Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s new documentary Miss Representation is a head-on dissection of how the media systematically undermines women, presenting them as bimbos, bitches, or over-Botoxed harpies who fight each other for airtime on Bravo. Accomplished figures like Katie Couric, Margaret Cho, and Condoleezza Rice speak out on the matter, and now it’s our turn: We definitely agree that sometimes the media engages in some shady stuff to sell an agenda! In fact, one example of that might be Miss Representation’s own trailer, which pulls headlines from a New York Magazine article (“The ‘Bitch’ and the ‘Ditz’”) and a Daily Beast post (“Fat Judges Need Not Apply”) as evidence of the media acting “so derogatory to the most powerful women in the country” … despite the fact that both articles were actually criticizing derogatory, anti-feminist attitudes in a way that you’d expect Siebel Newsom to approve of. If the filmmaker is trying to make a point about judging women for more than just their looks, she might also want to delve beneath the surface – or even the headline – of some of the articles she’s taking to task. (And God knows, there’s plenty of real misogyny out there on the internet if she wants to take a second pass.) [Jezebel]
