Women have been objectified in the media since time immemorial, being treated as mere sex symbols for the satisfaction of the male gaze. Cinematic pioneer Nina Menkes is actively addressing this problem through her groundbreaking documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. She joins Debra Graugnard to shed light on how A-list directors have been using the film industry to perpetuate a toxic environment where women are harassed, assaulted, and discriminated against, directly attacking their selfhood. Nina also talks about the profound repercussions of being trained to see oneself as an object, as well as why glamour is not about your external appearances. Discover how you are brainwashed by the media and use your dollars to make a real difference.
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Brainwashed: Fighting Against A Toxic Culture With Nina Menkes
Nina is considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers. Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals, including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes, Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, La Cinematheque Française, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Film Festival.
Menkes synthesizes inner dream worlds with harsh outer realities. She has been called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today” by the Los Angeles Times, and her body of work was described as “Controversial, intense and visually stunning” by Sight and Sound. Menkes has referred to herself as a witch, and Dennis Lim, writing in the New York Times, called her a Cinematic Sorceress.
Welcome, Nina. I am so excited to have you today and cannot wait to get into this conversation.
Hi everybody. Thanks for having me.
How The Film Industry Attacks Women’s Selfhood
Let me tell you and the people how I came across your work. I’ve published a book called Fear, Food, and Feminine Power. It is about how we feel so uncomfortable in our skin, self-soothed with food. We get caught up in the societal double-blind that brainwashes us into thinking that we need to look and act a certain way, which we cannot meet because we are too busy abusing our bodies and trying to hide our light because we feel so unsafe. It’s this whole thing.
I was reading my book as an audiobook to audiobook producer, Mark Shipman, who is married to someone who is in your film, Brainwashed. He said, “You’ve got to see this film.” I went and watched the film, and I came back for our next session and said, “I’ve got to rewrite the book.” What you do in here is you put a professional technical language around the things that I was attempting to express.
You and I are the same age. We were born in the same year, so I know we grew up at the same time. Film, commercials, the introduction of music videos, all of that had a detrimental impact, as you talk about in the film, on an attack on selfhood. That’s why I feel like everybody needs to see your film. I feel like it has only gotten worse since then. Maybe it has been a little bit of a roller coaster. With where we are, it’s like there’s always an attempt to one-up the previous version. Can you say more about the attack on selfhood?
Yes. I want to urge everyone who is tuning in to watch the film. It’s on the internet. It’s on Amazon. It’s on Kino Lorber. It’s not hard to find. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is the actual full title. It’s best to watch the movie because, as Debra said, we break it down in a very specific way what selfhood means, meaning being a subject and what it means to be an object.
A lot of people don’t know what it means. They have a general feeling. You hear the phrase the objectification of women, and women are made into objects. You hear these phrases, but you’re not sure what they exactly mean. You think maybe it means something about sexualizing or wearing skimpy clothes. Maybe that’s it. It’s both more complicated and less complicated than that. It’s less complicated because an object is not a thing so much as it is a position.
As we explain in the film, the easy way to start thinking about this is to take English grammar. It’s the same in any other language, but since we all speak English, let’s look at an English sentence. As I say in the film, “The cat sees the mouse.” In that sentence, and we probably learned this in third grade or something, the cat is a subject.
The cat is seeing, which is the verb, and then what the cat is seeing is the mouse. The mouse is the object. The cat, the subject, is doing something, which is seeing the mouse. In that sentence, we know what the cat is doing, and we know what the cat is seeing. It’s the mouse. We do not know what the mouse is feeling. We don’t know much about the mouse. The mouse is the object of the sentence.
If you put that into the relevant sentence here, which is the man sees the woman, the man is the subject, and he sees the woman. The woman is the object. That helps us understand that the difference between subject and object is a difference of power in that sentence. Who has the power in that situation? Who has acted upon, and who is powerless in that setup? It’s a setup, and it’s a setup that is reproduced so many kazillion times through visual language. This is what we show in the film. How do you take this sentence, “The man sees the woman.” That’s a sentence with words. How is that sentence reproduced ad nauseam through visual language?
That’s why you have to see the film to understand. Basically, it shows the perspective of the camera, lighting, blocking, arranging who is doing the looking and who is being looked at, and all of this stuff, and how that positions women again and again a gazillion times in the object position and not in the subject position. We take the next step, which is, what are the repercussions of this? What is the meaning of this? What are the implications of this?
How Sexual Discrimination In The Film Industry Translates To Corporate
You show four different techniques in the film. I don’t know if you call them techniques, excuse my lack of expertise there. From my layman’s terms, I would say there are four techniques that create the narrative position that produce the result that you want, which is that power-over. It does create that power-over dynamic. When you see it broken down like that, and that example that you show in the raging bull, it’s undeniable.
Go see the film because it’s an education. You can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. All of this stuff that is written into your psyche, and we’ll talk about the repercussions of it because it is monumental, it’s the things that you don’t recognize that get into your subconscious. It’s the way you think about yourself, the way you see yourself, and the way you desire to be seen.
The important thing to remember is that it’s not just the way that a great majority of men have been trained, as we’ve been trained, to see women in this way. We ourselves have been trained to see ourselves in this object position, too. It’s all unconscious training. No one says, “You have to do this.” Maybe there are even people who say very overtly, “Don’t interrupt. Don’t raise your voice. Let the guy be the one who leads the way,” and all of these kinds of things that we’re taught. Those are pretty overt. There’s also the subtle thing, which is that you’re not a full-on human subject. A full-on human subject gets to make decisions, gets to move in the world, and gets to have an action path, not just an acted-upon path.
A great majority of men have been unconsciously trained to see women as objects. Share on XYou show in the film also that triangle of the visual language of film, and then how that affects employment discrimination, the culture of sexual abuse and sexual harassment, and the rape culture that we have come to on so many levels. You also talk in the film about the sexual discrimination in the film industry and in Hollywood, but that translates to the corporate world. I came through Corporate America, and it creates this, “Don’t be a baby. Don’t be a crybaby. Don’t be a whiny person. Suck it up and prove yourself. Try as you may.” That discrimination that we’re taught to power through is still there.
Not only is it still there, but here in LA at USC, the University of Southern California, there is a famous film school. There’s also this Annenberg Center that does research out of the University of Southern California. For many years, they have been tracking statistics on women in the film industry. You can track statistics in other industries, not only film. As you pointed out, it’s everywhere. Annenberg tracks it in the film industry.
If you watch the film, you’ll also hear from a fantastic woman by the name of Maria Giese, who instigated a federal investigation into extreme sexism and hiring practices in the film industry. That is a whole long story in itself. The short form is that she did instigate this investigation, and they did find terrible discrimination. There were some secret deals made. No one ever knew because they wouldn’t go to court out in the open. There were some secret deals made between the federal government and studios to hire more women because they were way illegal in their sexist hiring practices. It wasn’t a thing.
Coming out of film school, 50/50 men and women, but hiring 7% women and 93% men. It was like, “What?” After that, there was a little blip where things got a little better for women. It also coincided with the #MeToo Movement. There was more awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t experienced it.
There was a little improvement, but Annenberg puts out a report every single year. They track statistics. In their report, which came out in December 2025, they said, “Whatever gains we got after the Maria Giese instigated investigation and all that have now reverted back. We’re back and worse. We’re worse than we were before.” Part of that is the administration, but not only because this has been going on for a very long time. It went on under all different kinds of administration.
The Repercussions Of Objectifying Women
Can we jump back to the repercussions? You started to talk about repercussions. If you’re reading this and you’re wondering, “That’s just the way it is,” one of the things that I heard from someone who has watched this film was, “The women want to be in those positions. Women like being like that.” I can’t speak for all of the women, but do they have a choice? Let’s talk about repercussions for the people in the position, as well as those who are being brainwashed.
It’s very often the same people who are being brainwashed and who are in positions. The repercussions are that you’re trained to be a subject. There are so many millions of examples that it’s hard to know where to start. When a man speaks up in a meeting, and he speaks strongly, and he voices a strong opinion about something, people think that that’s good leadership. A woman does the same thing, and it’s like, “She’s a troublemaker.” That’s one little example. Across the board, I doubt there’s a woman alive who hasn’t been on the receiving end of this.
One thing that comes up in this film that’s very important to clarify is that because of all of this brainwashing, it has become that to be sexy for a woman means being in the object position. It’s quite difficult to untangle. Some people will hear this and say, “You’re just against sex. You don’t like women to be sexy.” That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that women can also be sexual subjects. They don’t have to be sexual objects.
Because of media brainwashing, it has become hard for women to be sexy without being put in the object position. Share on XIt’s not against sex per se. It’s against the construction of sexuality through the media in a million ways, putting women in a powerless position, and having the powerless to be looked at in this position defined as sexiness. There are people who are intelligent, well-read, and well-educated who will watch Brainwashed and say, “You don’t like sex.” You missed the point. Sorry. That’s not what I’m saying. We’re saying that this position of object is disempowering, and it has terrible repercussions.
Have you ever seen a sex scene where there are two subjects? In the last twenty minutes of the film, we give a lot of examples of that. It’s not anti-sex. Sorry to state the extremely obvious, but believe me, intelligent people have made this remark. Any person who says that is so deeply brainwashed by the idea that the only way for a woman to be sexy is to be objectified, not understanding that that’s the problem. Sex is not the problem. The power relation is the problem.
I took a lot of notes, and then I had to go back and highlight them because I knew that I couldn’t get them all in. One of the things that you say in the film is that our power is associated with the power to attract the male gaze and how that seduces us ultimately into powerlessness.
That’s very tricky.
It’s very seductive and covert. There’s the big feminine power movement. What is divine power? What is feminine power? It gets so intertwined with being a sexual being, with having that power to attract. It makes your body. It makes your image about somebody else’s experience, other than your own.
You nailed it right there. Perfectly said.
Glamour Is Not About Your External Appearance
Your film conveys that beautifully. It also says, “Here’s how they’re doing it. Step one. Step two. Step three. Step four. Wake up.” I love it. You speak specifically about glamour. Can you talk about what you say about glamour?
The way that they seduce you into this powerlessness is primarily through the idea of glamour, or at least that’s one big way. It’s glamorous, or it’s sexy. If you define the object position as glamorous and sexy, then you have people saying, “I want that. I want to be sexy. I want to be glamorous.” Those are cover-up words. They’re a veil. They’re a cover-up for powerlessness. Another thing is people are like, “Are you saying don’t wear makeup?” It’s not about the external appearance. You wear makeup, or you don’t wear makeup. It’s about my experience as a human being. What do I feel in my body? Do I feel desire? Do I feel hatred? Do I feel powerless?
Glamour is not about external appearances but what they feel and experience as human beings. Share on XDo I feel like someone’s always looking, and I somehow have a responsibility to make their visual experience of me some experience for them?
It’s so upside down. It’s very confusing. Smart people have been confused by this. I strongly recommend everyone see the movie.
I’ve watched it more than once. Some of the things were like, “Oh my gosh,” so I had to go back and watch it again. I watched it with a friend because I wanted her reaction and her response. Some of the things that she responded to were like, “How is that better than that?” She was dealing with her own unraveling. That’s why you need to see it more than once. Initially, it’s in your face, the awakening of it, and then you have the unraveling. You can watch it objectively. Watch it three times.
I had a film critic. I’m talking about a very sophisticated film watcher. This is a person who has been watching films and writing about them professionally. A woman from Czechoslovakia saw the film at Sundance when it premiered there. She told me that she had to take a Valium after she saw the film. She was so freaked out. I understand that. You have this horrible, almost cellular awakening, and it’s not pleasant.
That is true.
A friend of mine said, “I loved your film, but you ruined all my favorite films.”
You didn’t ruin mine. I’d rather be awake to what is going on so that I can have a choice over how I internalize it. Otherwise, it subconsciously becomes internalized and integrated into your experience without your knowledge. That’s brainwashing. The first time I watched it, I did have to take breaks, go walk around, eat a piece of chocolate, and come back. Afterwards, I developed such an appreciation for the things that you were sharing and the other women that you interviewed in the film. It’s a must-see, not just for women, but for everyone.
Thank you. I do hope everyone goes out to watch the movie. I’m easy to reach. If you want to send me a note on Instagram, it is @MenkesFilm or @BrainwashedMovie. We always like to hear from people, but
Making A Stand Against Women Objectification
Thank you. I’ll put my comments there. Can I ask you one more question before we close?
Sure.
There has been a lot of boycotting going on with different companies. In this administration, there’s been a lot of calls to boycott. With something so pervasive as this brainwashing, the male gaze, the seduction, that coercion to desire to attract a male gaze, and that whole thing that perpetuates this triangle that you speak of, how can we take a stand against it or take a stand for another way?
It’s tough because it’s so pervasive. The best thing is if you go out and see a movie where you see this kind of thing perpetuated, tell your friends, “Go see that movie.” Call it out and be like, “Don’t pay to see that movie.” Women do it, too. That’s one of the important things we point out in the film. Women directors do it, too. This is not only about male directors. If you see a film where you see a real woman subject who’s not an object, maybe you tell your friends, “Go pay money to see that movie.” Put your dollar where your politics are.
It’s not so easy to say, as everybody did, “Boycott CBS.” It isn’t one thing that’s easy to boycott, and then you’re good. The problem is that it’s everywhere, so it’s very difficult. On an individual basis, if you see a film where the first shot is naked women bent over, and it’s a pan of their derrières, you could go out and say, “I want my money back.”
We all have the voice of social media if we choose to use it. Nina has other films that she has produced and directed. I love your sister. She makes it in what I’ve seen of the trailers of those films. You have chosen. I have to say, the first time I saw Brainwashed and the trailers of your other films, I was like, “It’s hard to imagine this being done differently than the way that I’ve been so conditioned to expect.” Yet, you’ve done it. Several of the women whom you interview in Brainwashed have also done it. They’ve chosen to use different film techniques or camera techniques in order to not create or avoid creating the subject-object or power-over dynamic that perpetuates this toxic culture that we live in.
I encourage everybody to see those films. Watch Brainwashed. Highlight some of the women who are interviewed. Check out their films. Let’s condition ourselves, or at least awaken ourselves to a different way of being, and then we can begin to create the change. I appreciate you so much. I appreciate what you’ve given through this film and through your other films. I can’t wait for everyone to see it. Please check it out. Thank you so much.
This was wonderful. Thank you, Debra.
Important Links
- Nina Menkes
- @MenkesFilm on Instagram
- @BrainwashedMovie on Instagram
- Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
- Fear, Food, and Feminine Power
About Nina Menkes
Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes, Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, La Cinematheque Francaise, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art and The New York Film Festival.
Nina Menkes synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. She has been called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today” by the Los Angeles Times and her body of work was described as “Controversial, intense and visually stunning” by Sight and Sound. Menkes has referred to herself as a witch, and Dennis Lim, writing in The New York Times, called her a “Cinematic Sorceress.”
