We haven’t come far enough
101 years after International Women’s Day was launched, we still need it — but not for the same reasons
International Women’s Day is as necessary today as it was 101 years ago when it was launched, although not for the same reasons. This Thursday, when women around the world mark the day, they can celebrate having conquered so many things that were offlimits to them a century ago: education, careers, the right to vote and to run for public office.
Those freedoms should have helped women realize their full potential by now, at least in wealthy, democratic countries like Canada and the United States. Women should make up half of elected officials and not 20 per cent, earn 100 cents for every dollar earned by their male co- workers and not 77 cents, and direct and star in movies about women instead of being the half- dressed sidekick to the male star.
But we’re not there. A new U. S. documentary called Miss Representation argues that, if anything, we are losing ground under a sustained, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, campaign to undermine women in public life.
Written, directed, produced and narrated by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a former actress, the film sets out to show how the media, described as the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms in the U. S. today, delivers the message that a woman’s worth is limited to her youth, beauty and sexuality. In the past decade, Siebel Newsom says, the message television has given to women is to “look like Miss USA, have sex like Samantha on Sex and the City, and think like June Cleaver.” In the film, Katie Couric, the first American woman to solo as a national news anchor, says that when she looks at cable newscasts, the female newscasters are wearing low- cut clothing, masses of makeup and tousled hair. “They look like cocktail waitresses instead of newscasters,” she says.
This hyper- sexualization of even the most banal newsreader job might not matter if people watched less television. But young people especially consume a staggering amount of media. They spend 31 hours a week watching television, 10 hours a week online and three hours a week watching movies.
Exposed daily to an impossible standard of digitally enhanced beauty, by age 17, 78 per cent of girls are unhappy with their bodies. Sixty- five per cent of women and girls have an eating disorder. Rates of depression among girls and women in the U. S. have doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to the film.
Girls learn from television and the movies to see themselves as objects, Jean Kilbourne, an author and filmmaker, says in the film. The negative consequences of that include shame, anxiety and self- disgust — the opposite of empowerment.
Girls are rarely exposed to women who have succeeded in life without using their sexuality. They don’t see Indra Nooyi, the chief executive officer of Pepsico., or Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox. They certainly saw Hillary Clinton when she was running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, but they also heard her called a bitch, a ball- breaker and an irrational woman who couldn’t be entrusted with power. It would have been hard to miss replays of former vice- presidential candidate Sarah Palin being asked in 2010 by Greta Van Susteren on Fox television if she had had breast implants. ( The film sees a connection between Fox’s relentlessly demeaning treatment of women and the fact that of Fox’s 16 board members, only one is a woman.)
Ignoring women is another form of demeaning them. During current U. S. House Speaker John Boehner’s first four weeks on the job, the film shows, he was featured on the cover of five prominent weekly magazines: Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, the National Journal and The Economist. In Nancy Pelosi’s four years as speaker, she did not appear on a single national magazine cover.
Small wonder that few American and Canadian women go into politics, a situation that does not serve women well. In the film, Condoleezza Rice, former U. S. secretary of state, says: “Washington’s still pretty male. It’s not unusual to go into a room and be the only woman in the room. Sometimes, it mattered.”
Every era of advance has its pushback. Jackson Katz, an author and filmmaker quoted in the film, says that as women have been challenging men in politics and other spheres, they are increasingly made to appear threatening and highly sexualized. He ends by saying, “… a certain kind of power has been taken away from them, which is the power of being a whole person.”
This is not something that girls, with so little experience of life, should be left to cope with on their own. Once again, International Women’s Day should serve as a call to action.