A lot has changed since 2011. The urgency of talking about the way women are represented in media, unfortunately, has not, according to Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
The documentary filmmaker and the current First Partner of California initially tackled the subject of media’s impact on the underrepresentation of women in positions of power in her 2011 documentary Miss Representation. Around 15 years later, she’s returning with a follow-up, Miss Representation: Rise Up, which chronicles how social-media platforms and AI tools are undercutting women and girls, enabling harassment and supercharging misogyny.
Like its predecessor, the film, which premieres in New York theaters on Thursday, with more screenings to come, enlists a series of high-powered female interviewees to make its point. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Amy Klobuchar, Jameela Jamil and Gretchen Carlson all make appearances. They show up in between footage showing young students speaking about the way social media has impacted them (“It makes me feel like, what is wrong with me?” asks one) and showing female candidates describing online abuse and harassment in political races. Victoria Hinks, the mother of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after Hinks says she became addicted to social media, also speaks for the film.
Siebel Newsom said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that tech titans need to be held accountable for the harm occurring to women and girls with their tools. “The fact of the matter is we’ve let these guys go unregulated for too long, and they’ve prioritized profit over the health and wellbeing of not just women and girls, but any vulnerable population,” Siebel Newsom said. “And they’ve exploited women and girls for profit. We are the product, and they’ve done this intentionally.”
Newsom also discussed how her personal experiences as a high-profile woman and mother shaped the film and the solutions she believes are most promising to helping women feel more secure online. And she offered her thoughts on the ongoing controversy over an alleged gang rape at Cornell University.
Miss Representation was first released in released in 2011. Why did you decide it was time for a follow-up?
To be honest, I hoped I never had to make a follow-up. I hoped because of the incredible reception of Miss Representation with lines outside the door at Sundance Film Festival and standing room-only audiences, and then a sale to Oprah Winfrey Network, and again, TV broadcast and big screenings around the world, I thought, okay, we’re making progress. This film is really going to do its work in the world. And it did. We started to see more and more women aspiring towards leadership and running for elected office and becoming leaders in the C-suite. And then we elected Donald Trump in 2016 and normalized rape culture. And we started to see the rollback of Roe v. Wade and the ascension of the manosphere online and then Trump 2.0 and more women’s rights rolled back and a devaluation of research on women’s health and anything having to do with women and gender. And then we had the CDC study that came out and proved that after the advent of the “like” button in around 2011 with Facebook online, that girls were persistently feeling sadness and hopeless at a rate of 57 percent and that one in three seriously considered suicide and that 99 percent of deepfakes were targeting women and girls, 96 percent of them non-consensual deepfake pornography. And so all of this combined, and always me leaning into both cultural issues and policy issues with a mother’s frame and perspective, I knew that we had to make Miss Representation: Rise Up.
It’s not an easy time for social-issue documentaries to receive funding, so how did you fund this one?
The truth is when I made Miss Representation, my first documentary, there must have been 500 people that contributed individually to that film. I had seed money from one funder, and then I went on the road hosting little house parties and would raise $2,500, $1,500, $15,000, $2,000. And it was crazy, but I’d never directed a documentary before and so I really involved these house parties in the whole process. With Miss Representation: Rise Up, I went back to some of the initial supporters, but by this time there were more women with some means in the documentary realm. And I just think they all really recognized that we had a responsibility to correct this inequity and this backslide that has been happening at scale, and again, at an unprecedented rate because of technology.
In your director’s statement, you pointed to personal experiences that led you to tell this story as a visible woman with a voice online and a mother of two daughters. How did those experiences shape how you told this story?
I read a Rumi poem this morning called “The Guest House,” and I think I’ve come to learn in life sometimes the hard way that experiences that I have or that people close to me have, you don’t have to get stuck in the negative or the pain or the suffering, that you can turn this into light and into hope and into change. That’s what I take from that in particular. And I would say that that’s kind of what spurs so much of my work. Also with a real understanding that girls and women are the backbones not just of our families, but our communities and our democracy. And so I think for me, just witnessing the rollback of women’s mental health, our safety and our political power alongside the increasing attacks on our democracy really raised the stakes for me in terms of technology’s role in diminishing women’s power and technology’s role really in silencing our voices. Our voices are critical in a thriving democracy. So I would say that is a large part of why this film became so urgent and necessary to make.
And it was personal because of stuff that has happened to my own children, but it was professional in the sense that I care about our country and I love women so much, and I just am so inspired by feminine leadership and what’s possible when we have more of the feminine at the tables of power. And it’s not to replace [men], I just think, and I’ve always felt this way, that we need to represent our population. The point is our voices have not been in leadership and we find ourselves in crisis after crisis after crisis, not just in this country, but around the world. And the fact that our democracy is so fragile and that we’ve got a climate crisis, a global war and global unrest, a political divide like we’ve never seen before, skyrocketing rates of suicidal ideation, anxiety and depression and then, what am I missing? Did I say wealth inequality?
No, you did not.
Tremendous wealth and equality, worse than it’s ever been. For me, women wouldn’t have allowed us to get to this place if we had more women in leadership or more of the feminine. I do believe that there are incredible men that embody the feminine or value the feminine, but there’s nothing like having just four moms in a room who are invested in a sustainable future, not just for their own children, but everyone’s children.
The film touches on the difficulties of being an aspiring female politician today. You’ve had a backstage pass to the political process as the First Partner of California. Have you seen firsthand certain female lawmakers deciding not to run for reelection or potentially promising candidates deciding not to run at all because of these online pressures?
Yes, I have seen it personally, and politics really takes a toll on the individual. It takes a toll on the family. It is not always kind to women. It’s increasingly unkind to people that care about people or people that are doing, I would say, the right thing. We’re such an individualistic society, and I think the current administration in particular has doubled down on individualism and the “me, me, me” culture. And we have to get back to the “we” culture where we recognize that individuals have a personal role and responsibility in their own success, but we also recognize that we’re nothing without each other and that we’re all connected, and there’s no leak on, as my husband likes to say, on your side of our boat. There needs to be a balance between the individual and the collective, and we’re really missing the collective.
A number of women explain potential solutions to the problems outlined in the film, like the repeal of Section 230 or social media companies reporting to a nonpartisan regulator. Which were most compelling or promising to you?
Well, look, I am proud of the work that we’re doing in California, which is not just leading the nation, but leading the world in holding tech titans accountable. But obviously we need to do more at the federal level because what you have then is this individual tech titan saying they’re just going to move to another state. They’re full of threats and they have a lot of wealth, and so they can play games. They often forget that they built their wealth off of many of the regulations and the tax breaks or tax incentives that we provided in California. I included those different lines in the documentary because we need more transparency and we need more accountability, period. And sometimes accountability requires the person at the top to be financially accountable. Sometimes it just requires that there be this outside entity or body that has a look into that black box to create more transparency. But the fact of the matter is we’ve let these guys go unregulated for too long, and they’ve prioritized profit over the health and wellbeing of not just women and girls, but any vulnerable population. And they’ve exploited women and girls for profit. We are the product, and they’ve done this intentionally.
As this film is preparing its release, the story of an alleged gang rape at Cornell University is exploding and involving all sorts of issues this film touches on. Have you been following that case and what lens do you have on it, having worked on this film?
I have been loosely following it and it’s been very disturbing, mostly because I have two boys and two girls, and I know that what’s happened at Cornell is not unique to Cornell. I know that this has been going on and happening around the world, and it happens in fraternities across our country. And what’s most disturbing to me is that we have come to a place where the highest leader in our country has normalized rape culture, not just in his office, but in other offices or appointments, whether they’re affiliated with Epstein or affiliated with their own darkness and bad male behavior. And so what I get upset about is that of course our young men think that this is acceptable behavior because they’re seeing it online with the Tate brothers and the manosphere online, and then they’re seeing it in the highest offices in our country.
I don’t know if you know this, but I was an executive producer on The Hunting Ground, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s documentary. And so I also thought we’d made all this progress with that film and also with The Invisible War and then On the Record. But all three of those big industries continue to see harm done to women. And again, the current administration says that’s fine and scoffs at it, laughs at it, in fact makes it worse. [That’s] why we need to make sure we have healthier role models in leadership and why it’s also critical that men aren’t bystanders and that they speak up and out and hold other men and other young men accountable when these sorts of things happen.
You mentioned you’re working on some other films in different stages of the process. What’s next for you as a filmmaker?
I’m looking at climate and feminism and also masculinities and what’s going on in the manosphere. And then I’m looking at some scripted biopics because I just am really inspired by uplifting women’s stories. I feel like we need hope and inspiration, and there’s so many incredible people doing wonderful things in the world, and so I just want to shed a light on their stories and inspire future generations through their stories and through storytelling. And so I think I’ll just figure out what’s next, but have a few things going at the same time, as I typically do.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.