28. At Seventeen – Janis Ian 1975

  

To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball

 

Many moons ago when I was seventeen my favourite subject at school was media studies. I loved learning about how the media can be used to communicate broader stories, how the media boils down these stories and, more generally, how it is a lens to society and culture.

That said, at one stage I found myself watching a group of my female classmates presenting on the portrayal of women in the media. Supermodel @NaomiCampbell’s appearance in the film clip for @michaeljackson’s In the Closet was held up as their great example of the objectification of women in the media and the unrealistic images that girls have to aspire to. To try to drive their message home, the group had plastered the walls of our media room with pages, mainly advertisements, ripped out of women’s magazines featuring, apparently, unrealistic images of women.

Now, yes, Naomi Campbell is an exceptionally good looking chick. That’s why she was able to make a career as a supermodel. And yes, she does have exceptionally long, lean and shapely legs. Some people are lucky enough to be gifted features like this through their genes. But the same chicks that were bleating about the unrealistic expectations put on females through the media were the ones that were buying fashion magazines and looking down on me because I was, and still am, a tomboy that didn’t bother to try to conform to these expectations.

This left me thinking, even at seventeen, that sometimes we have to take responsibility for what we buy into. That said, by the late 1990s I was heavily invested in the show Sex and the City. I loved the depiction of women as strong, independent and funny characters, but really struggled with their infatuation with such superficial and cliché things as shoes and fashion. Now there’s the hope of the new show, Run the World. No, I haven’t seen this show yet, but it’s meant to be a more mature Sex and the City. Mature as in women getting shit done, rather than fixating on males and fashion.

More recently I’ve watched the movie Walk of Shame. After watching this pretty funny movie I googled it and found that it was widely panned by critics for being misogynistic.

Did the critics even watch the end of the movie?

When I watched it I thought it was a funny take on what ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ has to go through just to get home or to work. Clearly, the critics don’t recognise what most women have to put up with in certain situations, or bothered to watch the end of the movie when the main character refuses to apologise for her actions or experiences.

One other observation of women in the media relates to the side-splitting show Shameless. This show gets me laughing every time, but the actress that plays the female lead, @emmyrossum, has to get her tits out every second episode and has more on-air time than the male lead, @WilliamHMacy. Then it turns out Emmy Rossum was paid less for her efforts than William H. Macy, until she took the show’s producers to task on it.

By the way, back when I was seventeen, for all my classmate’s bleating about how thin Naomi Campbell was and the other unrealistic images they were being confronted with, it was them that were supporting this image of women by buying the magazines, not me. Additionally, Michael Jackson looked just as thin and a lot more sickly. No mention was made of his appearances though . . .

 

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=JU3-vNfIM5w&list=RDAMVMJU3-vNfIM5w