Last Night
Last Night: Missrepresentation
Missrepresentation, a new documentary by actress, activist, and wife of former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom Jennifer Siebel Newsom that sold out the Uptown Theater on Queen Anne Wednesday night, is an unflinching, if somewhat elementary, look at the underrepresentation of women in positions of power and their often demeaning portrayal by the media.[pullquote]It's all a little feminism-101, if you ask me, but maybe that's still---or even increasingly---necessary.[/pullquote]
Inspired by Newsom's anxiety about bringing a baby girl into a world polluted by toxic images of women (and her own experience with anorexia and, later, trying to get "multidimensional" roles as an actress in Hollywood), Missrepresentation juxtaposes interviews with feminist scholars, entertainment and news celebrities, and political figures with footage culled from reality TV, music videos, TV news, and commercials.
Interspersed throughout the film are slick black-on-white illustrations of stark, if not surprising, statistics: Seventy-eight percent of 15-year-old girls say they hate their bodies. Sixty-five percent of girls have an eating disorder. Seventeen percent cut themselves. Women make up 51 percent of the population, but only 17 percent of Congress, 13 percent of film writers, 7 percent of directors, and 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. The US ranks 90th in the world in the number of women in elected office. At the rate at which women are gaining positions in government, we won't achieve parity for 500 years.
Newsom gathered an impressive roster of folks, famous and obscure, to talk about the challenge that face women and girls from the small stage of junior high school all the way to the huge arena of a presidential campaign: From Jane Fonda, Condoleezza Rice, Katie Couric, and Gloria Steinem to a group of high-school boys and girls who talk about the pressures they feel to conform to limiting gender norms.
Although the big-name appearances give the movie heft (Margaret Cho's comment, "The media treat women like shit!", is delivered with such candor you want to cheer), the interviews with kids give it gravitas.
"I straighten my hair to fit in," one girl says.
"My little sister cuts herself because she doesn't have a perfect body," another chimes in.
"I have close friends that go to the bathroom [between classes] and put on, like, ten pounds of makeup" to impress boys, another says.
It's all a little feminism-101, if you ask me, but maybe that's still---or even increasingly---necessary in a world where girls are taught that women should aspire to be sexual objects, not leaders, practically from the moment they begin to talk. In fact, girls (and boys) might be the ideal audience for Missrepresentation, whose basic lesson---sexualizing and devaluing women and girls renders half the population invisible---is the kind of thing kids should learn young, before they're bombarded with images of Botoxed reality TV stars, porn that sexualizes violence against women, and TV pundits who scrutinize every aspect of female leaders' appearance, whether they're "sexy" Sarah Palin or "haggard" Hillary Clinton.
Two final quibbles: Newsom's voiceovers, delivered in a flat California intonation, distract from the story---particularly when she's narrating scenes of herself staring dreamily up into sun-dappled trees.
And the emphasis on women's responsibility for fixing the problem misses a major opportunity. Instead of telling women they should work harder and stop being so mean to each other Missrepresentation could have chosen to focus instead on the need for institutional changes, as well as on what men and boys can do to change the way womanhood is represented, perceived, and constricted.
Inspired by Newsom's anxiety about bringing a baby girl into a world polluted by toxic images of women (and her own experience with anorexia and, later, trying to get "multidimensional" roles as an actress in Hollywood), Missrepresentation juxtaposes interviews with feminist scholars, entertainment and news celebrities, and political figures with footage culled from reality TV, music videos, TV news, and commercials.
Interspersed throughout the film are slick black-on-white illustrations of stark, if not surprising, statistics: Seventy-eight percent of 15-year-old girls say they hate their bodies. Sixty-five percent of girls have an eating disorder. Seventeen percent cut themselves. Women make up 51 percent of the population, but only 17 percent of Congress, 13 percent of film writers, 7 percent of directors, and 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. The US ranks 90th in the world in the number of women in elected office. At the rate at which women are gaining positions in government, we won't achieve parity for 500 years.
Newsom gathered an impressive roster of folks, famous and obscure, to talk about the challenge that face women and girls from the small stage of junior high school all the way to the huge arena of a presidential campaign: From Jane Fonda, Condoleezza Rice, Katie Couric, and Gloria Steinem to a group of high-school boys and girls who talk about the pressures they feel to conform to limiting gender norms.
Although the big-name appearances give the movie heft (Margaret Cho's comment, "The media treat women like shit!", is delivered with such candor you want to cheer), the interviews with kids give it gravitas.
"I straighten my hair to fit in," one girl says.
"My little sister cuts herself because she doesn't have a perfect body," another chimes in.
"I have close friends that go to the bathroom [between classes] and put on, like, ten pounds of makeup" to impress boys, another says.
It's all a little feminism-101, if you ask me, but maybe that's still---or even increasingly---necessary in a world where girls are taught that women should aspire to be sexual objects, not leaders, practically from the moment they begin to talk. In fact, girls (and boys) might be the ideal audience for Missrepresentation, whose basic lesson---sexualizing and devaluing women and girls renders half the population invisible---is the kind of thing kids should learn young, before they're bombarded with images of Botoxed reality TV stars, porn that sexualizes violence against women, and TV pundits who scrutinize every aspect of female leaders' appearance, whether they're "sexy" Sarah Palin or "haggard" Hillary Clinton.
Two final quibbles: Newsom's voiceovers, delivered in a flat California intonation, distract from the story---particularly when she's narrating scenes of herself staring dreamily up into sun-dappled trees.
And the emphasis on women's responsibility for fixing the problem misses a major opportunity. Instead of telling women they should work harder and stop being so mean to each other Missrepresentation could have chosen to focus instead on the need for institutional changes, as well as on what men and boys can do to change the way womanhood is represented, perceived, and constricted.
