Just because it’s difficult to deal with issues of gender equality, writes Soraya Chemaly, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
That’s the conclusion you have to come to after watching Miss Representation, a documentary about the debilitating influence of media on girls and society that aired recently on the OWN network.
If you are a mom or dad interested in changing culture so that it is more gender-balanced and equitable stop whining and just go home. It’s so much easier than thinking about the information synthesized and encapsulated by the movie.
We are so screwed. This too hard. It’s easier to ignore the problems of gender inequity, and it’s definitely more fun to. I mean, who wants all this striving for equality. Girls get it. They’re not stupid. That’s why they’re receding from public life. Boys get it, too, which is why we are having a “trouble with boys” debate. How many ways can we set our kids up either by undermining their confidence (girls?) or creating a false sense of entitlement and power (boys?)?
So what if girls “opt-out” of leadership roles and think public life is the exclusive arena of boys and men? It’s unpleasant out there in the big bad leadership world.
So what if boys learn to think of girls primarily as accessories that they acquire like so many shiny, molded cars? That’s why I had girls. Duh.
And if boys feel pressure to grow up and take care of women, like they’re children? That’s what they’re here for, right? I mean, what boy isn’t made to feel like he has to “be a man” and “provide” for dependents, “protect” them from amorphous “bad stuff.”
So what if the best thing my girls and yours think they can aspire to is the real life paper-doll cut-out of the object of a 15 year-old boys wet dream, which is, as the movie compellingly documents, the image of girls and women promulgated by our gaming, media, and entertainment industries? And, so what if the highest thing your son can aspire to is a hyper-masculinized athlete whose goal is to lay everything that moves in a skirt.
What if all that makes them happy? What is wrong with that?
And, really, if more than 50 percent of our population is effectively denied the ability to pursue public service, to the detriment of the greater good, by a system of informal, entertaining bias, it’s not like it’s a major problem for a democracy or anything.
I mean, why do girls need to understand the effects on their health, jobs … life, of having the bare minimum gender representation in Congress? What’s wrong with 17% anyway?
The last spark of a feminist in me this morning is compelled to point out that all of this not making any of us happy. Twice as many girls experience depression as boys, beginning in adolescence. And the entire nation is focused on bullying, but won’t talk openly about the fact that much of its root cause is misogyny. That’s just too much to wrap our tattooed-Barbie-and-cartoon-superhero-of-the-day benumbed brains around. Bullying is the norm in a culture that denigrates what is female. It is why, for example, boys in religious private schools say they experience bullying at a higher rate than boys in public or non-religious private schools? There are dots screaming and turning blue in the face to be connected.
I give up.
No, I don’t. The wealth disparity in our country is one of the largest in the industrialized world and continues to grow. The highest indicator of adolescent male violence and unwanted teen pregnancies is not the presence of guns or a lack of sex ed, its…the wealth gap. Look at which countries have the largest wealth gaps and compare that to a ranking of those with the least gender equity. No surprises there—the ones with the smallest gap happen to be the ones with the highest equity.
As the recent Wall Street Journal article about the gender gap clearly explains, this is a huge economic issue. We need to educate ourselves, and our children, about the importance of these issues as a society. Like THAT’s going to happen. OK. I give do up. Aren’t you glad?
Besides, it’s boring. How do I compare with my friends, really excellent moms and dads who aren’t thinking about equity as much and are cheerfully taking their girls and boys to the next showing of “Bad Teacher” and “Transformers 16.” These are the friends that I need most now, because misery loves company. They can be depressed with me.
There is no way to watch Miss Representation without feeling the enormity of the issue at hand. Our country is cobbled by a structural misogyny, embedded in our culture and economy, that permeates every dimension of life. Louder now, so the fear of a female planet people can hear: Men are not sitting around in man-caves, watching football games and plotting devious ways to undermine women’s equality, just like feminists are not trying to destroy boys’ ability to be boys and men. What we have instead is something much more insidious and difficult to deal with—a systemized, traditional, destructive and amorphous bias that polarizes masculinity and femininity in extremely harmful ways.
There is no way to think deeply about the information imparted in Miss Representation without realizing its vast implications. Changing the status quo means literally changing everything from the way toys are packaged to the structure of capitalism. I’m stating for the record that the last statement is not a joke, it’s not meant to be sarcastic or an exaggeration for effect. It’s so pervasive that even those of us who have been ardent lifelong feminists, who want to change the world and work hard to do it, struggle with where to start and how to continue. It’s exhausting.
So, just in case you are a man who doesn’t watch the OWN Network, which I’m figuring is pretty much most guys, find out where you can see Miss Representation at www.missprepresentation.org and take your teenagers, girls and boys, with you.
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photo: Oakley Originals / Flickr