Only minutes into it and I was crying. My tears brought on by a teenage girl who criticized the media for its part in teaching young women to hate their body. She mentioned her sister who cut herself as a result of her insecurities about the way she looked. I have two sisters of my own that I love very much, and I don't know what I would do if one of them began hacking away at her flesh because she didn't like the way she looked. And so the tears silently flowed.
I watched as the documentary took a political twist, showing clips from major news networks whose male anchors had a lot of fun berating female public figures who were running for public office. I was shocked to hear many of their comments geared negatively at the physical appearance of these women; criticizing their hair, their face and their body, and even making sexual innuendos. It all seemed so grossly inappropriate and irrelevant.And there were the hot bodies. The women whose perfect breasts and perfect skin and perfect vagina and perfect hair and perfect legs and perfect everything have the rest of us swooning to look exactly like them. The problem is, the people we aspire to be don't even exist; they've all been either graphically enhanced or their body has been hacked at by plastic surgeons. Although some of us have been genetically blessed with great bodies, even those bodies have their flaws and real women all have a few scraches here and there.
Unfortunately, this doesn't deter us from trying to live up to ridiculously elevated standards of beauty.
And I cringed at the part where little toddlers are dressed up like miniature versions of Dolly Parton and sent to model and pose on a stage, in front of judges who will tell them that they aren't good enough to be this year's prettiest little princess.
The backlash to all this isn't just a generation of appearance obsessed females but also confused males who begin to believe that all women actually look like the graphically enhanced and plastic plastered poster girls that the rest of us are dying to be. And so the pressure is on, the hot poker even hotter, when men begin to expect a fallacy to be a reality.
And the documentary touched on what I call woman on woman combat where we bash each other instead of support each other. We choose cat fights over girls nights and unnecessary female criticism over female appreciation. One woman's flattering appearance is enough to bring down the gods of war and fury, and ashamedly, it's our own fault that our daughters are so messed up.
And of course, there's the man on woman war; the glass ceiling that's still very much intact although some men would like to fool us into believing otherwise. The statistics in this documentary were overwhelming. I couldn't have imagined that in large, modern media corporations that dominate the media waves, women take up only two seats on a board, versus men who take up thirteen. I had to agree with the women who were interviewed for this documentary that said the female interest isn't represented during the decision making process that carries on in media houses.
So if the female interest isn't present, does it mean that men in top, key positions are the ones responsible for the damaging advertisements that reach young girls and women, young boys and men? The numbers aren't lying people.
I'd like to have a daughter one day, but I'm more scared than ever to get pregnant. How am I supposed to protect her from all this and raise her to appreciate herself as a intelligent individual who's worth more than what the media shows her? And how am I supposed to explain a woman's worth to my potential future son when he will be surrounded by false portrayals of women, regardless of whether or not there's a TV or fashion magazines in our home?
Moreover, how am I supposed to save myself from the falsehoods that have already been ingrained into my brain...
Some men considered this documentary to be just another man-bashing production. Others have said that women will never be equal to men in the fight for gender equality simply because men are built physically stronger than women. I disagree with both statements and my question to the second is, why does it always have to go there? Why is it always the "I'm stronger than you so I rule the world" argument?
It's one loaf of bread, why can't we break it in half and share it...
Like I said at the beginning of this blog, the documentary was a lot more detailed than what I'm able to comment on here. Search for it and see for yourself.
Here's the official trailer:
