BRATTLEBORO — Raise your hand if as a child you believed you could grow up to become president.
At 7 years old, boys and girls want to become president in equal numbers, says Caroline Heldman, associate professor of political science at Occidental College, in the 2011 documentary Miss Representation, which will be shown among the films at next month's Women's Film Festival.
But by age 15, a “massive gap emerges,” with fewer girls thinking they'll grow up hold the Oval Office, Heldman says.
According to the documentary, the United States ranks 90th among nations globally in the number of women serving in national legislatures.
That statistic places the U.S. behind Cuba, Iraq, China, and Afghanistan.
Vermont fares better, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
The state ranks second behind Colorado, with 38.3 percent of government leadership positions held by women.
Vermont, however, is one of only four states that never have sent a woman to Congress. (Delaware, Iowa, and Mississippi are the other three.)
The insanity of stepping into the political arena aside, why do fewer young women believe they can lead the country?
Or Fortune 500 companies?
Or national television networks? Or publishing houses? Or the local Selectboard?
“You can't be what you can't see,” says Marie Wilson, founding president of the White House Project, a nonprofit that “invites, inspires, and equips the next generation of diverse women to lead in business and politics,” according to its website.
Wilson and her peers say that the media's general portrayal of women falls short of building a positive self-image. Instead, speakers like Jean Kilbourne, Jennifer Pozner, Cory Booker, Jackson Katz, and Gloria Steinem say that the media portrays male figures as aggressive, as winners, and as getting their needs met before women.
Instead, they say, a woman portrayed in today's media is expected to be beautiful. Or sexy.
But not smart. Not clever. And never in a leadership role unless, of course, she is a ball-breaker, witch, or bitch.
“The media treats women like shit and it's horrible and I don't know how we survive it and I don't know how we rise above it,” Margaret Cho, comedian, actor, and activist, says in Miss Representation.
Cho says her television show All-American Girl was canceled, in part, because she was too fat. The network replaced it with The Drew Carey Show.
According to the film, among magazines, the Internet, television, films, and music, teenagers consume about 10 hours and 45 minutes of media daily.
“The media is the message and the messenger, and, increasingly, a powerful one,” said Pat Mitchell, president and CEO of the Paley Center for Media and former president and CEO of PBS.
Miss Representation looks at the consequences of this dynamic on how our country is governed.
For voters to cast a ballot for a female candidate, they must experience a psychological breakthrough to where they can envision a president who is a woman, says former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“As the most powerful country in the world, if you're not standing for the right values or for the right principles, that's a loss for the world,” said Rice, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a director of the school's Global Center for Business and the Economy.
“This is all about capitalism - the exploitation of women's bodies sells products, magazines, etc.,” says Lindy Dekoven, chair of the California Commission on the Status of Women and former executive vice president of NBC Entertainment.
In the film, actress Jane Fonda says that media creates consciousness. But if men comprise the majority of people creating the media, then women will never make progress, she asserts.
But some of the interviewees in the film take a turn from the typical “it's-all-the-devil-media's-fault-and-there's-nothing-we-can-do” road, saying that the negative media messages can change and that the media reflects our society as much as it creates it.
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Women must tell their own stories, say the interviewees. The media needs more female screenwriters, directors, journalists, media executives.
“The media can be an instigator of change,” says Katie Couric, former anchor of the CBS Evening News. “It can maintain the status quo and reflect the views of the society, or it can awaken people and change minds. It depends on who's piloting the plane.”
“There are moments in life where you see things more clearly,” said filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom. “When I found out I was pregnant with a girl, things came into focus.”
In a TEDx Talk, Newsom relates how gender bias pervades our consciousness.
When Newsom and husband Gavin, then mayor of San Francisco and now California's lieutenant governor, had their first child, Montana, a girl, the family received a flood of cute pink cards and clothes.
When the couple welcomed the arrival of Hunter, a boy, blue cards and gifts arrived, including a letter from The White House.
One of the gifts: a t-shirt with the words “Future President.”
It hit Newsom, an actress who at 21 had been advised to lie about her age and strike her MBA degree from her resumé, that Montana had not received similar gifts. Nor had she received the unspoken message that a limitless life awaited her.
Why not?
“Our daughters are handicapped with the notion that their value lies in their beauty,” said Newsom.
Women decisionmakers account for 3 percent of media executives, she said. This means 97 percent of the media is from a male point of view.
According to Newsom, we're all desensitized to society's negative gender messages.
One Halloween, Newsom perused costumes for her children. The girls' costumes were geared toward sexuality. The boys' costumes were geared toward violence and power.
Attempting to bypass these gender roles, Newsom decided on animal costumes. She chose for her daughter a lamb and for her son a lion.
“It's pretty safe to say the media is harming our children,” she said. “Truth be told, it's killing our daughters' ambition and destroying empathy and emotion in our sons.”
According to Newsom, the human brain reaches full development by 22 years. Even an 18-year-old does not possess the same level of emotional maturity or intelligence as adults, she points out, and society can't expect young people to process messages flung at them by the media with the same maturity or emotional nuance that adults can employ.
On the big screen, audiences don't generally question the norm of limited female protagonists serving mostly in romantic roles.
But what about the female-centric “chick flicks”?
In these films, female characters' storylines generally revolve around men's lives: getting the love and getting the wedding ring. Women in power or with ambition are portrayed negatively, like Sandra Bullock as bitchy boss Margaret Tate in The Proposal.
Screenwriter Paul Haggis points out in Miss Representation that in the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood supported complex female characters. Now, films write women as comics, he says.
Miss Representation points to the effects of these negative stereotypes rippling into the political arena where women candidates are portrayed as emotional - in comparison to men - and therefore not equipped to lead.
According to interviewees, when comparing a male and female candidate, the news media will, more often than not, highlight a male candidate's ideas with positive verbs like “he explained,” “he said forcefully,” or “he looked confident.”
A female candidate, however, is critiqued on her looks, her outfit, her hair style. She is described disproportionately with negative verbs like “she complained,” “she looked haggard,” or “she said meekly.”
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These points raised in the film are echoed by staff at the Women's Freedom Center, the nonprofit for which the Women's Film Festival raises funds.
The mainstream media functions by judging women, says Shari, an advocate at the Brattleboro-based shelter for women challenged with domestic violence issues. (Because of the confidential, sensitive, and sometimes dangerous nature of their work, advocates at the center do not release their surnames as a matter of protocol.)
“There are so many -isms that intersect in the mainstream media,” says Shari, adding that sexism that dehumanizes women often also leads to violence.
The media places enormous pressure on women from the time they're in the cradle to be, look, and behave in specific ways, she says. The images in the media, along with society, have created a “sexist lens” through which women's ascent to leadership is viewed, she says.
“We as women are not narrating most of the national conversation,” Shari says.
Much of the national conversation in politics and the media about women move from the outside in, said Donna Macomber, Women's Freedom Center co-director.
Ask male candidates the same questions that the media routinely poses to women - “Who will care for your young children at home?” or “Are you tough enough to lead the free world?” or “Are you running as a men's candidate?” - and the oppression rampant in American society rears into view, both Macomber and Shari point out.
“[Under the current system] you're marked at birth by your anatomy,” she says.
“As advocates, however, we need to remain specific to what in 'the media' frustrates us, what we oppose, and what we want to change,” Macomber says.
Macomber adds that she wants to remember and support the media-makers who produce genuine, authentic, humane, and thought-provoking narratives or news.
Freedom Center advocate Anna says that that most of the damaging or toxic media belong to what she would classify as “mainstream corporate.”
“There is a lot of awesome and alternative media out there like the Media Education Foundation in Northampton, Mass.,” she says.
And media is made by humans, who can change it, says Shari.
But our minds are made of images, Shari points out. And our minds assimilate media images that bombard us daily, even as we walk down the grocery aisles to buy a gallon of milk.
“We know to stay away from toxic air or polluted water, but how do we shield ourselves from toxic images?” she asks.
One voice in the film poses another question.
“When is it going to be enough?” asks Maria, a young woman in Miss Representation whose little sister deals with the social pressures of high school by cutting herself.