as catty, manipulative, vindictive and on display for male judgment and objectification"
- "Through media and advertising, boys get the message that they should be violent, in control, unemotional, and that women should be treated like objects and second class citizens." (All statistics from Miss Representation talking points, on the website)

The film highlighted many disturbing clips from reality TV shows and commercials that are readily available day and night on any mainstream channel. My friends and I cringed away from half-naked women in catfights and digitally enhanced (or reduced) images of young people; if we had a choice we would have changed the channel. Yet our brains developed under the influence of vastly different media. When I was young we had three channels, no TV remote, and a sacred "family hour" of viewing when the networks agreed to show only child-friendly material and commercials. These are long gone. If our children develop under the exposure of reality TV and digitally-altered everything, will their brains even know to cringe?

According to the folks at Miss Representation, kids and young adults watch more than 10 hours of media each day. Their world is defined by what they see, hear, and discuss with their peer group. How can young men and women find healthy role models and avenues to growth and development among the images that exist today? They can't.

My impulse is to turn off or get rid of the television - for good. But that solution won't fly in my family, and ultimately would not prepare our children for integration with their culture. Instead, I watch certain (carefully selected) shows with my older children and pause the DVR to discuss the characters of young men and women portrayed.  Thank goodness I can also use my DVR to fast-forward the commercials. We talk to the kids about how the goal of every advertiser and TV show is to influence them, primarily to buy certain commodities (clothes, makeup, shoes, music, etc.) - and make a lot of money.

We can also tell stories about strong women and emotionally - savvy men, both genders in three dimensions rather than stereotypes. We can focus on social justice rather than sexuality and wise choices rather than weight. We can work together with friends and neighbors to support good media with our words and our buying choices and to boycott bad movies, video games and TV shows. We have the power to fight back and create a better world for our boys and our girls, we just need to chuck the remote and represent the way life truly is.


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