MAD ABOUT SEX-ISM: “Miss Representation” docu stirs the cauldron
The flyer touted a “highly acclaimed film” showing midweek at the community college cafeteria –a documentary made in 2011 by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California’s Attorney General, Gavin Newsom. The free screening of “Miss Representation” would focus attention on the “media’s disparaging portrayals” of women that “negatively affect [feminine] self esteem,” contributing to the startling “under-representation of women leaders.” Over half of our population is female; but the U.S. ranked ninetieth worldwide in putting women into positions of leadership and power. I had to be there.
We were a SRO audience of a few salt-and-pepperheads bobbing in a sea of young students, all primed for gaining perspective about the daily inundations of media images we’re accustomed to viewing. Teens reportedly spend nearly eleven bombarding hours a day, including countless portrayals of females being judged primarily on physical appearance. Conversely, males are portrayed as assuming or retaining power and status positions in virtually every walk of life.
The statistical results are stunning, the huge rise in teen girls’ depressive or suicidal thoughts, instances of self mutilation — “cutting”– whatever might give expression to the pain of being rejected, teased, taunted, branded as ugly or just-not-sexy-enough. The images of little beauty pageant girls parading their sexily clad bodies, faces caked with make-up are bone-chilling.
I remembered having seen the movie “My Week With Marilyn.” Marilyn Monroe, nee Norma Jean Baker, was so early and fatally wounded by believing herself unattractive and unworthy of love. How often in America are those two judgments linked? Being deemed an unattractive female, you’re apt to be treated as worth-less.
I flashed back to my own Kansas childhood in the 50s, ashamed of my tell-tale Jewish nose. Years later a show biz agent pronounced me as “too ethnic looking” for modeling, even as I was pressured to appear sexy over being smart. As a featured Nevada casino lounge singer, the more flesh revealed, the higher my pay. But I was cautioned not to “sing too well,” distracting gamblers from the money tables. Being eye candy was my task, along with allowing entertainment industry big and small-wigs to claim the right to inappropriately suggest sex in exchange for vocational opportunities. My only power seemed to be to attract –and simultaneously safely repel these unwanted attentions –without angering the men. I felt like a dirty secret, confused, vulnerable.
Media images on the JC cafeteria screen were stirring everything up: pop song divas competing with obliging bumps and grinds; bustier–bursting bubble-head, TV blondes selling beer, burgers and beauty products; and a video of a headless woman lying on her back on the floor, undulating salaciously as a pack of macho males teased dollar bills over her crotch.
I shuddered, flashing back to ’79, my year of performing in Hong Kong. It was both exciting (gigs, photo-shoots, attention) and scary: after a late-night gig at the swanky Hyatt, I was nearly raped by a wealthy clothier customer. “Peter” (appropriately named) was staying in “the presidential suite,” insisting that I come see it. Blind to the glaring red light going off as bodily instinct to danger, I tried to be pleasing. Wasn’t this what “nice” girls do to win male favor or protection? But Peter, accustomed to patriarchal privilege, had learned that females were status props, objects to use. Like the images of women and girls streaming from Newsom’s film, I’d had no idea how to clearly take my power and “just say no” to his invitations. I wound up shoved onto the designer, king-sized bed, my clothes stripped off, pinned down with a pillow over my head. Five hours later, managing an exit, I heard my tormenter suggest, “Lunch sometime next week?”
“Miss Representation” was triggering my most secret history: molestations, suicidal depressions, years of eating disorderliness, intimacy and power issues, hyper-vigilance towards maintaining my perceived high school-aged “perfect weight.” How sad that today’s troubling statistics report that by the age of thirteen, 53% of U.S. girls dislike their bodies and looks, increasing to 78% by the age of seventeen. It’s rare to feel naturally good in the body our Maker Made. And what of “the Lolita effect” with 20% of girls aged fourteen already sexually active as they seek peer approval? Girls modeling their look on provocative, digitally-altered images of “perfect-looking” celebs? Surely there’s a fine line between celebrating our sex by adorning ourselves and enhancing our features –and “enhancement” choices made from unwholesome social, peer or parental pressures. How do we discern between what honors the unique beauty of each feminine person, and what is a sick kind of cover-up which demeans us. When is it sacred, when is it porn?
My own healing journey led me away from a full- time entertainment industry career, to a healing artist’s role in which I am able to help women –and men — accept and embrace themselves. Men and boys, too, are injured from cultural stereotyping of females as “sex objects.” When females are considered and treated as second class citizens, lacking empowerment, how can anybody have fulfilling relationships, which by definition, require respectful equality in personal value? Today’s imbalanced patriarchy continues to conspire to control half the population, question women’s rights to choose what happens to their own bodies, deny them power and leadership roles. It’s endemic, evidenced as both sexes continue to vote primarily for male over female candidates, even in middle school elections. Evidence of unconscious injury to our collective psyche.
In the Q&A after the screening, we the audience were asked for ideas about combating our nation’s male-owned and dominated media. Referring to an interview segment in the film, one young man argued that female newscasters are taken less seriously because of their provocative attire. It’s their fault, he argued — male newscasters don’t do that! He’d missed the point that the pressure on females to be sexy on camera is endemic, their jobs put on the line to keep up this questionable industry standard. It’s a daunting task for each of us individually to wake up to the media’s role in perpetuating harmful myths and stereotypes, and choose instead to forge paths to sanity by examining what information and images we choose to take in. Along the way, perhaps we’ll find more kindness and compassion towards the loved-able girls and boys, women and men that we truly are.
