Here tis, as promised, from the White House Project, the Women’s Media Center, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and written by moi:
Read this document on Scribd: SoundbitesReport
media
Just when we thought we’d had enough of media (and everyone else’s) sexism. Sigh. For a Sarah Palin Sexism Watch, hop on over to Shakesville. They’re doing a great job. And meanwhile do check out Marco’s post over at Open Salon, “Mom, Guns, and Apple Pie.”
Me, I’m heading off today for South Carolina, where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at the University of South Carolina Upstate. I just added a TON about Palin and the sexism coming her way after only less than 48 hours. Here’s the description:
Talkin ’bout My Generation: Youth, Gender, Race, Class and the 2008 Election
SYNOPSIS: Young voters—and female ones in particular—have been the subject of heated debate in an election when race and gender matter like never before. But what do young voters really think about gender, feminism, race, and the Presidential election? In this talk, cultural critic and feminist Deborah Siegel sheds fresh light on media myths and real-life generational rifts that surfaced during primary season, creating an interactive forum in which members of the so-called postfeminist, post-Civil Rights generation are invited to freely speak their minds.
(And hey – to bring me to your campus, contact info@speakingmatters.org !)
I’ve presented at the Women, Action, and Media (WAM!) Conference twice now and highly recommend it for its colleagiality and bloggy networking opportunities. The organizers are currently collecting proposals for their 2009 conference, which takes place on March 27-29 this year at MIT. CFP embedded below (you can click on the image to make it larger). Have at it, GWPers.
Read this document on Scribd: WAM!2009CFP
For anyone not yet acquainted with the Michelle Obama Watch blog, today is probably as good day as ever to stop by for links to all things Michelle. And for MOW founder Gina’s blow by blow from the floor of the convention, go here.
Personally, I thought Michelle rocked the house last night. Seen any particularly interesting commentary or analysis out there? Feel free to post links in comments!
Yes, Happy Convention Day! As Allison Stevens reports, this year women are running much of the show and helping craft the script.
A quick reminder for those of you lucky enough to be in Denver this week:
The Women’s Media Center and The White House Project will both be reporting on the latest from the DNC–where together they are hosting a panel, Soundbites to Solutions: Bias Punditry and the Press in The 2008 Election, along with The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Panelists include:
* Jonathan Alter, Senior Editor, Newsweek
* Michele Martin, Host, “Tell Me More” on NPR
* Maria Teresa Petersen, Founding Executive Director, Voto Latino and Commentator for MSNBC (and a fellow PWVer)
* Jamal Simmons, Political Analyst, CNN
* Rebecca Traister, Senior Writer, Salon.com
At the panel, they’ll be releasing an accompanying report (authored by yours truly!) called BIAS, PUNDITRY, AND THE PRESS: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Report available to public today too–I’ll be sure to post info when it’s up. Registration for the event required at www.seachangecom.
More women-focused DNC events posted here and here.
And hey–if you’re reading this from Denver and would like to post something about the events you attend here on GWP telling us about it, please email me at girlwpen@gmail.com.
Anytime Jean Kilbourne has a new book out, I pay attention. And last week, I came upon her latest while hunting for that new ProBlogger book at B&N. Kilbourne’s latest is called So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, and it’s coauthored with education professor Diane Levin.
I was waiting for someone to come out with this book. Like The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (note the similarity of the subtitles), the authors accuse the media of sexualizing children. No surprise there. But what does sound surprising is the extremity of the anecdotes. Here’s from the Publishers Weekly review:
Constantly, American children are exposed to a barrage of sexual images in television, movies, music and the Internet. They are taught young that buying certain clothes, consuming brand-name soft drinks and owning the right possessions will make them sexy and cool—and being sexy and cool is the most important thing. Young men and women are spoon-fed images that equate sex with violence, paint women as sexually subservient to men and encourage hooking up rather than meaningful connections. The result is that kids are having sex younger and with more partners than ever before. Eating disorders and body image issues are common as early as grade school. Levin and Kilbourne stress that there is nothing wrong with a young person’s natural sexual awakening, but it is wrong to allow a young person’s sexuality to be hijacked by corporations who want them as customers. The authors offer advice on how parents can limit children’s exposure to commercialized sex, and how parents can engage kids in constructive, age-appropriate conversation about sex and the media. One need only read the authors’ anecdotes to see why this book is relevant.
Any of you parents–or girls studies experts–out there got your own advice on dealing with this phenomenon? Inquiring minds are eager to know.
I’m thrilled to announce that a report I took the lead on for the Women’s Media Center, the White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, will be released and distributed at the DNC in Denver on August 25. The report, “Bias, Punditry, and the Press: Where Do We Go From Here,” includes recommendations for the media and consumers of media and will be available for download after its official release.
Additional happenings of interest going on at the DNC, all conveyed via Carol Jenkins (thanks, Carol, for the heads ups!):
-On August 25, there will be a reprise of the WMC/WHP/MIJE forum, From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry and the Press in the 2008 Election, on which the report is based. This time the panelists will be Michel Martin of NPR, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Patricia Williams of The Nation, Rebecca Traister of Salon, Jamal Simmons of CNN, and MarÃa Teresa Petersen of Voto Latino, among others. Video clips from the original forum, which took place at The Paley Center, can be accessed from the WMC website.
-On Tuesday, August 26, Senator Hillary Clinton will address the delegates. That is the 88th anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution became law, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. Senator Barack Obama accepts the nomination on Thursday, August 28th, before a public audience of 75,000 people. That is the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
-On Wednesday, August 27, the WMC is hosting a panel with Women’s eNews at which six leading congresswomen (Loretta Sanchez-CA, Rosa DeLauro-CT, Carolyn Maloney-NY, Gwen Moore-WI, Lois Capps-CA confirmed so far) will discuss WEN’s The Memo– a status report of six areas that the candidates and delegates must address. The congresswomen will address the media’s handling of women and the economy, immigration, women in the military, international issues, war and peace, and health. Do check out my fellow PWVer Pramila Jayapal’s Election Dispatch on Immigration and Jennifer Hogg’s Election Dispatch on Women in the Military.
-And finally, this year, the convention is chaired by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the highest ranking woman elected official in the country, co-chaired by Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Texas State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. The CEO of the Democratic National Convention Committee is Leah D. Daughtry.
It’s my delight, as always, to bring you this guest post from GWP regular Virginia Rutter, prof of sociology at Framingham State College, to whom I send out a big batch of xxoo! -Deborah
At the American Sociological Association meeting this past weekend, Pepper Schwartz, Barbara Risman, and I spoke on a panel on gender and the media: The case study of the “opt out” story—covered here at GWP recently—helped get everyone on the same creepy page about how reportorial anecdotes get transformed into a mythic cultural truth…until the facts finally get the light of day.
Quick recap on opt-out: In the opt out story, the narrative was that women were choosing to leave the work force and join the mommy track. Heather Boushey and
others did the research to show that first, the work force is the mommy track—more than ever before mothers of small children—college-educated even more so than others–go to work. But there’s more: our crash and burn economy currently means that women, like men, are getting laid off and losing jobs. Women aren’t opting out, there are fewer jobs for them, just like men, to opt in. Evidence trumps myth.
But, as I reminded the little crowd at our ASA talk, there is a lot that goes right in our media in terms of making gender a mainstream topic, not an academic buzz word. The women and science debate set off by remarks Lawrence Summers made at Harvard has caused us to look explicitly at gender bias (thanks Larry!) and then of course to detect it in our imperfect public conversations about it. Hillary Clinton’s campaign also brought about a platform for everyone to think about gender. The thinking is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes ugly (check out the Women’s Media Project’s sexism sells video), but it is mainstream, as this public editor essay from the Times shows us.
So, on Sunday, it felt good to read Jennifer Finney Bolan’s op-ed in the New York Times on “The X-Y Games.” She gave us a textbook lesson on gender and sex. She reports that:
Last week, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics announced that they had set up a “gender determination lab” to test female athletes suspected of being male. “Experts” at the lab will evaluate athletes based on their physical appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes.
Bolan, who is an English Professor at Colby College, provides a history of sex tests at the Olympics (nudity worked in 776 BC, ocular assessment was the tool in 1968, and now we do chromosomal tests). The stories she tells are fascinating. But the lesson is crucial: even sex—what we think of as our biological profile as “xx” or “xy”—doesn’t fit neatly into boxes, what with chromosomal anomalies and transgender and transsexual people. This reality with respect to biological sex reminds us that gender, too, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. (Pepper Schwartz and I write about this in our book, The Gender of Sexuality.) We can’t, for example, determine whether someone is a man or woman by what they wear, who they love, whether they have babies or whether they can have babies or whether they like babies.
Bolan gave us a great lesson until her conclusion. She argues gender isn’t what’s on the outside, it is on the inside, which means it is about how we feel and think about ourselves. But, remember the opt-out narrative? Here’s the deal: no woman has to feel any particular way about herself or her identity in order to be subject to 1. cultural narratives that place her in a box or ascribe meaning to what she’s doing or 2. economic forces that make her more likely than men to be impoverished or to earn a lower wage or 3. a whole bunch of other social forces that mean that gender is not just about identity but about group membership and social class. Same for the boys: No man has to feel a particular way about himself in order to be subject to 1. the threat of violence based on homophobia or 2. workplace sanctions—formal and informal—for using family leave for domestic caregiving.
But the bigger lesson is this: we’re talking about gender—not in code (at least some of the time its not in code) but in direct, clear, and therefore debatable terms. We’re not just talking about it in academia (which from my academic point of view is also a great place to talk, just different). We’re talking about it all over the place. And learning as we go along. So give me xx/xy and I’ll give you xxoo.
A hearty congratulations to the members of the Final 2008 Class of Progressive Women’s Voices! The new participants will join us (we?) alumna of the program to ensure that women are visible and powerful in the media. Tidbits from the press release:
Launched in January of this year, Progressive Women’s Voices has provided 33 women from a variety of fields with intensive media training and ongoing support to promote their perspective and message into the national dialogue. Since the program began, the Women’s Media Center has already had an impact at the highest levels of the media. Participants have appeared on such media outlets as CNN and CBS Evening News, been quoted by The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, placed op-eds in national papers including the Washington Post, and blogged about issues from the economy to race.
“You can’t change the lopsided numbers of women working at top levels overnight,” said Carol Jenkins, president of The Women’s Media Center. “That’s why we created this year-long, intensive program that includes briefings from experts, conversations with media professionals, pairing with mentors-as well as pitching to media outlets. The women get on-camera and op-ed writing training, and constant feedback. They have a support system, and it shows.”
Participants in the third training class include authors, policy leaders and journalists – 11 women whose diverse backgrounds reflect the diversity of women’s experiences in the United States. They join 22 current participants, forming a stable of progressive women who will add their voices to the national conversation in areas of economics, politics, health care, immigration, women’s rights, workplace policy, and other important issues. The program is funded primarily by a generous grant from the NoVo Foundation and with additional support from the UN Foundation and other supporters.
A personal shout out to Veronica Arreola and Alissa Quart. For a full list of participants in the third class, click here.
A little slow to posting today…
A bit o history making over the weekend, as reported by Adele Stan over at Huffington Post: Sunday’s face-off between the McCain campaign’s Carly Fiorina and the Obama campaign’s Claire McCaskill on NBC’s Meet the Press served up an historic television moment; it was the first time in the show’s history, said moderator Tom Brokaw, that two women had appeared together on the show as the surrogates for opposing campaigns.
Just when we thought we’d had enough of media (and everyone else’s) sexism. Sigh. For a Sarah Palin Sexism Watch, hop on over to Shakesville. They’re doing a great job. And meanwhile do check out Marco’s post over at Open Salon, “Mom, Guns, and Apple Pie.”
Me, I’m heading off today for South Carolina, where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at the University of South Carolina Upstate. I just added a TON about Palin and the sexism coming her way after only less than 48 hours. Here’s the description:
Talkin ’bout My Generation: Youth, Gender, Race, Class and the 2008 Election
SYNOPSIS: Young voters—and female ones in particular—have been the subject of heated debate in an election when race and gender matter like never before. But what do young voters really think about gender, feminism, race, and the Presidential election? In this talk, cultural critic and feminist Deborah Siegel sheds fresh light on media myths and real-life generational rifts that surfaced during primary season, creating an interactive forum in which members of the so-called postfeminist, post-Civil Rights generation are invited to freely speak their minds.
(And hey – to bring me to your campus, contact info@speakingmatters.org !)
I’ve presented at the Women, Action, and Media (WAM!) Conference twice now and highly recommend it for its colleagiality and bloggy networking opportunities. The organizers are currently collecting proposals for their 2009 conference, which takes place on March 27-29 this year at MIT. CFP embedded below (you can click on the image to make it larger). Have at it, GWPers.
Read this document on Scribd: WAM!2009CFP
For anyone not yet acquainted with the Michelle Obama Watch blog, today is probably as good day as ever to stop by for links to all things Michelle. And for MOW founder Gina’s blow by blow from the floor of the convention, go here.
Personally, I thought Michelle rocked the house last night. Seen any particularly interesting commentary or analysis out there? Feel free to post links in comments!
Yes, Happy Convention Day! As Allison Stevens reports, this year women are running much of the show and helping craft the script.
A quick reminder for those of you lucky enough to be in Denver this week:
The Women’s Media Center and The White House Project will both be reporting on the latest from the DNC–where together they are hosting a panel, Soundbites to Solutions: Bias Punditry and the Press in The 2008 Election, along with The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Panelists include:
* Jonathan Alter, Senior Editor, Newsweek
* Michele Martin, Host, “Tell Me More” on NPR
* Maria Teresa Petersen, Founding Executive Director, Voto Latino and Commentator for MSNBC (and a fellow PWVer)
* Jamal Simmons, Political Analyst, CNN
* Rebecca Traister, Senior Writer, Salon.com
At the panel, they’ll be releasing an accompanying report (authored by yours truly!) called BIAS, PUNDITRY, AND THE PRESS: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Report available to public today too–I’ll be sure to post info when it’s up. Registration for the event required at www.seachangecom.
More women-focused DNC events posted here and here.
And hey–if you’re reading this from Denver and would like to post something about the events you attend here on GWP telling us about it, please email me at girlwpen@gmail.com.
Anytime Jean Kilbourne has a new book out, I pay attention. And last week, I came upon her latest while hunting for that new ProBlogger book at B&N. Kilbourne’s latest is called So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, and it’s coauthored with education professor Diane Levin.
I was waiting for someone to come out with this book. Like The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (note the similarity of the subtitles), the authors accuse the media of sexualizing children. No surprise there. But what does sound surprising is the extremity of the anecdotes. Here’s from the Publishers Weekly review:
Constantly, American children are exposed to a barrage of sexual images in television, movies, music and the Internet. They are taught young that buying certain clothes, consuming brand-name soft drinks and owning the right possessions will make them sexy and cool—and being sexy and cool is the most important thing. Young men and women are spoon-fed images that equate sex with violence, paint women as sexually subservient to men and encourage hooking up rather than meaningful connections. The result is that kids are having sex younger and with more partners than ever before. Eating disorders and body image issues are common as early as grade school. Levin and Kilbourne stress that there is nothing wrong with a young person’s natural sexual awakening, but it is wrong to allow a young person’s sexuality to be hijacked by corporations who want them as customers. The authors offer advice on how parents can limit children’s exposure to commercialized sex, and how parents can engage kids in constructive, age-appropriate conversation about sex and the media. One need only read the authors’ anecdotes to see why this book is relevant.
Any of you parents–or girls studies experts–out there got your own advice on dealing with this phenomenon? Inquiring minds are eager to know.
I’m thrilled to announce that a report I took the lead on for the Women’s Media Center, the White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, will be released and distributed at the DNC in Denver on August 25. The report, “Bias, Punditry, and the Press: Where Do We Go From Here,” includes recommendations for the media and consumers of media and will be available for download after its official release.
Additional happenings of interest going on at the DNC, all conveyed via Carol Jenkins (thanks, Carol, for the heads ups!):
-On August 25, there will be a reprise of the WMC/WHP/MIJE forum, From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry and the Press in the 2008 Election, on which the report is based. This time the panelists will be Michel Martin of NPR, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Patricia Williams of The Nation, Rebecca Traister of Salon, Jamal Simmons of CNN, and MarÃa Teresa Petersen of Voto Latino, among others. Video clips from the original forum, which took place at The Paley Center, can be accessed from the WMC website.
-On Tuesday, August 26, Senator Hillary Clinton will address the delegates. That is the 88th anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution became law, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. Senator Barack Obama accepts the nomination on Thursday, August 28th, before a public audience of 75,000 people. That is the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
-On Wednesday, August 27, the WMC is hosting a panel with Women’s eNews at which six leading congresswomen (Loretta Sanchez-CA, Rosa DeLauro-CT, Carolyn Maloney-NY, Gwen Moore-WI, Lois Capps-CA confirmed so far) will discuss WEN’s The Memo– a status report of six areas that the candidates and delegates must address. The congresswomen will address the media’s handling of women and the economy, immigration, women in the military, international issues, war and peace, and health. Do check out my fellow PWVer Pramila Jayapal’s Election Dispatch on Immigration and Jennifer Hogg’s Election Dispatch on Women in the Military.
-And finally, this year, the convention is chaired by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the highest ranking woman elected official in the country, co-chaired by Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Texas State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. The CEO of the Democratic National Convention Committee is Leah D. Daughtry.
It’s my delight, as always, to bring you this guest post from GWP regular Virginia Rutter, prof of sociology at Framingham State College, to whom I send out a big batch of xxoo! -Deborah
At the American Sociological Association meeting this past weekend, Pepper Schwartz, Barbara Risman, and I spoke on a panel on gender and the media: The case study of the “opt out” story—covered here at GWP recently—helped get everyone on the same creepy page about how reportorial anecdotes get transformed into a mythic cultural truth…until the facts finally get the light of day.
Quick recap on opt-out: In the opt out story, the narrative was that women were choosing to leave the work force and join the mommy track. Heather Boushey and
others did the research to show that first, the work force is the mommy track—more than ever before mothers of small children—college-educated even more so than others–go to work. But there’s more: our crash and burn economy currently means that women, like men, are getting laid off and losing jobs. Women aren’t opting out, there are fewer jobs for them, just like men, to opt in. Evidence trumps myth.
But, as I reminded the little crowd at our ASA talk, there is a lot that goes right in our media in terms of making gender a mainstream topic, not an academic buzz word. The women and science debate set off by remarks Lawrence Summers made at Harvard has caused us to look explicitly at gender bias (thanks Larry!) and then of course to detect it in our imperfect public conversations about it. Hillary Clinton’s campaign also brought about a platform for everyone to think about gender. The thinking is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes ugly (check out the Women’s Media Project’s sexism sells video), but it is mainstream, as this public editor essay from the Times shows us.
So, on Sunday, it felt good to read Jennifer Finney Bolan’s op-ed in the New York Times on “The X-Y Games.” She gave us a textbook lesson on gender and sex. She reports that:
Last week, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics announced that they had set up a “gender determination lab” to test female athletes suspected of being male. “Experts” at the lab will evaluate athletes based on their physical appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes.
Bolan, who is an English Professor at Colby College, provides a history of sex tests at the Olympics (nudity worked in 776 BC, ocular assessment was the tool in 1968, and now we do chromosomal tests). The stories she tells are fascinating. But the lesson is crucial: even sex—what we think of as our biological profile as “xx” or “xy”—doesn’t fit neatly into boxes, what with chromosomal anomalies and transgender and transsexual people. This reality with respect to biological sex reminds us that gender, too, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. (Pepper Schwartz and I write about this in our book, The Gender of Sexuality.) We can’t, for example, determine whether someone is a man or woman by what they wear, who they love, whether they have babies or whether they can have babies or whether they like babies.
Bolan gave us a great lesson until her conclusion. She argues gender isn’t what’s on the outside, it is on the inside, which means it is about how we feel and think about ourselves. But, remember the opt-out narrative? Here’s the deal: no woman has to feel any particular way about herself or her identity in order to be subject to 1. cultural narratives that place her in a box or ascribe meaning to what she’s doing or 2. economic forces that make her more likely than men to be impoverished or to earn a lower wage or 3. a whole bunch of other social forces that mean that gender is not just about identity but about group membership and social class. Same for the boys: No man has to feel a particular way about himself in order to be subject to 1. the threat of violence based on homophobia or 2. workplace sanctions—formal and informal—for using family leave for domestic caregiving.
But the bigger lesson is this: we’re talking about gender—not in code (at least some of the time its not in code) but in direct, clear, and therefore debatable terms. We’re not just talking about it in academia (which from my academic point of view is also a great place to talk, just different). We’re talking about it all over the place. And learning as we go along. So give me xx/xy and I’ll give you xxoo.
A hearty congratulations to the members of the Final 2008 Class of Progressive Women’s Voices! The new participants will join us (we?) alumna of the program to ensure that women are visible and powerful in the media. Tidbits from the press release:
Launched in January of this year, Progressive Women’s Voices has provided 33 women from a variety of fields with intensive media training and ongoing support to promote their perspective and message into the national dialogue. Since the program began, the Women’s Media Center has already had an impact at the highest levels of the media. Participants have appeared on such media outlets as CNN and CBS Evening News, been quoted by The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, placed op-eds in national papers including the Washington Post, and blogged about issues from the economy to race.
“You can’t change the lopsided numbers of women working at top levels overnight,” said Carol Jenkins, president of The Women’s Media Center. “That’s why we created this year-long, intensive program that includes briefings from experts, conversations with media professionals, pairing with mentors-as well as pitching to media outlets. The women get on-camera and op-ed writing training, and constant feedback. They have a support system, and it shows.”
Participants in the third training class include authors, policy leaders and journalists – 11 women whose diverse backgrounds reflect the diversity of women’s experiences in the United States. They join 22 current participants, forming a stable of progressive women who will add their voices to the national conversation in areas of economics, politics, health care, immigration, women’s rights, workplace policy, and other important issues. The program is funded primarily by a generous grant from the NoVo Foundation and with additional support from the UN Foundation and other supporters.
A personal shout out to Veronica Arreola and Alissa Quart. For a full list of participants in the third class, click here.
A little slow to posting today…
A bit o history making over the weekend, as reported by Adele Stan over at Huffington Post: Sunday’s face-off between the McCain campaign’s Carly Fiorina and the Obama campaign’s Claire McCaskill on NBC’s Meet the Press served up an historic television moment; it was the first time in the show’s history, said moderator Tom Brokaw, that two women had appeared together on the show as the surrogates for opposing campaigns.
