Miss Representation

Mitchell: The media is the message and the messenger

and, increasingly, a powerful one.

Katz: People learn more from media

than any other single source of information,

so if we want to understand

what's going on in our society in the 21st century,

we have to understand media.

Steyer: If you think about media and technology,

they're delivering content that is shaping our society.

They're shaping our politics.

They're shaping our national discourse.

And most of all, they're shaping

our children's brains and lives and emotions.

Mayer: We estimate that there's somewhere north

of a billion people who use the internet every single day.

That's just a reach that hasn't existed before

in terms of media.

Steyer: Our kids today live on Facebook and cellphones.

The diversity of the platforms means

that those images are impacting your kid 2417

and whatever restrictions existed when we were growing up

simply don't exist today.

Kilbourne: Girls get the message from very early on

that what's most important is how they look,

that their value, their worth, depends on that.

And boys get the message

that this is what's important about girls.

We get it from advertising. We get it from films.

We get it from television shows, video games, everywhere we look.

So, no matter what else a woman does,

now matter what else her achievements,

their value still depends on how they look.

There is no appreciation for women intellectuals.

It's all about the body, not about the brain.

You all saw the famous photo from the weekend

of Hillary looking so haggard

and, what, looking like 92 years old.

Breast implants... did you have them or not'?

Because that's all over the internet about you

in mainstream media.

I think if you waterboarded Nancy Pelosi,

she wouldn't admit to plastic surgery.

Pozner: The fact that media are so limiting and so derogatory

to the most powerful women in the country,

then what does it say about media's ability

to take any woman in america seriously'?

The media treats women like shit,

and it's horrible, and it's, like...

I don't know how we survive it

I don't know how we rise above it.

[Metric's "Help I'm Alive" plays]

Captions paid for by Discovery Communications.

Siebel Newsom: There are moments in life

when you begin to see things more clearly.

When I found out I was pregnant with a girl,

everything came into focus.

But I looked around me,

and I was really frightened for her.

I couldn't imagine that my daughter could grow up

to be emotionally healthy and fulfilled

given our modern culture.

So I'm compelled to make sense of all of this for her.

And I know I have to start by looking at my own life...

the mistakes I've made and the traps I've fallen into.

Because even though I've had many privileges,

I haven't been immune

to the damage our culture does to women and girls.

When I was a young girl,

I felt secure in my place in the world.

But as with most girls, things changed as I got older.

A few days before my 7th birthday,

my older sister Stacy died in an accident.

I blamed myself for her death,

and out of guilt and sadness,

I tried to be two daughters instead of one.

I channeled my pain

into excelling in sports and school.

But no matter how hard I tried I somehow felt inadequate.

I became increasingly susceptible to peer pressure

and the bombardment of media messages

telling me that being strong, smart, and accomplished

was not enough.

To be a woman meant constantly striving

for an unattainable ideal of beauty

and approval in the eyes of men.

So when a trusted peer and, later, a coach

preyed upon my vulnerability and violated me,

I was so frightened and ashamed I completely shut down.

My self-worth was at an all-time low

and I developed an eating disorder

that consumed two years of my life.

It took a lot of love and support

for me to find my strength again.

And although my experiences are unique,

my struggle is all too common.

It's always hard being a teenage girl,

but now the media disseminates

such limiting portrayals of women

and pervades every aspect of our culture.

Is it any wonder teen girls feel more powerless than ever'?

I want a different world

for my daughter and her generation.

But a lot has to change first.

We see so much in the media

that there's so much negativity towards women

and their weight and how they look,

and it's just a representation of the pressure we feel

to conform to man's ideals.

There's this concept of the perfect woman

who looks this certain way,

and because women may not look that way,

they're scrutinized.

I remember fifth grade, I was worrying about my weight.

And now I'm in ninth grade.

I'm still worrying about my weight.

Me being a small person,

like, at my old school, I was told to, like, go throw up

or, like, go eat a hamburger

because people thought I was like, anorexic or something.

So I would, like, eat a lot so that people would think

that I didn't have an eating disorder.

I straighten my hair just so I can fit in

when I have naturally curly hair.

I have close friends that, like, in between break periods,

they will go to the bathroom

and put on like 10 pounds of make-up

and, you know, comb their hair

and do all this pampering you know,

and you're at school to learn.

When is it gonna be enough'?

'Cause, you know, I have a younger sister, and, like.

She's like...

Kilbourne: The ideal image of beauty

is more extreme and impossible than ever before.

In the old days, the perfection was achieved

through cosmetics and airbrushing,

but now it's possible

for that image to be absolutely perfect

because of computers.

You never see the photograph of a woman considered beautiful

that hasn't been digitally altered

to make her absolutely, inhumanly perfect.

Girls are being encouraged to achieve that ideal

at younger and younger ages all the time.

They end up measuring themselves against an impossible standard

and feeling themselves wanting as a result of it.

Also, not surprisingly,

young men who are shown lots of photographs of supermodels

then judge real women much more harshly.

The most important thing to understand

about all of these images and how they affect us

is that the effect is primarily subconscious

and that it is very harmful

but that for the most part, we're not really aware of that,

which is why we need to pay conscious attention

to these images.

The average child develops over 18 to 24 years,

and full brain development doesn't really occur

until you're into your early 20s.

So the idea that kids at 8 or 10 or 15

have the same level

of intellectual and emotional maturity as an adult is nuts.

They have different interpretive abilities,

they have different emotional abilities,

and they're a much more vulnerable class in society.

I worry about, you know, how much pressure my daughters feel

in a society that features

anorexic actresses and models and television stars.

We get conditioned to think

this is what women should look like,

so even people of average weight and size

have body dysmorphic disorder.

When I did my first television show, "All-American Girl,"

which was the first Asian-American family show

on television,

I had a lot of problems with the network

because they were constantly telling me that I was too fat.

You know, I became very anorexic

trying to somehow keep this job that I really wanted to keep,

and they ended up canceling the television show,

and they replaced it with Drew Carey

'cause he's so thin.

An aspect of media-literacy education

that I think many people aren't aware of

is the whole political economy of the media.

Most media get their revenues from advertising, you know'?

So the non-advertising content of these media

has to support the advertising.