I just watched a trailer for a great-looking new documentary called Miss Representation. Its premise, from the film’s website, is that “American youth are being sold the concept that women and girls’ value lies in their youth, beauty and sexuality. It’s time to break that cycle of mistruths.” Here’s the trailer:
A very worthy topic. I actually watched an extended 8-minute trailer, which you can find on Facebook. In that video, the film expresses a theory of change based on getting more women into positions of power in politics, corporations and media. From the film’s website:
While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have an eating disorder.
Though it’s not plainly stated anywhere, the website and trailer imply that if more women were in positions of power, the despairing treatment of women in media and advertising would improve. This, on the face of it, seems like a rationale approach to the problem.
I can’t speak broadly to the issue, but whenever this solution is presented, I think of women’s magazines. Specifically, I think of magazines apparently culpable in the objectification of women–Cosmopolitan, Glamour and their sundry sisters.
These magazines have been staffed and run by women for decades. Glamourhas had a female editor since its inception in 1939.
If these magazines are produced by women, then why do we regularly point to them as a source of the message that “women and girls’ value lies in their youth, beauty and sexuality”? Here are the possibilities I can think of:
Despite all the women on the masthead, the tone and content of these magazines are driven by the men who own the magazines at Condé Nast and Hearst.
Sex sells, and in a competitive landscape, women are as likely as men to race to the bottom.
We’ll require many women leaders in many different fields and vocations before progress can be made on this culture of objectification and sexism.
Other reasons I haven’t thought of.
Now, obviously, achieving gender equity in positions of power is essential for a healthy society. There are many, many reasons for why we need more female politicians and executives. And Miss Representation seems like a very worthy film.
However, the ongoing popularity of Cosmopolitan, written by and for women, prevents me from completely buying the “more women in power” leads to “less emphasis on girls and womens’ youth, beauty and sexuality” thesis.
What do you think?
A Footnote on the 3%
The trailer also used the statistic I quoted above, about only 3% of women being in “clout positions” in media. That seemed shockingly low, so I wanted to learn more about it. The Miss Representation site provided no source for this quote. I did some searching, and determined that it came from a 2003 report entitled “The Glass Ceiling Persists”. The report defines “clout positions” as “clout titles as those positions that ‘wield the most corporate influence and policy making power.’ These titles include: Chairman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Vice Chairman, President, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Senior Executive Vice President, and Executive Vice President.”
The report examined three advertising companies, 11 entertainment firms and 18 publishing companies. So, that seems hardly like a definitive analysis of the media industry. It’s a dubious statistic at best.
It’s also worth noting that the average age of a new CEO in 2009 was 53, while the average age of any CEO according to a couple of sources is about 57. Considering it’s a 2003 study, that means 2003-era CEOs were entering the workforce in the late sixties and early seventies. At that time, there were fewer women in the workforce, and fewer of them expected to become a CEO.
My point? It’s a lousy stat, and there are definitely better, equally shocking ones available. Also, we’re probably a generation away from seeing anything close to parity in these “clout positions”. On top of all the other battles women have fought, it just takes a long time to make a CEO.
The Globe and Mail is running a series of articles about gender roles in education. In particular, they’re wondering how and why “boys rank behind girls by nearly every measure of scholastic achievement”. From the first article:
Here, a hill of data suggests that boys, as a group, rank behind girls by nearly every measure of scholastic achievement. They earn lower grades overall in elementary school and high school. They trail in reading and writing, and 30 per cent of them land in the bottom quarter of standardized tests, compared with 19 per cent of girls. Boys are also more likely to be picked out for behavioural problems, more likely to repeat a grade and to drop out of school altogether.
I found these facts from the same article particularly compelling:
Compelling insight comes from Statistics Canada’s ambitious Youth In Transition Survey, which in 2000 began tracking 30,000 15-year-olds at 1,000 schools and 23,000 youths between the ages of 18 and 20. It finds that while overall marks, reading ability and study habits are the top three predictors of which teenager will go to university, parental expectations rank fourth.
Nearly 70 per cent of parents said they expected their 15-year-old daughters would complete a university degree. Yet only 60 per cent had the same expectation of their 15-year-old sons.
I mentioned the piece to an English professor I know. She said that of the 51 students in her classes this semester, 48 of them are female. I know it’s the English department, but that’s 94% women. All other considerations aside, those three dudes better not be sitting home alone on Friday nights.
Another little story: I know somebody who worked at UVic. She said the campus bookstore was having some fun with the gender imbalance by selling t-shirts featuring this graphic:
I don’t have any kids, but even if I did, I think I’d find it pretty hard to get particularly vexed about this issue. It’s not a question of doors being shut to young men, but rather one of the young women outclassing them. I also expect that we can chalk this up to the gender pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction. That’s refreshing, if nothing else.
Are you concerned about the education of young men?
13-year-old Chelsea Baker may be one of the best Little League pitchers in the country. She hasn’t lost a game in the last four years, and this past season she struck out 127 batters in 60 innings. This is more exceptional because she doesn’t have a Y chromosome. In fact, she’s the only girl on her team.
I learned about Ms. Baker through this 10-minute ESPN piece. Even if you have no interest in baseball or child prodigies, you should watch a few minutes of it for the sheer audacity of its production. The storytelling is pretty good, but it overflows with unnecessary post-production tricks and clunky visual metaphors. It’s like Oliver Stone is moonlighting for the sports network.
It’s surely a foamy latte problem, but there’s something uniquely despicable about rude and belligerent sports parents, isn’t there?
Baseball feels like one of those sports where women have a good shot at playing in the (historically all male) major leagues. Not to be controversial, but women are always going to struggle against men in sports involving speed and physical contact–hockey, American football, soccer and the like.
Pitching, in particular, seems like an area where women could match or exceed men. Not that every league or sport needs to be mixed. However, Ms. Baker is way good for any girls’ leagues. If she wants to continue to play and be challenged, she’s going to have to keep playing with the boys.
A friend sent me this exquisitely-written book review from this month’s The Atlantic. Written by Caitlan Flanagan, the article explores how young women reconcile the so-called Boyfriend Story–”the gossamer-wrapped quest for true and perfect love”–with “the reality of the sexual era in which we live”. She does so through the lens of Anita Shreve’s novel, Testimony, for which she has high praise.
While Flanagan’s thesis is well-constructed, I want to highlight the calibre of her writing. Consider this section:
Today’s teenage girl–as much designed for closely held, romantic relationships as were the girls of every other era–is having to broker a life for herself in which she is, on the one hand, a card-carrying member of the over-parented generation, her extended girlhood made into a frantically observed and constantly commemorated possession of her parents, wrought into being with elaborate Sweet 16 parties, and heart-tugging video montages, and senior proms of mawkish, Cinderella-dream dimensions–and on the other hand she has been forced in a sexual knowingness, brought upon her by the fact that, beginning at a relatively tender age, she has been exposed to the kind of hard-core pornography that her own mother has probably never seen; that her earliest textbooks on puberty have included, perforce, eye-opening and often upsetting information on everything from the transmission of HIV to the range and expression of sexual orientations; that she has been taught by her peer culture that hookups are what stolen, spin-the-bottle kisses were a quarter-century ago. She is a little girl; she is a person as wise in the ways of sexual expression as an old woman.
Most of that is a single sentence, long but utterly intelligible.
I haven’t had time to read theseresponses to the piece, but they might interest.
Every once in a while I encounter a piece of magazine writing that I recommend as course material to friends and family who teach English and communications. This is one such piece.
In the past few years, I’ve become interested in the rise of female power, particularly in the realm of money and consumption. Here’s an example from your local drugstore’s magazine rack.
I don’t do this with any sense of resentment. Men have wielded the purse strings for all of human history, after all. It’s high time that pendulum swung the other way.
Last night, it occurred to me television was following other media forms in its reorientation to female audiences. Consider the most popular shows in the US for last week:
Dancing with the Stars
American Idol – Wednesday
American Idol – Tuesday
NCIS
The Mentalist
NCIS: Los Angeles
CSI
Survivor
The Good Wife
Criminal Minds
I can’t speak to all of the shows in the top ten, but the top three definitely have a predominantly female audience. None have an obviously mostly-male audience. This should be no surprise. Women control a huge portion (85%, according to this article) of a household’s income. And–this was news to me–they watch more television. The most recent data I could easily find was from 2004, but in that year, Statistics Canada reported that adult women watched nearly five more hours (25.6 to 20.9 hours) of television a week than men.
Musing on this topic on Twitter earlier today, I asked about TV shows (besides sports and shows about cars) that predominantly appeal to men. Here are some of the suggestions I received that rang true:
Mythbusters
Handyman Superstar Challenge
Dexter
Most Extreme Elimination Challenge
Deadliest Catch
The Simpsons
Family Guy
There were also several suggestions for anything on Spike TV. Is that the only male-oriented channel, besides the likes of TSN and SportsNet? What’s your experience of watching television these days?
Last year I complained about a periodical incursion–how magazines for men were increasingly being annexed by magazines targeted at a female audience. I was down at Pharmasave today, and snapped this photo of this ongoing trend (click for a bigger version):
I couldn’t get the whole newsstand in, but this is certainly representative. You can find a smattering of men’s interest magazines on the top shelf, but that’s really it. And most are buried in the third or fourth row, the way girlie magazines used to be.
I’m not actually lobbying that men deserve more shelf space. It’s pure economics. Consider this table from the Magazine Publishers of America. Of the top 50 magazines sold in 2007, only three could be considered primarily of interest to men (by my count, two others might qualify as appealing equally to both genders). The top male interest magazine, Men’s Health, is in the 17th spot, with a single copy circulation of 544,054. Cosompolitan, the top magazine, has a circulation of 1,882,061.
Men just aren’t buying magazines. Or, more accurately, women are buying a lot more magazines than men.
Victorians love their lawns and gardens. I mean, there’s even an annual flower count. Are all the local retirees so footloose and fancy-free that they’re resigned to counting the begonias in their front yard? I note that the count has come down in recent years, to a mere 2.4 billion.
As a result of this passion for all things flora, my neighbourhood seems overrun by landscapers. Not a day goes by that I pass at least one stenciled van or pickup truck (‘Lawneratti’, ‘Aboreal Morals’…ah, I’m making those up) parked outside a house, with somebody wailing away with a weed whacker in the front yard.
In my youth, it seems to me that all gardeners, lawn mowers and landscapers were men. It was a common summer job among my male peers in high school and university. These days, however, it seems like at least half of these employees are women. That’s a significant shift. Has anybody else observed this trend?
On a vaguely related note, a friend and I were talking over the weekend about how much less dog poo one sees when out and about. Hearkening again back to my childhood, I remember how the boulevard in front of my friend’s house was off limits because it was notoriously rife with doggy landmines. I guess the social pressure on dog owners has increased over the past two decades?
New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott narrates a nice five-minute video exploring the excellence and universal appeal of Pixar’s films. His thesis, in summary, is that they often feature an identity crisis–the hero feels he doesn’t belong. Humans of all stripes respond to such notions. Plus, of course, they’re usually exceptionally executed.
On a related note, I was recently listening in to a conversation among five 30-something, university-educated women. They were talking about movies. Despite being aware of the glowingreviews for Pixar’s Wall-E, they were unanimous in their lack of interest in seeing the movie.
I don’t want to inspire a lot of female commenters to contradict me, but I have a sense that women are generally less interested in animated films than men. This seems entirely understandable, given that most of the animated work they’ve seen has been a) made primarily for boys, featuring male protagonists and b) bad. Still, I think it’s unfortunate, because some of the most remarkable and effective movies of the last decade have been animated. I’m thinking here of Persepolis, Ratatouille and The Incredibles. The former of these movies obviously bucks this trend, but it didn’t necessarily have the broad appeal of the Pixar movies.
