How Does the Media Influence Women and Men?

      In class, we watched a documentary called Miss Representation, which focuses on how women are represented in the media and its effects on them. It says that the media teaches girls and women that the most important thing about them is the way they look. Everything revolves around the way they look. The media sets unrealistic expectations of how they should look by photoshopping and digitally altering pictures of women on magazines and on social media. They do this to promote the idea that women should be tall and skinny to be considered beautiful. This teaches girls that if they do not look this way, they are not beautiful. As a result, they become self-conscious about how they look and become vulnerable to objectification, both from others and themselves. People begin to believe that a woman's sole purpose is to just stand around and look pretty, and this expectation has damaged women's representation in positions of power and in prominence in places like Hollywood or other media outlets. The documentary didn't focus a whole lot on the media's effect on men, but it did touch on it. It said that boys are taught from a very young age to be very masculine and to suppress their emotions. They said that men suppressing their emotions combined with the objectification of women leads to violence against women. Overall, the message of the video was that the media heavily influences the way people see themselves and they way they act, usually for the negative. It is our job to ignore and see past these forced messages and just exist as we want to, without anybody telling us how to do so.