1

Nadege Simon Semester Project Art and Women in Media Professor Cacoilo December 4, 2011

The Misrepresentation of Women The Miss Representation organization believes women and people in general should be equally represented in media and technology because these are two variables that shape our society. This campaign was created to raise awareness about the effects media has in our current societal views and how women in our society are portrayed and generalized. A film was created that educates and exposes how American youth are being sold the concept that women and girls value lies in their youth, beauty and sexuality. (MissReprentation.org) Many influential women from the past and present believe the portrayal of our sex has often been anything less than accurate. Similarly Bell Hooks used her cultural criticism to educate the men and women who ultimately play key roles in this ongoing false perception of women in art, media and throughout history. Annette Kuhn described this matter in The Power of The Image as the acts of analysis, of destruction and of reading against the grain offer an additional pleasure of resistance, of saying no: not to unsophisticated enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of culturally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways. The connection between media, art and women

to feminist and intellectual women lies on a common ground of inequality and ultimately misrepresentation. The Miss Representation film discusses the different types of media and the understanding that media communicates and teaches individuals ideas. The media can be held accountable for the value and worth of a woman to lie in their physical attributes rather than in their intellectual beings. It also shows the lack of appreciation and coverage of women intellectuals in our society. Girls often learn to see themselves as an object which leads to lower confidence, ambition and political ethics. In films women protagonist are rare, and when they do happen to land major roles their usually accommodated to revolve around a male character. The sexism in media has lead to women being sexual object of lust and desire for the male viewer. This concept of the male viewer and the woman object has been discussed by John Berger, he studied the nude and discovered They are evidence of gendered difference because any effort to replace the woman in these images with a man violates the assumptions of the likely viewer (Berger, 1972: 64). In art women are painted in either the nude or in a sense of being highly emotional which perpetuates a sense of weakness as oppose to a male object that is often portrayed as superior. Throughout history women have always been expected to be emotionally unstable despite their level of intelligence and power. For example, Hilary Clinton who holds power and intelligence hand in hand has been under major scrutiny of her ability to do her job based solely on her sex and dehumanized based on tradition and history. This scrutiny women have to endure has lead to a lack of women holding high position in politics, business and technological industries. This inequality among men and women has lead to symbolic alienation of women in our patriarchal society. The film also discusses the ability of the media to affect particularly the ways media affects women and girls ability to see themselves as leaders and be

seen as leaders by others in society. (MissRepresentation.org) The Miss Representation campaign also has a curriculum that educates the youth on media literacy and is used in many schools, colleges and universities. Art history concerns itself with the analysis of works of art; sexual difference has been shown to be inscribed in both the objects of its inquiry and in the terms in which they are interpreted and discussed (Chadwick,pg 9) dating back to the earliest stories of mankind, in the story of Adam and Eve , they are both naked but consequently after eating the apple "each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder." (Berger pg 48) Eve was blamed and made inferior to Adam while Adam became an agent of god. With this basis the male gaze was created, the male gaze is how men perceive women and how women perceive themselves. Men look at women as an object inferior to themselves, objects they have the right to survey before actually interacting with them. A woman being constantly surveyed has given them the mind set of constantly having to identify themselves by how she appears to others. Berger explains this as sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another." (Berger pg 46) The thought of women constantly surveying themselves is closely tied into present day media in which women read articles and magazines and see the portrayal of what is considered to be a perfect women and subsequently go out of their way some in minor and major ways to adjust themselves to this portrayal. In the Miss Representation film it was noted that The average facelift cost 11,429 dollars, thats enough to pay for five years at a community college, two years at a state university and one year at the University of California. This shows how women in our present society rather adjust themselves to look like the epitome of what a woman is based on what the media believes that to be. With that being said, it wouldnt

be a fallacy to say that media and technology shapes our societal views and the course of action each individual takes in order to meet the popular demands of the time. In our culture men look at women as objects of lust and desire while women look at other women as objects they may desire to be like. In The Oppositional Gaze bell hooks talks about the gaze from a black female spectators point of view. She speaks on the gaze regarding race and racism controversy, she notes Unless you went to work in the white world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at them on the screen." (Hooks pg 117) As a spectator viewing another race through a screen and analyzing the representation of stereotypical race domination of blacks by whites she found herself wrongly represented. In media the current depiction of women is false but the power of the media lies in the mind of the individual who lets these false perceptions misconstrue the meaning of themselves. As a woman it is easy to see many misrepresentations of yourself but like the goal of the Miss Representation organization woman have always been misrepresented, its up to the women in our society to educate ourselves about the inequality among us and the ability to change the mind frame of our society. Though women were oppressed and abused throughout history, intellectual and artistic women emerged. Women started finding ways to have their thoughts and illustrations noticed whether it was through a family of political idealist, a father painter or by becoming a Nun women have worked and are still working twice as hard as men to be recognized. the subject matter women artist portrayed varied but each woman showed her struggle in her own way ranging from self portraits, perfection of the formal Victorian era to wild horses and bulls. Women artist surpassed boundaries created by men and have made their own specific impact in art whether it was in the Middle ages, Victorian England or the modern world.