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Mitchell: The media is the message and the messenger
and, increasingly, a powerful one.
Katz: People learn more from media
than any other single source of information,
so if we want to understand
what's going on in our society in the 21st century,
we have to understand media.
Steyer: If you think about media and technology,
they're delivering content that is shaping our society.
They're shaping our politics.
They're shaping our national discourse.
And most of all, they're shaping
our children's brains and lives and emotions.
Mayer: We estimate that there's somewhere north
of a billion people who use the internet every single day.
That's just a reach that hasn't existed before
in terms of media.
Steyer: Our kids today live on Facebook and cellphones.
The diversity of the platforms means
that those images are impacting your kid 2417
and whatever restrictions existed when we were growing up
simply don't exist today.
Kilbourne: Girls get the message from very early on
that what's most important is how they look,
that their value, their worth, depends on that.
And boys get the message
that this is what's important about girls.
We get it from advertising. We get it from films.
We get it from television shows, video games, everywhere we look.
So, no matter what else a woman does,
now matter what else her achievements,
their value still depends on how they look.
There is no appreciation for women intellectuals.
It's all about the body, not about the brain.
You all saw the famous photo from the weekend
of Hillary looking so haggard
and, what, looking like 92 years old.
Breast implants... did you have them or not'?
Because that's all over the internet about you
in mainstream media.
I think if you waterboarded Nancy Pelosi,
she wouldn't admit to plastic surgery.
Pozner: The fact that media are so limiting and so derogatory
to the most powerful women in the country,
then what does it say about media's ability
to take any woman in america seriously'?
The media treats women like shit,
and it's horrible, and it's, like...
I don't know how we survive it
I don't know how we rise above it.
[Metric's "Help I'm Alive" plays]
♪ I tremble ♪
♪ [echoing ] I tremble ♪
♪ They're gonna eat me alive ♪
♪ [echoing ] Eat me alive ♪
♪ If I stumble ♪
♪ [ Echoing ] If I stumble ♪
♪ They're gonna eat me alive ♪
♪ [echoing ] Eat me alive ♪
♪ Can you hear my heart beating like a hammer? ♪
♪ Beating like a hammer ♪
♪ Help, I'm alive ♪
♪ My heart keeps beating like a hammer ♪
♪ Hard to be soft ♪
♪ Tough to be tender ♪
♪ Come take my pulse ♪
♪ The pace is on a runaway train ♪
♪ Help, I'm alive ♪
♪ My heart keeps beating like a hammer ♪
♪ Beating like a hammer ♪
♪ Help, I'm alive ♪
♪ My heart keeps beating like a hammer ♪
Captions by Vitac... www.VitaC.Com.
Captions paid for by Discovery Communications.
Siebel Newsom: There are moments in life
when you begin to see things more clearly.
When I found out I was pregnant with a girl,
everything came into focus.
But I looked around me,
and I was really frightened for her.
I couldn't imagine that my daughter could grow up
to be emotionally healthy and fulfilled
given our modern culture.
So I'm compelled to make sense of all of this for her.
And I know I have to start by looking at my own life...
the mistakes I've made and the traps I've fallen into.
Because even though I've had many privileges,
I haven't been immune
to the damage our culture does to women and girls.
When I was a young girl,
I felt secure in my place in the world.
But as with most girls, things changed as I got older.
A few days before my 7th birthday,
my older sister Stacy died in an accident.
I blamed myself for her death,
and out of guilt and sadness,
I tried to be two daughters instead of one.
I channeled my pain
into excelling in sports and school.
But no matter how hard I tried I somehow felt inadequate.
I became increasingly susceptible to peer pressure
and the bombardment of media messages
telling me that being strong, smart, and accomplished
was not enough.
To be a woman meant constantly striving
for an unattainable ideal of beauty
and approval in the eyes of men.
So when a trusted peer and, later, a coach
preyed upon my vulnerability and violated me,
I was so frightened and ashamed I completely shut down.
My self-worth was at an all-time low
and I developed an eating disorder
that consumed two years of my life.
It took a lot of love and support
for me to find my strength again.
And although my experiences are unique,
my struggle is all too common.
It's always hard being a teenage girl,
but now the media disseminates
such limiting portrayals of women
and pervades every aspect of our culture.
Is it any wonder teen girls feel more powerless than ever'?
I want a different world
for my daughter and her generation.
But a lot has to change first.
We see so much in the media
that there's so much negativity towards women
and their weight and how they look,
and it's just a representation of the pressure we feel
to conform to man's ideals.
There's this concept of the perfect woman
who looks this certain way,
and because women may not look that way,
they're scrutinized.
I remember fifth grade, I was worrying about my weight.
And now I'm in ninth grade.
I'm still worrying about my weight.
Me being a small person,
like, at my old school, I was told to, like, go throw up
[voice breaking] or, like, go eat a hamburger
because people thought I was like, anorexic or something.
So I would, like, eat a lot so that people would think
that I didn't have an eating disorder.
I straighten my hair just so I can fit in
when I have naturally curly hair.
I have close friends that, like, in between break periods,
they will go to the bathroom
and put on like 10 pounds of make-up
and, you know, comb their hair
and do all this pampering you know,
and you're at school to learn.
When is it gonna be enough'?
'Cause, you know, I have a younger sister, and, like.
[voice breaking] She's like...
[sighs]
Kilbourne: The ideal image of beauty
is more extreme and impossible than ever before.
In the old days, the perfection was achieved
through cosmetics and airbrushing,
but now it's possible
for that image to be absolutely perfect
because of computers.
[camera shutter clicking]
You never see the photograph of a woman considered beautiful
that hasn't been digitally altered
to make her absolutely, inhumanly perfect.
Girls are being encouraged to achieve that ideal
at younger and younger ages all the time.
They end up measuring themselves against an impossible standard
and feeling themselves wanting as a result of it.
Also, not surprisingly,
young men who are shown lots of photographs of supermodels
then judge real women much more harshly.
The most important thing to understand
about all of these images and how they affect us
is that the effect is primarily subconscious
and that it is very harmful
but that for the most part, we're not really aware of that,
which is why we need to pay conscious attention
to these images.
The average child develops over 18 to 24 years,
and full brain development doesn't really occur
until you're into your early 20s.
So the idea that kids at 8 or 10 or 15
have the same level
of intellectual and emotional maturity as an adult is nuts.
They have different interpretive abilities,
they have different emotional abilities,
and they're a much more vulnerable class in society.
I worry about, you know, how much pressure my daughters feel
in a society that features
anorexic actresses and models and television stars.
We get conditioned to think
this is what women should look like,
so even people of average weight and size
have body dysmorphic disorder.
When I did my first television show, "All-American Girl,"
which was the first Asian-American family show
on television,
I had a lot of problems with the network
because they were constantly telling me that I was too fat.
You know, I became very anorexic
trying to somehow keep this job that I really wanted to keep,
and they ended up canceling the television show,
and they replaced it with Drew Carey
'cause he's so thin.
An aspect of media-literacy education
that I think many people aren't aware of
is the whole political economy of the media.
Most media get their revenues from advertising, you know'?
So the non-advertising content of these media
has to support the advertising.
Everybody needs to learn what the media's really about.
It's really, like, about
how they want you to be something that you're not.
A lot of advertising is based on making people feel anxious
and feeling insecure.
For men, there's a lot of anxiety around status and power
and wanting to look as if you have power...
at least drive a powerful car.
For women, that you're never beautiful enough,
Durham: Which is why you keep seeing
these same body types over and over and over again.
Because those are the body types
that generate the purchase of all these beauty products
in this futile pursuit of this idealized body.
It's a hugely profitable pursuit for these media industries
and for all of the advertisers.
American women end up spending much more money on beauty
and the pursuit of these ideals and these myths
than on their own education
which, in fact, would benefit them more in the long run.
And so, under this rhetoric of empowerment,
it's completely disempovvering women.
Kilbourne: Not only are girls seen as objects by other people,
they learn to see themselves as objects.
Heidman: The American Psychological Association
has found in recent years
that self-objectification has become a national epidemic,
a national problem.
The more women and girls self-objectify,
the more likely they are to be depressed,
to have eating disorders.
They have lower confidence. They have lower ambition.
They have lower cognitive functioning.
They have lower GPAs.
How does this connect to women in leadership?
Women who are high self-objectifiers
have lower political efficacy.
Political efficacy is the idea
that your voice matters in politics
and that you can bring about change in politics.
So if we have a whole generation of young people
being raised where woman's objectification
is just par for the course, it's normal, it's okay,
we have a whole generation of women
who are less likely to run for office
and less likely to vote.
Siebel Newsom: This is dangerous business.
If the media is sending girls the message
that their value lies in their bodies,
this can only leave them feeling disempovvered
and distract them from making a difference
and becoming leaders.
Mitchell: Here we are...
this massively powerful democratic society,
and we are not modeling for the rest of the world
a better balance.
Newsom: If people knew that Cuba,
China, Iraq, and Afghanistan
have more women in government
than the United States of America,
that would get some people upset.
No wonder we are in such trouble in this country.
We've been choosing our national leadership
from 6% of the country.
Lawless: Without more women in politics,
we just don't really have democratic legitimacy.
Something looks fundamentally wrong
with our political institutions.
We're shortchanging voices
that are urgently needed in public forums
from ever getting to the table.
Washington is still pretty male,
and it was not unusual to go into a room
and be the only woman in the room.
Sometimes, it mattered.
When there was an attempt to change Title IX
and some pressure from Capitol Hill about that,
I can remember Karen Hughes and I going to the President
and saying, "You can't do that because you don't know"
"what it was like to be a woman in college prior to Title IX,"
when you had to ha a bake sale
"to get your sports team to take a trip."
If you have any kind of a decision-making board
and there are not any women on that board,
they're going to make the wrong decisions,
because they don't have the woman's perspective,
the woman's insight, the woman's experience.
It's an absolute scandal that America's women
continue to earn just 77 cents for every dollar men earn.
In nine states and the District of Columbia,
women who are victims of domestic abuse,
who've been victims of domestic abuse,
can be denied healthcare coverage
because domestic abuse
can be considered a pre-existing condition.
We go to the ladies room...
the Republican women and the Democratic women...
and we just roll our eyes at what's being said out there.
And the Republican women said,
when we were fighting over the healthcare bill,
"if we sent the men home,
we could get this done this week."
[ laughter, cheers and applause]
The United States is the only major industrialized nation
without paid family leave.
If women didn't speak up on these issues
and didn't become front-and-center
on making sure they were on the front burner
of the legislative agenda, they simply wouldn't happen.
I feel if it wasn't us, who would do it'?
Women have been actually creating
the best public policy in America
in every state and community of this country.
The living-wage campaigns, micro-enterprise, safety...
everything that needed different thinking,
women have been doing it.
So we got to get them in the tables of power.
Well, two things have to happen
when you talk about women moving to the next rung
or minorities moving to the next rung.
First, you have to have the candidates.
You have to have people who are in the pools
from which these positions are drawn.
But you also have to have
a kind of psychological breakthrough.
Can an American see a woman or an African-American
in that position'?
Now, I think with women we still have a bit to go.
Siebel Newsom: I knew these obstacles still existed for my generation,
but I wanted to find out if things were any better
for young women seeking leadership positions,
so I spent time with an exceptional young woman
named Devanshi Patel,
who aspires to have a career in public service.
Well, welcome to bill hearing.
Tonight is the bill hearing night
for the Central Silicon Valley YMCA Youth & Government Delegation.
So, the first time I ran for public office
was in fourth grade.
My parents worked with me.
We made all these fliers with all these cure little slogans,
and we campaigned all over the school.
And I was actually the runner-up by a handful of votes.
I think everyone is born with something that they have to do,
and for me, this was it.
Every time that I could run for something,
I didn't run for anything less.
I didn't run for Vice President or Treasurer.
I ran for President.
Ranna: I asked her one day... I think it was in fifth grade.
I said, "Devanshi, you always want to be a leader,"
but do you know what a leader is?"
She says, "it's very simple, Mama.
"They are just serving the people.
Leaders are just servants to people."
Devanshi: I loved the Youth & Government program.
The best way I can give back is by running for Youth Governor.
How would you solve the California budget crisis?
Starting with Miss Patel.
I would out unnecessary spending.
When I was running for office, there were a lot of...
if not outward shows of sexism,
little remarks here and there,
like, "Oh, she speaks well for a woman."
"She's smart for a woman."
There were also a couple instances
with some of my friends
when they were going to speak in front of a large audience
and the only thing people could focus on was their body,
what they looked like, what they were wearing.
I thought, you knovv, "We're better than this."
She said, "Mama, it looks like I'm another Hillary Clinton."
Guys will vote for guys, and girls will vote for guys
but some of the time,
girls have a harder time getting the girls to vote for girls
'cause I feel like girls are kind of harder on other girls.
Siebel Newsom: Devanshi's story
made me think about how early girls face a deep gender bias
and how things have not changed as much as we'd like to think.
One of the first things I did
when I became mayor of San Francisco is
I appointed a female Police Chief
and then a female Fire Chief.
When they both show up at the podium in a disaster,
a lot of national media will look there and say,
"Where's the Police Chief?" "She's right here."
"Where's the Fire Chief, then?" "Well, she's right here."
People thought I was trying to make some grand statement
when, in fact, I was actually just hiring
the most qualified two candidates.
The incredible opposition was coming mostly from women
and those that feel it's too much, too soon, too fast.
They never would have questioned that had they been men.
Little boys and little girls, when they're 7 years old,
an equal number want to be President of the United States
when they grow up... about 30%.
But then you ask the same question when they're 15,
and you see this massive gap emerging.
So we have this gendered socialization,
where politics is considered to be for men.
Leadership is considered to be a masculine pursuit,
and women are discouraged from pursuing ambitious positions.
I think what happens is that if you do not have women there,
then girls do not see that they can be that,
so it's really what you see that inspires your idea
of what's possible for you in the world.
I do disagree with Sarah Palin on a lot of issues,
but seeing her up onstage there
with her young family and her young baby
was just beautiful, and I thought, "You know what'?"
Maybe I could give this a shot as well."
Having this opportunity to see women,
to see women leadership,
to see woman's leadership in reality and on the screen
and in the television is huge for women... huge.
Because you don't have that many women really in leadership,
so the way that it gets done, to a certain extent,
and the way problems get solved often have to do with Hollywood
and the films that get made,
the documentaries, the television shows.
Start where people are,
and people are watching television.
Siebel Newsom: There are some examples
of films and TV shows that portray powerful women,
but in general, the situation in Hollywood is pretty bleak.
I decided to pursue acting professionally at the age of 28
and was hopeful I could find complex roles to play.
My first reality check came
when my agent told me to lie about my age
and remove my Stanford MBA from my résumé
because it might be threatening.
Well, I didn't do either,
but my confidence was really shaken.
My second reality check came
when I learned that there were very few multidimensional roles
to even audition for.
I shouldn't have been surprised
because when you really look at Hollywood
and the films that are being made,
you see the same stereotypes being portrayed
over and over again.
[Metric's "Gold Guns Girls" plays]
♪ All the gold ♪
♪ And the guns ♪
♪ And the girls ♪
♪ Couldn't get you off ♪
♪ All the boys ♪
♪ All the choices in the world ♪
♪ I remember when we were gambling to win ♪
♪ Everybody else said, "Better luck next time" ♪
♪ I don't wanna bend like the bad girls bend ♪
♪ I just wanna be your friend, is it ever gonna be enough'? ♪
♪ Is it ever gonna be enough'? ♪
Women are never the protagonists or the ones who...
like, if they are the protagonist,
it's some, like, drama about getting a guy or something.
It's never really about finding your destiny or whatever,
how they say it for the guys.
Like in the "Star Trek," he's like,
"This is your destiny,"
you know, being powerful being the captain.
But for a girl, they wouldn't say that.
And then what's weird about it is
that it seems normal for us. Like, we don't question it.
We don't say,
"Oh, why isn't a girl being the protagonist for this'?
Why can't a girl be powerful?"
Davis: I hear this all the time.
Well, things are getting better.
I mean, things are getting better, you know'?
But they're not.
Mainstream movies are generally stories of man's lives
which revolve around men,
and then we have this subgenre called "chick flicks,"
which are stories of woman's lives
which, when you look at them a little more closely,
you realize that they generally revolve around man's lives, too.
They revolve around trying to get a man,
trying to get love, get married, get pregnant.
It's my fault that I'm alone on Valentine's Day.
My closest relationship is with my Blackberry.
- Right. - Thank God it vibrates.
Between 1937 and 2005,
there were only 13 female protagonists in animated movies.
All of them except one
had the aspiration of finding romance.
As a culture, women are brought up
to just be kind of fundamentally insecure
and always looking for the time
when that knight on a horse will come and rescue us
or provide for us.
Heidman: When it comes to female leaders in entertainment media,
we see the bitchy boss
who has sacrificed family and love
to make it to where she is.
Miranda: I said to myself, "Take a chance.
Hire the smart, fat girl."
The whole movie is about bringing her down a peg,
and this is generally done by someone who is under her,
a subordinate, typically a male,
so that image doesn't bode well
when it comes to ideas of women in leadership.
Haggis: We had many more interesting characters on screen
in the '20s, '30s, '40s than we do now.
And we allowed women to really embody
all the contradictions that make up a human being back then.
They could be the femme fatale
and then turn around and be the mother
and then turn around and be the seductress,
and then turn around and be the saint,
and we accepted that.
They were complex human beings.
Now we really like to put people in boxes.
The only two choices for women...
witch and sexy kitten.
Oh, you just said a mouthful there, sister.
As men, we do it because we don't understand
characters that aren't ourselves,
and we aren't willing to put ourselves
in the skin of those characters.
And women, I think, terrify us.
We tend not to write women as human beings.
It's cartoons we're making now.
And that's a shame.
Heidman: Throughout any type of mass media there is,
we see the widespread acceptance of women as sex objects.
In rock videos, rap and hip-hop videos,
in all the summer blockbusters,
women are basically just body props
there for young male viewers.
I think when they do put in the part,
she's used as a sexual object
or an object of desire toward the men,
which I think should change a lot
because there's a lot more to a woman than just a body.
Katz: We're socializing boys to believe
that being a man means being powerful and in control.
Ooh la la.
Being smarter than women or better than women
or our needs get met first in relationships with women,
that's not genetically predestined.
That's learned behaviour.
You don't think I can be a surgeon'?
I can be a surgeon.
- Surgery's hardcore. - I'm hardcore.
You won't last the first year, babe.
Heidman: We also see a new incarnation of this,
where women appear to be empowered.
They are carrying the story. They're the action hero.
But, again, when you peel back a layer or two,
you discover that it's not really about their agency,
and I call this archetype "the fighting fuck toy."
♪ Don't move, don't speak, even whisper ♪
That's a badass chick.
Heidman: Because even though she is doing things
supposedly on her own terms
she very much is objectified and exists for the male viewer.
Davis: In G-rated movies, the female characters
are just as likely to be wearing sexually revealing clothing
as in R-rated movies,
which is horrifying.
Fonda: The hypersexualization that occurs in Hollywood...
it's toxic. There's no question.
It affects all of us,
including young girls who are seeking an identity.
Mitchell: If the message is that women are objectified objects,
that that's their primary being,
that's a very tough and challenging message
for young women who think that's their path to power.
Durham: You know
they'll say Madonna is tremendously empowered
or Angelina Jolie,
but they all embody that exact same definition of sexuality.
I mean, when you really think about it, though,
Hillary Clinton's tremendously empowered.
She's Secretary of State, right'?
Or, you know, you think of women CEOs
or, you know, there are women who are empowered
in lots of different kinds of ways,
but you don't see them represented.
You don't get that message
that you don't have to use your sexuality
to attain empowerment in the world.
A male-dominant system, a patriarchal system,
values women as child-bearers, period.
So it limits their value
to the time that they are sexually active,
reproductively active,
and become much less valuable after that.
Lauzen: What we see in broadcast television is
that the majority of female characters
are in their 20s and 30s.
That is just a huge misrepresentation of reality,
and that really skews our perceptions.
It's like when a female reaches 39 or 40,
she simply needs to go away.
One day, I got the call that I'd heard about others getting,
and that was this... I had just gotten a series,
and it was presented to me by my manager as,
"Daphne, your part is secure, but would you consider doing
a little Botox or collagen or something?"
Well, just like them, I didn't know what the hell it was.
What do you mean, "Botox or collagen or something"?
And I remember lying in this chair,
with this fat, bald man
injecting, like, needles in my forehead, bleeding.
And I'm crying,
and I'm feeling guilty for crying.
I remember lying in that chair, just thinking,
"There's something wrong here."
It really made me feel...
a less spiritually whole person,
less of a woman with integrity.
I felt like I was cheating and lying
with this stuff in my face.
So, maybe I'll stop working. I don't know.
But just right now,
I have chosen not to do it again.
And my mother was furious.
Want to hear what my mother, the hippie in Vermont, said'?
"You tell those fuckers to get penis implants."
[laughs]
This is not new.
You know, I started out in the business in the '50s.
My very first movie, I played a cheerleader,
and Jack Warner was the head of Warner Bros.
And he sent word down that he wanted me to wear falsies
and my director, Josh Logan,
asked me to have my back teeth pulled out.
You know, I wasn't good enough the way I was.
I really, truly believe
that reality TV is the contemporary cultural backlash
against woman's rights.
Miss Blondie...
I think one of the worst stereotypes in reality TV
is this notion that women exist to be decorative.
Women exist to be stupid.
Women are considered gold diggers.
Women are considered bitchy, catty, manipulative, vindictive,
not to be trusted, especially by other women.
You are a piece of [bleep] and you're a stupid blonde.
I think you look like a ho.
[ Cat yowls ]
Slap me, bitch, or...
What?! You are a fucking whore!
Pozner: This notion that women are natural enemies
vying for the prize of being more beautiful than the rest
or the love of whoever
is so counter to women in real life.
Woman: Please pick me, pick me, pick me.
See how beautiful I am.
Durham: There's a really unequal power relationship
going on there,
where it's the girls whose bodies are on display,
and the boys get the power to arbitrate and judge
whether their bodies are acceptable or not acceptable,
desirable or not desirable.
So I think there's a whole lot going on there
that actually puts girls in a really disempovvered position.
Pozner: These shows, over the course of the last decade,
have tried to portray a world in which
the only options available to women
mimic the 1950s model of femininity,
in which woman's only power was her beauty,
in which women not only had no choices
but shouldn't have even wanted any,
in which men were burdened with the responsibility
of being the Prince Charming who comes in
and Whisks women away to happily ever after,
then has to provide for their financial security.
Nobody wins in this model,
but women particularly lose in this model
where they're expected to look like miss U.S.A.,
have sex like Samantha on "Sex And The City,"
and think like June Cleaver.
Siebel Newsom: And here's something
I find even more disheartening...
watching the news.
So many female journalists are objectified or sexualized.
[theme music plays]
Cronkite: This is the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric."
Hi, everyone.
I'm very happy to be with you tonight.
Jenkins: Katie couric was
the very first national experience we had all together,
viewing a woman who was not entertaining us
but whose presence and presentation was vital
for getting us the information we needed.
The three major evening newscasts
had been dominated by white males.
They had very similar faces
and very similar backgrounds for the most part.
I thought, "This is an opportunity
to mix it up a little bit."
I also thought it was an important message
that a women could be as competent as a man
in an important, powerful role.
And I remember in the early days
when I would get calls from reporters about,
"Ah, we have our first woman anchor.
What do you think about that?"
inevitably, the questions that they would ask first were.
"What about those legs'?
Do you think she was showing too much leg?"
Or, "What about that winter white'?"
Wasn't that a big mistake?"
They were all observations that had to do with her physicality
and not really about the content at all.
But, again, it's because, as I've always said,
we are a nation of teenage boys.
We don't know what to make of this woman
sitting in front of us,
and so, you know, we look at her legs, her boobs, her hair,
her whatever, you know
and then maybe way down the line
we'll get to listening to what she's saying.
Ever since I've been in media at all,
even since, you know, the first morning show that I was on
in Holyoke, Massachusetts, as the sidekick news girl,
there's been a really consistent proportion of...
I don't even know if you could call it criticism.
Essentially, it's hate mail.
As I've become sort of better-known
and I get more feedback,
the amount of "I hate you," homophobic,
"I hate what you look like,"
"I'm gonna kill you," threatening mail stuff,
it's like the proportion has stayed exactly the same.
[chuckling] It's like it's always 14% of the feedback.
And almost all of the hate mail is about gender and sexuality.
I mean, who has the time'?
If that's really what you think
and you really are that bad a speller,
like, you really are still gonna take this time
to let me know what you "thunk" [laughs] about what I look like'?
It's the scrutinization that women get
that far surpasses the scrutinization that men get.
I don't ever see gossip columns or tabloids
reporting on Brian Williams' personal life,
yet Katie Couric and what she is wearing
or who she's dating is headline news.
Couric: I think whenever there are two women
who are working in similar professions,
it's automatically positioned as a cat fight.
Diane Sawyer and I were pitted against each other
as if, you know, we were gonna be in a mud-wrestling competition
on the weekend, so...
and you never saw that
with, say, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.
Take it away with the red-hat boys in blue, would you'?
- I got this one down. - Okay. Good.
Couric: Sometimes, I look on the cable news channels.
I see women wearing very low-out shirts and lots of make-up,
and, you know, their hair is kind of tousled,
and they look like they're working as cocktail waitresses
instead of newscasters.
It's just a very mixed message.
Folks, we're gonna play a game.
I'm gonna show you a photo of a woman.
You have to guess whether she is a professional newscaster
or a Hooters waitress.
Are you ready'? Here we go.
Pozner: The local news anchorships look like,
you knovv, somebody's grandfather and his second wife.
Couric: Television's a very visual medium, obviously,
and it's kind of how do you walk the fine line
of looking pleasing and attractive
but also looking professional'?
I look back on my "Today" show interviews,
and I think, "Geez, my skirt is way too short."
I sometimes worry
that I started this thing with my legs and everything,
that I have sort of started this trend
of trying to look, you know...
I don't know.
There is so much pressure to look a certain way.
When I'm on television,
I never try and explicitly dress sexy.
I don't want to distract from the stories that I'm telling.
I want you to focus on what I'm saying.
There's a lot of words in my show,
and I work really hard on getting them in the right order.
For some people I will always be
too hideous a creature to be on television.
That's fine.
But if you can get over that on day one,
it's gonna stay the same
for the whole time that I'm on the air.
I think it's really hard for women today.
Siebel Newsom: The emphasis on woman's appearance
affects more than just women on screen.
It's affecting woman's ability
to participate in the political process.
Ironically, the more power women gain,
the stronger the backlash against them.
And this phenomenon is most evident
in the way the media disrespects our female leaders.
She's irresistibly cute, let's put it that way,
in the way she presents herself.
Obviously, she's attractive and all that.
Beck: Sarah Palin looks really hot in that hat.
She just said that she doesn't know how oars work.
Oh, that's crazy. You seen the hat on her'?
Both you and Sarah Palin are good-looking women.
I mean, you're attractive, young...
relatively young... women.
Savage: Kagan... he's gonna put on the U.S. Supreme court'?
Is there such a thing about the aesthetics of the appointee'?
Let's put it to you this way...
she's not the type of face you'd want to see on a $5 bill
I think I'm gonna send Sotomayor and her club
a bunch of vacuum cleaners
to help them clean up after their meetings.
Cynthia McKinney, the former Congresswoman from Georgia,
was another angry black women.
Rodgers: Look at these ugly skanks
who make up the female leadership
of the Democratic party.
You know that ugly hag, Madeleine Albright?
Remember her'? A psycho.
She was the Secretary of State under Clinton.
Remember her'? Like a fat moron'?
And now we have the Wicked Witch of the West,
you know, Nancy Pelosi
I think if Speaker Pelosi
were still capable of human facial expression,
we'd see she'd be embarrassed
Baker: Nancy Pelosi, that... hey, get another facelift, lady.
Another reason why it's very rare
to find a woman worthy of serving in political office.
♪ Ding dong! The wicked witch is dead ♪
Limbaugh: And it's bye-bye, Pelosi!
Levin: Hillary Rodham Clinton, her "Thighness,"
is no better than Dumbo with the big ears.
When she raises her voice, and when a lot of women do,
you know, as I say,
it reaches a point where every husband in America...
You know what'?
Has heard it one time or another.
You get a woman in the Oval Office,
most powerful person in the world.
What's the downside'?
You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings'?
There's probably no more powerful influence
in the way we view power than the way media treats power.
And media treats power as defined by men
because it has been,
throughout our generation and the ones before,
generally defined that way.
Falk: When press representations of women who are,
you know, running for the highest office in the land
are focusing, for example on how women look
instead of what they've done or their issue positions,
that's got to impact the audience
in terms of how they evaluate and judge those women.
One of the things it does is it trivializes them.
It makes women seem less powerful.
Pozner: During the Democratic National Convention in '84,
when Geraldine Ferraro was running,
she was introduced on national television
as the first female Vice Presidential candidate,
size 6.
So this is not new.
Walsh: My colleague did a study
looking at Elizabeth Dole and her race for president.
She was coming in second in Iowa at the time after George Bush,
and there was much more coverage of her appearance
than there was of the substance of what she was talking about.
Lawless: When I ran for Congress,
I was campaigning at grocery stores,
and a women came up to me, and she put her arms around me,
and she whispered, "Don't worry."
You don't look nearly as fat in real life as you do on TV."
The week before the election, a man came up to me,
and he said, You know, you seem great,
"but I don't feel like I could vote for you for Congress.
I feel like I should hire you as a babysitter."
When I first ran for public office,
which is now over 20 years ago,
although my youngest was a senior in high school,
the question I was most frequently asked was.
"Who's gonna be taking care of your children?"
And, of course, it's one of those questions
that I don't think a man has ever been asked
when he has run for office.
If you look at the women who ran who had honorary titles,
like Senator Clinton,
if the press drops that title
and instead refers to them as "Mrs. Clinton,"
this is a way to kind of diminish
some of her accomplishments.
Feinstein: There is such a thing as a media bias.
For example, media will write in the same way
about a man and a woman.
Senator X, who is a woman, "Complained that..."
And in the same thing, Senator Y "Stated that..."
So the man will get a stated
and the woman will get the negative verb "complained."
Women were twice as likely
to be described emotionally as were men,
and by painting women as more emotional than men,
we perpetuate the stereotype that women are emotional,
therefore they're irrational,
therefore they can't handle a crisis,
therefore they should not be in leadership positions.
I remember so many times during the campaign, people asking,
"Well, is she tough enough to be Commander In Chief?"
[chuckling ] Well, I've known plenty of men
who aren't tough enough to be Commander In Chief,
and nobody asked that question.
[voice breaking] Making sure that these kids have a shot
at the American Dream [sobs] like I did...
is important.
Gosh, what do you think they would have done to Nancy Pelosi
if she had gotten all worked up'?
They would've said that she's unstable, couldn't do the job.
Ooh. Yes. Welcome to America.
A woman in power is often seen as a negative thing.
We associate all the worst aspects of power,
and we translate those
to a woman seeking to achieve power.
Heidman: One of the key ways
in which media played a role in the primary
was to talk about Hillary Clinton's ambition
as though it were a bad thing.
When Barack Obama speaks,
men hear, "Take off for the future."
And when Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear,
[high-pitched] "Take out the garbage."
When she reacts the way she reacts to Obama
with just the look... the look toward him,
looking like everyone's first wife
standing outside of probate court.
I don't know what they're getting at here, Tucker.
What do you think they're saying about Hillary'?
I don't know, but that is so perfect
[chuckling] I have often said when she comes on television,
I involuntarily cross my legs.
I know you do.
Heidman: Hillary Clinton had hecklers following her,
saying, "Iron my shirt."
Man: Iron my shirt!
- Some people think... - Iron my shirt!
- ...We bring about change by. - Iron my shirt!
Heidman: She was frequently called a bitch in mainstream media.
Beck: She's a stereotypical bitch.
You know what I mean'?
Obama did great in February,
and that's because that was Black History Month.
And now Hillary's doing much better
'cause it's White Bitch Month, right'?
If she knew how it made her look...
alternately soppy and bitchy... she'd stop it,
but she can't help herself, can she'?
Her credentials were constantly questioned.
Let's not forget... and I'll be brutal...
the reason she's a U.S. Senator,
the reason she's a candidate for President,
the reason she may be a front-runner
- is her husband messed around. - Woman: Yeah, but...
That's how she got to be Senator We keep forgetting it.
She didn't win there on her merit.
Heidman: Sarah Palin presented a very different image.
She is the first national, high-profile, female candidate
who presented herself in very feminine terms...
as a "real woman."
She's the American Dream.
Women want to be her. Men want to mate with her
I want her laying next to me in bed.
There were pictures shot between her legs
of folks at the Republican National Convention.
In a nutshell, she was pornified and ditzified.
I don't want to say she's a ditz,
but [chuckles] last night,
my stripper's fake name was Sarah Palin.
Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man.
[laughter]
She's good masturbation material.
- Oh! - Oh!
Heidman: So, Hillary Clinton
tried to be properly masculine and properly feminine,
and she lost.
Sarah Palin puts out this different image
of, shall we say, hyper-femininity,
and she gets beaten up in really degrading, gendered ways.
[laughter]
But tonight, we are crossing party lines
to address the now very ugly role
that sexism is playing in the campaign.
An issue which I am frankly surprised
to hear people suddenly care about.
[laughter]
Reporters and commentators,
stop using words that diminish us,
like "pretty," "attractive," "beautiful."
"Harpy," "shrew"...
[laughter]
"Boner-shrinker."
[ laughter, applause]
My worry is now that there were millions of people
watching Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton.
I could talk about a lot of women
that are in New Jersey politics.
There were millions of young women watching this,
and the messages that they're getting
are just not conducive to encouraging them
to put up with this kind of abuse.
When you're not treated the same,
you are dehumanized.
When you're not given the same opportunity,
you're dehumanized.
When people look at you differently
because you happen to be a woman
and you happen to be in a position of some influence
that someone who is a man would naturally be in
based on tradition or history
and people question your qualifications,
that's dehumanizing.
Empowered women in general threaten men
because they feel that an empowered woman
is just putting down a man
as opposed to trying to sort of raise herself.
As women have been challenging man's power in business,
in the professions, in education, in politics,
and other areas of social life,
the images of women that have been flooding the culture
have been showing women as taking up less space.
They're less threatening, they're highly sexualized,
and, therefore,
a certain kind of power has been taken away from them,
which is the power of being a whole person.
And I don't think those things are coincidental.
I think that the way that the symbolic realm has been acting
is to take power away from women
while women have been challenging man's power
in the concrete realm.
Siebel Newsom: It seems we've become numb
to the insidious ways the media holds women back
when it misrepresents them.
I can't help but wonder...
who are the people behind the scenes,
making these crucial decisions about what we see'?
And what are the consequences
for my daughter and her generation'?
The media has always been
overwhelmingly in the hands of men.
Pozner: As you go up the ranks in media,
fewer and fewer women and people of colour exist
at every rung of the ladder.
Jenkins: That means that 97% of everything you know
about yourself and about your country and your world
comes from the male perspective.
It doesn't mean that it's wrong.
It just means that in a democracy
where you talk about equality and full participation,
you've got half of the population...
more than half of the population...
not participating.
Many years ago, I said,
"Why don't we just create our ovvn network
"rather than continuing to try and get our stories told
by other people's networks?"
So we put together an idea.
We went to various distributors,
including the broadcast networks,
the cable companies, et cetera, pitched the idea.
And one person said to me,
"Why do we need another woman's network'?
We already have one. We have Lifetime."
There's a fairly pervasive sense of denial
about the status of women
working in both television and film.
Peter Bart wrote a column in Variety,
talking about the glass ceiling and how it no longer exists.
Putting that kind of information out there is really troublesome.
For so long, it has been an industry
dominated by men who just don't leave.
People who employ other people
tend to hire people who are a reflection of themselves.
This impacts hiring.
It impacts the news directors, the journalists,
the people who are gonna cover the news
and, of course, who reports the news
very much is the factor in what kind of news is reported.
When any group is not featured in the media,
they have to wonder,
"Well, what part do I play in this culture?"
There's actually an academic term for that.
It's called "symbolic annihilation."
All of Hollywood is run on one assumption...
that women will watch stories about men,
but men won't watch stories about women.
And all the decisions are made
based on this concrete fact,
and nobody's ever really proved that that's true.
I think it's a horrible indictment of our society
if we assume that one half of the population
is just not interested in the other half.
The first couple of scripts that I wrote,
of course, had a female, you know, as the lead character.
And people were like,
"Well, there's hardly any bankable actresses,
"so they can't carry a film,
"so it has to be super low-budget
"or we wouldn't bankroll it.
And no one's gonna show up in the theaters."
And I finally wrote
the lowest-budget movie I could ever write.
I co-wrote "Thirteen" with a 13-year-old girl,
and it was about people of lower income.
They could wear my clothes. We could shoot in my house.
We could use my car.
We made the movie, and it went on to Sundance,
and it went on to win awards
and get international distribution.
And I think it was the same with "Twilight."
Two major studios turned it down.
Finally, a new upstart company showed me the project,
and it turned into, obviously, a phenomenon,
making over half a billion dollars so far.
So it disproved the theory
that girls and women wouldn't go to see a movie.
That they did go see the movie in droves
and over and over and over
and bought the DVD and even bought pillow cases.
But there's a flip side to that,
which is kind of astonishing to me.
On the next two "Twilights," they've hired guys.
They did not seek out a female director.
And on the same side,
I've gone after some jobs
that I've been told flat-out to myself and my agent,
"Oh, no. We think a guy should direct this."
And to me, I think, "Okay."
Why can a man direct "Sex And The City,"
"Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants," a Miley Cyrus movie.
Nobody ever questions that.
But I, a very successful female director,
cannot direct a movie that "should be done by a man."
Nobody says, I'm not gonna hire a female director."
They just... on their list,
there's just 25 names, and none of them are women.
What happens is these studio chiefs
or people like myself, you know...
writer/predueere or directors...
we see the world in a certain way,
and we don't really challenge that often.
And so we just replicate the world that we grew up in
without really asking why we're doing it.
What is the first thing that they tell people
when they're, you know in screenwriting class'?
"Create what you know."
When you have greater diversity behind the scenes,
not only do you get more female characters on screen,
but you get a different kind of female character.
You get a more powerful
and multidimensional female character.
You should have seen the way those men looked at me.
But then they discovered I was fearless!
Dawson: That's why it's extremely important
for women to be writing their own stories,
truly crafting those stories,
writing them down directing them,
and giving them to people
to really emotionally become impacted by.
Because when my mom tells me a story
or my grandmother tells me a story, I'm riveted.
[laughs]
Davis: None of us had any idea
what the response was gonna be to "Thelma & Louise."
One time, I was at a red light, and heard this honking,
and I looked next to me, and there's a car full of women
who are popping out of all the windows and the sunroof
and going, "Whoo-hoo-hoo!"
[laughs]
And I'm like, "Well, this has certainly never been
the reaction to any of my other movies."
Then the very next movie I made was "A League Of Their Own,"
where I had 13- or 15-year-old girls coming up to me
with the same kind of reaction.
"Oh, my God. You have no idea. That movie changed my life.
I play sports because of that movie."
And it really struck me
how few opportunities we give women
to have that kind of experience watching a movie.
The media can be an instrument of change.
It can maintain the status quo
and reflect the views of the society,
or it can hopefully awaken people and change minds.
I think it depends on who's piloting the plane.
Siebel Newsom: I don't want to undervalue
the tremendous progress women have made in America.
But if we look closely
at the way our history has been recorded,
we start to understand
the crucial role media has played
in defining who we are.
Berg: Patriarchy really is America's default setting,
where men hold the positions of privilege and power
and where women, very often,
are treated as second-class citizens.
It's always been problematic in American society
when women have gained power.
[big-band music plays]
During World War ll,
6 million women were pulled in to take care of the factories
in the absence of the men.
But the time the war was coming to a close
80% wanted to stay at their jobs.
When the returning Gls came home,
within two days of victory in the Pacific,
800,000 women were fired from the aircraft industry,
and other companies began to follow suit.
We needed a huge media campaign
to get these women back into the home.
One of the most effective ways to do this
was through television,
so the television was part of the re-domestication.
We had television shows
sponsored by numerous commodities,
the gleaming appliances
that June Cleaver would use in the kitchen.
These commodities were being linked to the good life.
Women rushed to their new shopping centers
in their brand-new cars and loaded up.
They didn't realize that they were actually doing this
in the service of a strong governmental imperative.
The notion of the commodity boom was linked to capitalism,
which our government was supporting,
vis-é-vis the threat of communism.
So you really see the linkage of advertising on TV,
the pushing of capitalism,
and then our government pushing capitalism, too.
[Jules Larson's "I Want It All" plays ]
Now fast-forward to the woman's movement.
♪ Well, I can't help myself r.
♪ I want it all ♪
♪ And I start to fall ♪
♪ I can't think at all ♪
♪ 'Cause I want you, want you want it all ♪
♪ And I'm standing tall ♪
♪ So don't make me crawl ♪
♪ I just want you, want you want it all ♪
Berg: Women went from being barred access
to the institutions of higher learning,
not allowed to participate
in most of the well-known professions.
Within less than a decade,
women gained tremendous, tremendous power.
♪ I want it all ♪
♪ And I start to fall ♪
♪ I can't think at all ♪
♪ 'Cause I want you, want you want it all ♪
♪ I want it all ♪
♪ And I'm standing tall ♪
♪ Don't make me crawl ♪
♪ I just want you, want you want it all ♪
Berg: Then we get to the great reality check of the 1980s.
There was a huge, well-funded message machine
of conservative anchors
and the demonization of the word "liberal."
If you took an oppositional view
you were almost un-American.
And who were the great targets of this media machine'?
The woman's movement and feminists
because we were seen as posing the greatest threat
to the social order of America at that time.
Any time you move forward in a culture,
there's gonna be a backlash
that's gonna try to move backwards
or stop the progress.
And so there's a constant tension
between trying to move forward
and advance the project of human happiness
and equality and justice and everything else
and, at the same time,
the attempt to maintain the existing power structures,
and that tension is a constant tension.
Steyer: Starting in the 1980s, really under President Reagan,
we started deregulating the media industry
in the United States.
And the same people
who hung their hat on the mantel of family values
were the same people who deregulated the media industry.
The Chairman of the FCC, Mark Fowler in those days,
referred to the television set
as just another piece of hardware,
and therefore, it should be regulated or not regulated
in the same way that toasters are or washing machines.
But you're talking about images and messages
that shape our entire society, our culture.
And to out back on the regulatory structure
that oversees that
led to a lot of unforeseen consequences
when it came to messages and images for young people,
particularly for girls and young women.
What you saw was more and more content
fewer and fewer limits on that content,
and a lessening of standards.
By the time you got to the Telecom Act of 1996,
you had a chance to potentially re-regulate, if you will,
the media industry.
But, in fact, that did not happen.
Berg: We have huge corporate conglomerations
controlling television, radio, cable,
newspapers, movie theaters, theme parks,
huge amount of power in this country.
And most of these conglomerates really operate
with an eye focused on the bottom line,
not on fair and balanced reporting.
Pozner: You have Fox News and Bill O'Reilly
developing an entire strategy
to corner the market in sensationalistic news
just to sell ads, get eyeballs, et cetera,
and then all the other major news outlets on cable
trying to compete,
so that who gets to shout the loudest
becomes a standard for news practice.
I could be delivering the same script
with the same graphics in the same studio,
wearing the same thing,
but on two different days,
I could be delivering it like this,
[loudly] or I could be delivering it like this!
And if I'm delivering it like this,
I'm gonna get double the rating.
[normal voice] So that's why people yell.
I know that's a sexist comment!
- It totally is. - But there's truth to it!
Greene: The rise of punditry in America
is greatly adding to sexism and bias in the media
and also confusing what is fact and what is opinion.
Pozner: You have less and less minutes
devoted to the pursuit of strong,
independent, long-term investigative journalism,
more minutes devoted every year to celebrity news, to gossip.
Why'? 'Cause it's cheap.
Fifteen years ago, it would have been unthinkable
for Britney Spears' panties to be a breaking headline on CNN.
I want to lead with the Paris Hilton story.
No. And you know what'? So does my producer.
Andy Jones is not listening to me.
He's put it as the lead.
Listen... I just don't believe in covering that story,
especially not as the lead story in a newscast
when you have a day like today.
Can we show some footage of Paris'?
- Do we have Paris... - No. No, we can't.
Joe. No. I'm gonna do the news now.
I haven't thrown it... There she is.
Oh. Look at that strut.
Oh, look at that. She's so humble.
- That's a reformed woman. - Yeah, she is reformed.
She's shy.
- All right. To the news now. - Think she found Jesus.
Just months after Telecom '96 passed,
"Access Hollywood" debuted and "E! News" debuted.
These are two of the most sort of fat-shaming,
infotainment outlets we have today,
where they follow around women who have eaten a muffin
and then circle their stomachs with graphics
and point to them and say, "Baby bump'? Are they pregnant?"
Oh, no, sorry. She just ate a bagel.
Woman: After photos of the singer
performing in her trademark Daisy Duke jean shorts
showed off an unflattering belly bulge,
Jess' reps were forced to publicly state,
"She is not pregnant."
This notion that these media companies
are just giving us what the public wants...
No. They're giving us what the media companies want.
They're giving us what the advertisers want.
And they're packaging it in such a way
as to make it sound like it's our fault, and it's not.
This is the first time in human history
that marketers have dictated our cultural norms and values.
And this is made possible
by the relaxation of rules on advertising
in the 1970s and '80s...
and then an amplified relaxation starting in the '90s.
This is all about capitalism.
The television industry targets men 18 to 34
because it's harder to get men to watch television.
Women watch television.
So the advertisers encourage the networks
to come up with programming for men 18 to 34
so they can sell their products to them.
Great taste.
Less filling.
Great taste!
The exploitation of woman's bodies
sells products, magazines, et cetera.
Can you open this'?
[gasping]
♪ Isn't it wonderful'? ♪
Dekoven: There has been some discussion
that advertisers are themselves men who are 18 to 34.
They are saying,
"This is the kind of programing we want."
If you show a woman scantily clad,
maybe that's an opportunity
to get more viewers to your show.
And right now advertisements are really the best way
to support a business on the internet.
Click on me and let the show begin.
Sometimes, what will draw the most eyeballs,
at least in the voyeuristic sense,
is something that, you know might be more salacious.
[woman moaning]
In the old days,
there used to be a thing called "The Family Hour,"
which was a voluntary agreement of the three broadcast networks.
Remember those days'?
When you couldn't air
anything inappropriate for children and families
before 9:00 P.M. at night.
Where in return for the free airwaves,
they felt that they had
a very major public-interest commitment.
It's actually enforced
by the Federal Communications Commission... the FCC.
That is gone today, period, end of story.
Today, it is the wild, wild west.
It is a free-for-all, and there's no sense
among folks who run the media and tech industries,
perhaps with the exception of older broadcasters
who remember the good old days,
that they have an obligation to public interest.
It's a myth
that we live in and under and with a democratic media.
We don't.
When it comes to the politics of all this,
in the last 25 years,
our lawmakers have essentially been absent,
out of the picture.
You've had a situation where the lawmakers
who you would hope would represent
the broader public interest are in a sense...
I hate to overstate it...
but are largely in the pocket of the media industry
because their fortunes as politicians
are dependent upon the media coverage
as well as their ability to buy time
on those media stations when they're running for office.
Media has not been held accountable
by our elected representatives,
and it's not a liberal or conservative issue...
it's an american issue and an American problem.
Without a media system that's publicly accountable,
what you have is not only widespread content bias,
but what you have is
a completely inaccessible public conversation.
For years,
the media industry hid behind the label of censorship.
It's not censorship to say to a media company
that's producing an image or a website,
"That's really offensive and really inappropriate."
That's the essence of free speech.
But in a world of a million channels like we have today,
people try to do more shocking and shocking things
to break through the clutter.
And oftentimes, they resort to violent images
or sexually offensive images or demeaning images
'cause they know it will get attention.
The problem is kids are exposed to that
with very little or no mediation.
Kilbourne: These images are part of a cultural climate
in which women are seen as things, as objects,
and turning a human being into athing
is almost always the first step
toward justifying violence against that person.
Siebel Newsom: If the cards
are so heavily stacked against young women,
how are they supposed to achieve their potential
and become leaders'?
We can't turn a blind eye
to how the media impacts our culture
and harms both our daughters and our sons.
We have to help our boys
when they're really young, 5 or 6,
when they're just entering formal schooling,
help them not bifurcate their head from their heart,
not become emotionally illiterate
and feel that they can't show emotion,
that they're sissies if they cry,
that they can't be expressing love.
If a man is taught
that he's supposed to be smarter than women,
he's supposed to make more money than women,
he's supposed to have more respect than women
yet it's not true in real life...
you know, his boss might be a woman
his doctor might be a woman,
a woman might be making more money than him,
the girl next to him in class is smarter than him, et cetera...
what does it mean to be a man'?
If guys don't show this, like, masculine side,
then they're criticized for it,
and they're kind of...
I don't know.
They're looked upon as, like, less of a man.
Now, how do we expect our sons
to be men of integrity and of conscience
and to be social-justice advocates
and to treat women with respect
and to speak up
when they see women being treated with disrespect
if they don't see their fathers doing it,
if they don't see men in the public culture doing it'?
It's not fair to put the burdens
on the shoulders of boys or even young men.
Even though they're part of the solution...
there's no question... this is about adult men.
I definitely am not one to conform
to the "we need to be hyper-masculine,"
and we need to be misogynistic" stereotypes.
And it really puts a lot of pressure on me
when I have relatives
who have grown up with this phenomenon,
who attempt to put me on that path,
but I'm not ready for it.
I remember sitting down
having this conversation with a woman far wiser than me
and starting to talk about,
oh, how bad it is for women in America.
And she just looked at me and listened to me for a while,
and she said, "Well, I have to tell you, Cory,
I actually think it's really bad for men in America."
And I go, "What do you mean?"
She started talking to me
and really putting the spotlight on me and talking about
how emotionally constipated men are taught to be very early on,
how we don't have...
haven't learned how to express ourselves in healthy ways.
It often does manifest itself in such awful and violent ways
but she talked about a spiritual healing
that was needed for guys.
Siebel Newsom: I've been trying to imagine a better world
for my daughter's generation,
and I'm beginning to get some ideas.
The numbers of women in leadership positions
in our country are still very low.
Siebel Newsom: We have to find a way to change this culture.
We need to shift our focus from the bottom line
to one of social responsibility.
We need to challenge the media conglomerates
to value women for more than their youth,
beauty, and sexuality,
and we must hold these companies accountable.
We need to encourage women to discover their true power
so they can become leaders,
and we must support them on theirjourney.
And ultimately, we need to live our own vision
of what a woman can be.
We make a mistake when we say
you have to find role models who look like you.
If Sally Ride, my dear friend, the first female astronaut,
had been waiting for a female astronaut role model,
she would never have done it.
And so I'm a big believer
in finding your role models wherever you can find them,
in people who inspire and stimulate you
for whatever reason.
Growing up, there was nobody who looked like me on television,
so I never dreamed that I could be on television.
I would love to say,
"Yeah, there was great women role models back then."
Actually, there were none.
Years later, Connie Chung went on television
to report on Watergate,
and I'd say to her, "Connie, you're my role model."
And she would say to me, "Jan, but I'm not that old."
And I'd say, "Yeah, you're a year older than I am, Connie,"
and that's good enough for me."
In terms of my role models in television news,
of course Barbara Walters, Lesley Stahl,
and, believe it or not, Mary Tyler Moore.
I grew up watching that show
and the notion of a woman making it on her own
and working at that TV station,
I think, was very, very influential.
One of the things that really surprised me
was the number of women in positions of power in television
who reached out to me and said,
"Can I take you out to breakfast'?
"Can I take you out to lunch'?
"Can I make sure that you have my phone number
or my e-mail address so that if anything comes up..."
And it definitely wasn't like
the gender Mafia going on in the media.
But there was an overt effort to both welcome me
and make me know that women who had gone before me,
who had fought to get where they were
were both happy that I was there
and wanted to be resources to me,
and there's an expectation
that I will be a resource to other women.
Siebel Newsom: When women mentor each other,
it can be incredibly powerful.
I got to know a talented young journalist
named Jessica Shambora.
Jessica was covering a story for Fortune magazine
about mentorship that really proves the point.
I just wanted to introduce myself to you guys.
I'm Jessica Shambora.
I'm with Fortune,
and so I'm gonna be covering the event tonight.
Minute mentoring is a program that a couple of the women from.
Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit came up with.
In order to reach a larger group of young women
who really had this desire to be mentored
and get advice from successful, professional women,
they would have sort of like a speed-dating night,
except for substitute mentoring for the dating.
Meyers: The most important thing that should drive decisions,
especially when you're young,
is what really gets your heart pitter-pattering.
In the end, here's the deal.
You want to be so good at what you do
that they can't ignore you.
Perino: Turn off the television and read.
One hour of reality TV can be fun.
Four hours is, like, destructive.
[laughter]
To thine own self be true.
Know who you are. Know what is best about you.
Have confidence in yourself,
and don't try and be anybody else.
On Tony Snow's last day,
when he was leaving the White House
and I was taking over officially as the White House Press Secretary,
he came into my office, and he said,
"You are better at this than you think you are."
Molinari: I hope you will remember
that you will help that next generation of women along.
It is far overdue that we women stop criticizing each other,
the decisions and the life decisions that we make,
and instead say, "Alleluia, sister.
Whatever gets you through. I'm there to support you."
[applause]
You know, if women don't stand up for each other,
then no one else will.
No one's gonna look out for the interests of women
except other women.
If women spent more time helping a sick neighbour
or volunteering at a homeless shelter,
focusing on how to use all their energy
to solve some of the worlds problems...
if they spent a tenth of the time thinking about those things
that they do thinking about their weight,
I mean, I think we'd solve all the world's problems
in a matter of months.
We're here for an instant in an eternity,
and all that really matters is what we do with that time.
We have enormous power.
86% of the purchasing power in this country
is in the pockets of women.
Well, let's use it.
I mean, let's use it not to buy those tabloid magazines
and not to support the tabloid television shows.
A consumer's voice
is maybe the most important, powerful voice we have
other than as a citizen and using our vote.
Pelosi: Women in America will be more encouraged
if they can see young women who share their experience,
raising a young family, speaking for them,
identifying with their aspirations.
We're creating new leaders,
and they're going to not look like how they always did...
an older, white male.
They're gonna look like a woman,
and they're gonna look like people of colour,
and that is the true reflection of this country
and of this world.
Wilson: I got this little letter one day.
"Ms. Wilson, Do you realize
there has never been a woman president?"
And then she said, I will make a great president.
"I'm practicing my piano, I'm doing my maths,
and my name is Alexandra, which means 'leader of men."'.
Look at those eyes.
Oh, honey.
- Oh! - Hello.
Hello.
- Oh, she's smiling. - She's smiling.
Siebel Newsom: On september18, 2009,
a began myjourney into motherhood.
My husband and I have the same wishes for Montana
that any parents have for their child.
We want her to pursue her purpose and passions in life
and to understand that what's really important
is who she is on the inside.
And it's critical to us
that all girls grow up in a world
where their voice counts,
where our culture embraces them in all of their diversity,
and where they're afforded equal opportunities
to succeed in life.
I keep coming back to my early years.
Too often, we girls and women
don't recognize our own internal strength
I now know that we can't let anyone or anything
take our power away from us.
What do you think, Montana'?
Are you ready'?
If you really want things to change around you,
here's what you can do.
Measure yourself by your accomplishments
and not by how you look.
If you and I, every time we pass a mirror,
downgrade on how we look or complain about our looks
if we remember that a girl is watching us
and that's what she's learning.
Reflect on the ways you might contribute to sexism.
I include myself in this. We scrutinize the woman.
God, look how old she s gott Look how Grey she's gotten.
"What is she wearing?"
I think that as women,
we need to stop that destructive behaviour
that we inflict upon each other and, ultimately, onto ourselves.
Support media that champions accomplished women.
We need strong women role models
who are in the media because they did something,
because they're doing great work,
not because they have the most bangin' body
and they're the Sexiest Woman of 2010.
They're the best philanthropist.
They're the best in the medical field.
And it's not about the way they look.
It's about who they are inside.
Boycott magazines, TV shows, and movies
that objectify and degrade women.
Speaking your mind and criticizing media companies
when you think they're doing things
that are inappropriate to your children
is not just your God-given right as an American, as a parent,
but it's also entirely consistent
with the First Amendment.
Go see movies written and directed by women.
And it's important to go on opening weekend,
and Friday is best
because these are the numbers that Hollywood tracks.
Write your own stories and create your own media
about powerful women in non-traditional roles.
My daughter, when she was 9,
she wrote this little screenplay,
and she shot a movie, you know with our little video camera,
casting her friends.
It was just so much fun for her.
And it teaches them that the media are a construction.
And they start to understand
that these are stories that people are telling them,
and they can come up with their own stories to tell back
and very often, they can be, you know
subversive stories, resistance stories.
Teach those around you to look at the media critically.
Well, one thing that I do with my kids is
I watch these shows with them.
I say, "Hey, did you notice"
there's only one female in that group?"
And, "What if that character had been a girl instead?"
And, "Why is she wearing that"
when she's trying to rescue somebody?"
Ask your school to start a media-literacy course
focused on gender issues.
We need media literacy
as much, I think, as we need to learn to read.
Our responses should be,
"Whose perspectives are framing this story?"
There are always more than two sides to every story.
Are we being sold here'?
Don't be afraid to challenge your friends
if you hear them saying derogatory things about women.
King said it very eloquently.
"The problem today is not the vitriolic words
"and the evil actions of the bad people.
It's the appalling silence and inaction of the good people."
Find healthy role models and be a mentor to others.
Encourage women to become leaders.
And support them in the process.
If we see women who we think would be excellent
at any political job,
whether it's dogcatcher, school-board member,
or member of Congress, we need to make that known.
"Whatever women do,
"they must do twice as well as a man
"to be thought of as half as good.
Luckily, that's not too difficult."
♪ Woke up today ♪
♪ I looked around ♪
♪ And I had to smile cause I understood ♪
♪ That my whole life's ahead of me ♪
♪ Don't know what'll happen, but it's all good ♪
♪ 'Cause no one can break me ♪
♪ They can't retain me ♪
♪ Don't matter if they try to push me around ♪
♪ I ain't goin' down ♪
♪ 'Cause this is my life ♪
♪ I'm feelin' all right ♪
♪ I'm gonna keep livin' the way I like ♪
♪ No bringin' me down ♪
♪ Can't stand in my way ♪
♪ They can't change me 'cause I won't change ♪
♪ I got my dancin' shoes on ♪
♪ I think I'm gonna wear 'em every day ♪
♪ Hey, hey, yeah ♪
♪ I think I'm gonna fly through the galaxy ♪
♪ Explore the Milky Way ♪
♪ Hey, hey, he)”
♪ Maybe I'll be president ♪
♪ Maybe I'll be queen ♪
♪ Maybe I'll be doing things the world has never seen ♪
♪ This is my life ♪
♪ Yeah, this my life ♪
♪ This is my life ♪
♪ 'Cause this is my life ♪
♪ I'm feelin' all right ♪
♪ I'm gonna keep livin' the way I like ♪
♪ No bringin' me down ♪
♪ Can't stand in my way ♪
♪ They can't change me 'cause I won't change ♪
♪ This is my life ♪