This conversation with Jennifer Siebel Newsom actually began three years ago when I saw her documentary Miss Representation, about media’s manipulation of images of women. I was quite familiar with that topic already as a member of the media myself, but Miss Representation gave me a language with which to address it more directly and ask the questions of myself that were still bothering me.
Newsom is back at Sundance with a follow-up film from her Representation Project. The Mask You Live In tackles images of masculinity being sold to young boys and men. These include athletic prowess, sexual conquest, economic prosperity and some really violent aggressive tendencies. Fortunately she has many subjects who show that a lot of men don’t want to be that way and offer alternatives to developing better ideas of manhood.
I met up with Newsom on Main Street in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival co-op for a conversation about masculinity and the media from back on Miss Representation. I was very inspired that she called me a man of consciousness, which is what I hope to be and continue this conversation in the future.
CraveOnline: First a question about Miss Representation. I always knew I didn’t like the image I was being sold and I felt like I wanted to tell the non-“Media approved” women that I think they’re beautiful too. But then am I part of the problem because they don’t need my approval and I should be talking about the entirety of them and not just how they look?
Jennifer Siebel Newsom: You know what though? I think that’s so generous and beautiful of you and I actually feel like the whole of each of us, we want to feel attractive and to a certain extent appeasing, appealing to others, but yes. Predominantly we have to re-envision what it is to be a woman and it has to be about more than our appearance, our facade. It has to be about our hearts, our soul, our intelligence, our talents, our skill set, right?
So I think celebrating all of that together is really the end goal. But by you celebrating what makes each woman beautiful, which is really her inner soul, right? Maybe it’s her nose or a freckle or a dimple or whatever it is, dimples in her thighs, whatever it is, something about her, I think that’s really special.
“They’re all being fed these limiting notions and yet so many young boys are saying, ‘I’m not ready for it.'”
Boy, you really do know me already.
[Laughs.] Maybe it’s that freckle on her toe.
It does tie into The Mask You Live In because I don’t want to objectify women, and I feel like I’m being asked to all the time.
Sure, yeah. So there are kind of three lies that boys and men are fed. One is that your value lies in some kind of athletic skill set. The other is that your value lies in your economic success, and the third is really that your value lies in conquest and in dominating and being aggressive and owning women to a certain extent.
So yes, that unhealthy limiting narrative is being fed to boys and men and it’s so confusing, and it’s so unfair because we’ve interviewed young boys in their middle school years who are saying, “Hang on a second, too much, too soon, too fast. You all are throwing this stuff at us,” whether it’s in violent video games because of how violent video games often objectify and demean and degrade women and girls, and limit them to being objects.
Or if it’s, because we don’t have sex ed in the majority of our schools, in pornography which boys can’t help but be exposed to when they’re just surfing the internet. So they’re all being fed these limiting notions and yet so many young boys are saying, “I’m not ready for it.”
