The research for my documentary began by looking into studies that have been conducted about teenage girl’s self esteem and body issues. I found facts that spoke to why I wanted to pursue this subject further in a documentary. Low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders are the leading mental health problems facing girls while 54% of girls are worried about their appearance and 37% about their weight. Advertising is a large part of why girls are concerned with their appearance (which I will discuss further in the following paragraph) but scripted television also poses a problem. Women make up half of society but only 32% of the main characters on television are female while 1/3 of speaking roles in children’s movies are given to women. Even in the creative, fictional world of television women are restricted.
Set in daily life, advertising is perhaps the most blatantly negative area for women in media. A series of short documentaries by Jean Kilbourne titled Killing Us Softly (1 through 4) have been made in an attempt to bring attention to the ways in which women are portrayed in advertising. Below is a link to the trailer of Killing Us Softly and multiple short clips of the four films can be found on youtube. The structure of the series consists of Kilbourne giving lectures to a group of an unseen audience. Intercut with Kilbourne’s speech are images from advertisements that she speaks about specifically to make her points about the ways in which women are represented in media.
Kilbourne’s observations about the ads she discusses are detailed and go beyond the obvious messages of weight and beauty. One point she made that I found interesting were her observations about ads that on the surface discussed weight loss but underlying the straight-forward was the implication that women should not throw their weight around, as in their power as a person not just their physical body. The way in which advertisers push certain body images to girls while also encouraging them to take a docile behavior as compared to men stood out to me. I hope to present the material and physical concerns that the subjects in my documentary face while also going deeper into what underlies these concerns, having the girls examine why they make the choices they do in regards to their appearance.
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment