Decoding Media’s Image of Women

Editor's Note: Teaching Tolerance launched a new series of lessons about Gender Expression for early grades. A featured lesson can be found here [2].

Recently I suspended a seventh-grade boy for publicly calling his former girlfriend a “slut” and a “whore.” Our rules on slurs are clear. But as I learned again, talking about something in class doesn’t always affect student behavior, especially if the unwanted behavior isn’t corrected or condemned outside of the classroom.

A couple days after the suspension, we watched the documentary [3]Miss Representation [3]. The film’s goal is to encourage students (K-college) to think critically about how women are represented in the media. The makers of the documentary suggest that the media is one of the most powerful forces shaping our children’s understanding of gender, especially since the average teen consumes more than 10 hours a day.

We started with a quick conversation defining media literacy and stereotype. We watched a 12-minute clip that contained many images of women: scantily clad dancers in hip hop videos, angry ladies from reality TV shows attacking each other and thin models lifted up by buff men. Spliced in were interviews of girls talking about eating disorders and female scholars pointing out the absurdity of these portrayals. We discussed how these images made us feel uncomfortable in the classroom even though they are rampant in everyday television, magazines and Internet sites.

Some statistics offered by the Miss Representation curriculum are alarming. In America, 25 percent of women are abused by a partner, 1 in 6 women have survived a rape or attempted rape and 15 percent of rape survivors are under the age of 12. Were my students able to see a connection between the media they consume so avidly and real-world violence?

We went on to make collages of magazine photos and talk about the lack of women in leadership roles in our country. After examining the way women are generally represented, it was easy to understand why. Looking around the room, I could also see some of my students begin to understand and question out loud why they had never noticed this before.

From the outside, the seventh-grader I had suspended seemed unmoved by this experience. I hoped he was able to make connections between what he saw that morning and what he had said several days before. For his sake, and for the sake of his future female partners, I hope it planted a seed of awareness.

Now that we’ve explored how negative stereotypes of women are formed, we can begin an ongoing process of questioning the destructive messages we ingest daily. While it may not completely counteract the power of popular culture, hopefully it will pave the way for healthier girls and healthier relationships.  

 Anderson is a middle school humanities and interdisciplinary studies teacher in Oregon.