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YOU’VE COME A SHORT WAY, BABY!
‘It’s extremely important for women to be writing their own stories and giving them to people to be emotionally impacted by’ —Rosario Dawson
FILM SHOWS HOW MEDIA DEPICTION OF WOMEN IS ANYTHING BUT GENDER NEUTRAL...
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et me introduce myself by kindly inquiring, “Where the HELL did the F word go?” I’m talkin’ “FEMINIST.” You know, the “get out there and make it happen” kind of mother/wife/professional woman. Webster’s Dictionary defines a feminist as one who believes in social, political and economic rights for women equal to those of men. Gender equality in 2012. Is that really too much to ask? Back in 1979, my mom took me to see author and activist Gloria Steinem and U.S. Congresswoman and lawyer Bella Abzug speak at Manhattan’s City Hall. They were advocating for gender pay equity. Outspoken, articulate and heroic, I had never seen such fearless and unstoppable women. Today, women are still making about 75 cents to a man’s dollar. Today, women hold merely 17 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress and 23 percent in state legislatures. That puts the United States 78th in the world (tied with Turkmenistan) for the percentage of women holding office. And 2010 was the first election since 1978 in which the number of women sworn into Congress was fewer than the term before. What’s goin’ on here? What’s up with such dismal female power and representation? Where are my peeps?! I just don’t get it. Is it because women have been collectively brainwashed to “just wanna shut up and look good,” complicitly allowing a predatory, sex-sationalized mainstream media to make misogynistic misrepresentations of most modern women? Or is it that powerful, vocal and vision-focused female candidates are labeled “too controversial” when bravely speaking “inconvenient truths” and, therefore, can’t get elected? Or is it women aren’t 12 PACIFIC SUN JULY 13 - JULY 19, 2012
interested enough (i.e., apathetic) about politics and/or leadership skills to use their shared, collective strength-in-numbers to create any meaningful and bona fide social change? I swear, it’s thoughts like these that keep me awake at night... Last month, Lynne Wasley, chair of United for Safe Schools Novato (USSN), along with Karen Dohemann and a number of co-sponsoring local agencies, organized a screening of the documentary Miss Representation, a film exposing how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in power and influence. Wasley, a mother of five daughters, says she was motivated to “do something” after she saw the film. “By arranging the screening, I hoped to create awareness and empowering action around media’s negative message of women,” said Wasley. “I feel it’s with a collective voice that we can best counter the sexism that still defines much of by Annie S what our culture, particularly our media, promotes.” Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Miss Representation challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful. ● ● ● ●
I SAT WITH 150 appalled audience members (female and male) watching an orchestrated visual barrage of bikini-clad young women in TV commercials selling beer, (so-called) reality “stars” in lingerie waging staged catfights, gossiping gold diggers fighting for a man they’ve known for barely 10 minutes, fairy-tale weddings that predictably end badly, lip-plumped
housewives kvetching about their nonproblems, a plethora of body-shaming weigh-ins and facelifts, and non-apologetic pregnant teenagers with attitudes suggesting they know everything about life... As if that wasn’t enough torture for my brain, juxtaposed with these exasperating images were startling statistics, like the Crisis Intervention Center’s report asserting that 15 percent of rape victims are under the age 12, or that the rates of depression among women and girls have doubled in the past 10 years. OK, hang in there soldier, just one more: The number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed on youth 18 or younger more than tripled from 1997 and 2007. Soon after the film’s opening noxiousimage overload, a teenage girl comes on the screen wearing a navy-blue school uniform, and in a trembling voice pie ge lman asks, “When is it going to be enough?” (Let me just warn you: You will leave the theater feeling as if you just rifled through 15 People magazines at the dentist’s office and are in dire need of a lobotomy.) Newsom, who lives in Ross with husband Gavin Newsom, graduated with honors from both Stanford University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and was named one of Newsweek/Daily Beast’s 150 Women Who Shake the World in 2011. She runs Girls Club Entertainment, a production company that develops independent films focused primarily on empowering women. Newsom says she created the film to be a change agent and inspire both men and women to recognize women’s collective voice, leader-
ship capacity and equal rights. “I was inspired to make the film after finding out I was pregnant with a girl,” says Newsom. “I had witnessed an injustice toward women in the media that has worsened over time with the 24/7 news cycle and the advent of infotainment and reality television. Today’s media is sending a very dangerous message to young people, in particular, that women’s value and power lie in their youth, beauty and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. This just doesn’t hurt women. It hurts all of us.” Interspersed in the film are short clips of interviews with academics, politicians, journalists and entertainers, including Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Gloria Steinem, Geena Davis, Lisa Ling and Margaret Cho. Comedian Cho comments on how the network wanted her to lose weight when she had her own TV series and then when her show was taken off the air they replaced it with (the overweight) Drew Carey. Newsom herself talks about her days as an actress in Hollywood. “I started in Hollywood at the ripe old age of 28. I was told to take my Stanford MBA off my resume and to lie about my age. I didn’t do either but I certainly had my confidence shaken. I was cast as a trophy wife or a dumb blonde. Not as a strong character who doesn’t take her clothes off.” Jane Fonda comments on today’s generation being bombarded by “toxic, hyper-sexualized” images. Rachel Maddow recounts how, when she started out, she’d receive an incredible amount of hate mail about her appearance and her gender. She amusingly claims she still gets lots of hate mail but it’s just spelled worse. Katie Couric talks about her daughters feeling so much pressure to fit into a society that features anorexic