Miss Representation

Over the Spring Break, I watched the film Miss Representation. It is a documentary about the misrepresentation of women in the media. It shows how women are degraded, oversexualized, and have trivial depictions in common media. It shows the negative impact of the media's messages on women's attempts to get high political and business power. They cover points such as "53 percent of 13-year-old girls say they are unhappy with their bodies. When those girls reach age 17, 78 percent are unhappy with them", self-objectification, how only sixteen percent of main characters in movies are female (and most of these roles are stories about men's lives; the woman is seeking a male, the woman is taken down a peg or humiliated in some way), how powerful women are called "bitchy" or has sacrificed love and family for her career (and a male has to come and knock her down a peg).
What I find really appalling is that women in news have to extremely sexualized. They wear low cut shirts, or revealing skirts. (The scary thing is that when I searched for scantily clad news anchors, I got fewer results than when I searched female news anchors.)

These female news anchors are wearing tight-fitting clothing that reveals a lot of their bodies. This is really disgusting, especially for a news program... to deliver the news.
Another point that they bring up is that when women do not see themselves in the powerful position (like as someone with a high political or business standing), women do not even think to aspire to do those kinds of things. The documentary then went on to talk about how we are thirty-third out of forty-ninth in the world for female representation in government positions. Miss Representation is making the point that women have to see themselves in the media to feel empowered, but do the women in Iraq and Afghanistan see themselves in government positions in the media? I do not think so, but I also do not think that media plays such a big role in those countries as it does in America. Also, those are Muslim countries, and it is against their religion for women to be scantily clad. Their women cannot be objectified (as easily) as they can be in America.
Something needs to be done about the issue of women in government because it is severely affecting our legislature (birth control, abortion, etc...). Women should play a bigger role, if not the majority role of deciding things that specifically affect women, or just affect women.