BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  Baumgardner’s T-shirt is a lightning rod for the emotions that surround the abortion issue—especially among feminists—because it forces the current unspoken contradiction of the pro-choice movement into public speech. Keeping quiet might seem like a smart political tactic, but when women muzzle themselves because they are afraid, their silence can masquerade as the appearance of support for an anti-choice agenda. If we don’t break the silence about abortion, our right to control our reproductive destiny will never seem as natural as the right to wear our political opinions on a shirt.

  Meet Anne

  A Spunky, Adventurous American Girl

  Anne Elizabeth Moore / SPRING 2005

  JUST OFF MICHIGAN AVENUE IN CHICAGO EXISTS A PLACE where girls shop in special boutiques, dine in specially constructed chairs, and beautify themselves at the hands of trained experts. There’s even an onsite hospital in case of a medical emergency such as decapitation, a plight suffered tragically often by this community. For here, American Girls are given everything they desire. At least the dolls are: I was hassled for two hours, escorted out of the store by the cops, and told never to return upon penalty of immediate arrest.

  A three-floor worship center for the female consumer, American Girl Place exists to hone a sense of class and race privilege, and to foster in youth the ability to locate, and financially capitalize on, difference and tragedy. Shoppers grab small cards printed with pictures of the American Girl dolls—like Addy, who was born into slavery in 1864 and escapes with her mother to the North, or Kit, who lives during the Great Depression—as well as a brief description and a price. The cards are meant to be contained in small maroon folders imprinted with the phrase “Pocket full of wishes.” It’s a brilliant scheme: These can be brought to the nearest cash register or, as the folders brightly suggest, brought home as souvenirs, whereupon the cards can be flipped over and the pictured item ordered via the handy tollfree number.

  I like American Girl Place, especially compared to the other screwy options offered to young girls in our culture. Parent company Mattel uses the American Girl products to teach history and instill an early sense of self-worth into a diverse array of young lives. In teaching consumers about the lives of past girls, however, Mattel conveniently avoids showing them the reality of female futures. So I planned American Girl Project: Operation Pocket Full of Wishes, and created a batch of cards that mimicked American Girl shopping aids and included the following actual wishes of actual girls: Equal Pay for Equal Work, Self-Confidence, Healthy Body Images, Safe and Effective Birth Control, Ample Career Opportunities, Safe and Legal Abortion Access, and Free Tampons. These were described by the phrase “not pictured” and priced at $0. I took the “Pocket full of wishes” folders home, placed the cards inside, and returned them to the slots whence they had originated at American Girl Place. (Since the inside of the sleeves does offer the option of taking them home, it is completely acceptable to have removed them from the premises.)

  No crimes were committed, no acts of civil disobedience were undertaken. In fact, two hours of intimidation and interrogation by security guards succeeded only in acknowledging that the messages I had planted were consistent with American Girl Place’s stated values. (One guard flipped through the cards mumbling comments like “Well, everyone agrees with that,” while the other, I am convinced, kept a set for herself.) And still: a frisking and between eight and ten on-duty Chicago police officers—fully armed and wearing protective body armor—were apparently required to keep the girls safe from such notions as Domestic Partnership Benefits.

  Outside on the street, one of the officers tried to bad-cop me. “Next time you wanna commit your freedom-of-speech thing, you’re going to have to do it out here on the street. And only to adults!”

  “So, American Girl Place doesn’t allow freedom of speech on its premises?” I asked him. I knew I was provoking him, but—like Kaya, a Nez Percé Indian girl from 1764—I just can’t keep my mouth shut when there’s a point to be made.

  How to Reclaim, Reframe, and Reform the Media

  A Feminist Advocacy Guide

  Jennifer L. Pozner / BITCHfest 2006

  YOU FLIP TO YOUR LOCAL CLEAR CHANNEL STATION TO FIND A shock jock “joking” about where kidnappers can most easily buy nylon rope, tarps, and lye for tying up, hiding, and dissolving the bodies of little girls. Reuters runs an important international news brief about a Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for an alleged sexual infraction—in its “Oddly Enough” section, where typical headlines include “Drunk Elk Shot Dead After Attacking Boy” and “Unruly Taxi Drivers Sent to Charm School.” When California Democrats Loretta and Linda Sánchez become the first sisters ever to serve together in Congress, The Washington Post devotes 1,766 words in its style section to inform readers about the representatives’ preferences regarding housekeeping, hairstyles, and “hootchy shoes.” (Number of paragraphs focusing on the congresswomen’s political viewpoints: one.)

  After more than a million women and their allies storm Washington, D.C., for the March for Women’s Lives in April 2004, typical headlines refer only to “thousands” of protestors, downplaying its political importance, and most stories fail to mention that this feminist demonstration was the largest single political protest in the capital’s history. In summer 2005, when thousands protest in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan—an activist demanding answers from President Bush after her soldier son was killed in Iraq—the Selective-Memory Bureau at ABC’s World News Tonight relies on misleading poll numbers to report a so-called reality check that “public protests thus far have been relatively small” and that Sheehan is not likely representative of a real antiwar movement in this country. Never mind that nearly a million demonstrators gathered in cities across America—and many more internationally—on February 15, 2003, to protest the war before it started. And pay no attention to the numerous polls showing that 60 percent or more of Americans do not approve of our government’s handling of the war.

  We rely on news media to provide the information we need to function as active members of a democracy. But, as the above examples show, coverage often reveals a dire need for institutional optometry. The systemic underrepresentation of women’s and, in particular, feminist and other progressive perspectives in American media is the result of a variety of institutional factors, including the financial and political agendas of corporate media owners, and the pandering of news networks and entertainment studios to the whims of advertisers. Furthermore, right-wing organizations have spent decades training student journalists, funding think tanks, pumping out pundits, buying up media outlets, and doing everything in their power to frame discussions about American politics in their own terms (all the while railing against the mythical “liberal media”).

  Feminists and progressives need to learn from those strategies. If we want to move public opinion, defend our rights, and advocate for our future, we have to decide, today, that we’re going to compete on the media battlefield. This means critiquing negative media and, more important, actively working to create positive media coverage and advocating for structural reform. The following tips, adapted from the media trainings WIMN conducts for women’s social justice groups, will help you make the leap from righteous indignation to effective agitation.

  • READ (AND WATCH) BROADLY. Familiarize yourself with the ways various outlets cover the issues that you care about. Read—or at minimum, scan the headlines of—at least one major national daily newspaper, one national weekly newsmagazine, one independent online outlet, and one or more independent magazines, paying special attention to the issues most urgent to you. Watch nightly news reports and network and cable debate shows to get a clear insight into the way that the majority of the U.S. public gets their news, and don’t forget that popular TV shows are often as influential as news media when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes about women. Over time, you’ll start to recognize which outlets offer a reasonable sense of balance or do an especially good job exploring impor
tant issues. You’ll also see which ones virtually ignore women’s issues, and which ones regularly publish inaccuracies and overrely on the perspectives of “official” (read: governmental and/or corporate) or right-wing sources without quoting public interest voices.

  • COUNT THE “EXPERTS.” Despite years of right-wing attacks on the “liberal media,” decades of studies reveal a few salient facts: The range of debate in news media is skewed heavily toward the right, the perspectives of anyone who’s not a white man are systemically marginalized, and corporate representatives and political officials are regularly tapped as experts while public voices are virtually invisible. The media watchdog organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting found that in 2001, network nightly news sources were 85 percent male, 92 percent white, and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent Republican. In 2004, a Project for Excellence in Journalism study of more than seventeen thousand news reports showed that women are underrepresented as news sources across all outlets, faring worst on PBS’s News-Hour with Jim Lehrer and cable news (where 83 and 81 percent of stories, respectively, had no female sources at all) and better in newspapers (where “only” 59 percent of stories used all-male sources). Women were least likely to be cited as experts on foreign affairs—and the only place where female sources appeared in more than half of the stories was lifestyle stories.

  • PHOTOS COUNT, TOO. If you’re particularly peeved by a certain outlet’s habit of publishing photos of women who are either victims of sexual assault or provocatively dressed celebrities, or running captions that trivialize or disparage women, evaluate all images that appear there over a significant period of time and assess your findings. Such studies can yield powerful evidence: Yearbook or suit-and-tie photos tend to accompany stories about white youth accused of crimes, while black and Latino youth accused of similar crimes are often photographed in handcuffs or during “perp walks,” as reported in “In Between the Lines: How The New York Times Frames Youth,” a study by advocacy groups We Interrupt This Message and Youth Force.

  • CHALLENGE DOUBLE STANDARDS. The New York Times has referenced Condoleezza Rice’s dress size and “girlish laugh” on the front page, while The Washington Post described her as a “dominatrix” after she happened to wear a black coat and leather boots together; a CNN Larry King Live panel once convened to discuss Hillary Clinton’s electoral disadvantage of being “fat,” “bottom-heavy,” and “bitchy.” Needless to say, Donald Rumsfeld’s inseam measurements and Rudy Giuliani’s comb-over have never been considered newsworthy. And we all recall the widely circulated wire-service photos of Hurricane Katrina victims whose captions noted that a black man wading through chest-deep water was “looting” the food he was carrying, while white people in a similar photo were described as “finding” groceries.

  • CORRECT THE RECORD. Provide accurate, corrective follow-up information when media uncritically report misinformation that has already been debunked—even in their own newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts. For example, when George W. Bush reinstated the Global Gag Rule on family planning, the administration claimed, and the majority of news outlets dutifully repeated, that the act would prevent U.S. dollars from funding abortions overseas—despite the fact that, as had been widely reported in these same outlets years before, the United States had not funded foreign abortions for decades. Just make sure you check your own facts thoroughly when you’re making a stink about someone else’s inaccuracy.

  • ILLUMINATE BIASED OR DISTORTED FRAMING. Ask whose viewpoint is shaping the story—is the public interest subjugated to the perspectives of the powerful? In light of the Bush administration’s assault on affirmative action, for example, Peter Jennings once framed a World News Tonight Martin Luther King Day segment this way: “President Bush and race: Does he have a strategy to win black support?” Responsible journalism would have investigated the economic, academic, and political implications of the president’s agenda for African Americans rather than the effects of race policy on Bush’s approval rating. When filmmaker Roman Polanski was unable to return to Hollywood to accept an Oscar for The Pianist in 2003, a Los Angeles Times writer explained that “controversy” surrounded the director because he “became swept up in a sex scandal” of “cloudy circumstances” decades prior; a fully accurate story would have reported that Polanski fled the United States to escape sentencing after a conviction for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl.

  • HIGHLIGHT HEADLINE MISREPRESENTATION. Call attention to inflammatory or misrepresentative headlines that contradict the actual facts reported. After 9/11, for instance, The Washington Post headline “Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response” misleadingly implied that 90 percent of the public at large favored a full-scale war in Afghanistan. Yet the end of the story noted that women “were significantly less likely to support a long and costly war” than were men, that their hesitancy might develop into “hardened opposition” over time, and that while 44 percent of women said they’d favor a broad military effort, “48 percent said they want a limited strike or no military action at all” (emphasis added).

  • SHED LIGHT ON SELECTIVE SOURCING AND CREATIVE USE OF ELLIPSES. Are ideologically motivated studies from right-wingfunded groups like the Independent Women’s Forum being presented uncritically as neutral? If so, demand full disclosure and critical follow-up. Have reporters fairly assessed that original material? If not, suggest that the outlet publish or broadcast corrective data and analysis. And don’t forget that movie marketers aren’t the only ones who can use partial quotes in service of something less than the full picture: Someone could quote me as saying, “I … trust the corporate media,” and it wouldn’t technically be a misquote—but selectively omitting the word “don’t” between “I” and “trust” would still be wildly inaccurate.

  • HELP PROVIDE THE DIVERSITY YOU WANT. When reminding news outlets that they cannot present an accurate or comprehensive picture of news and public affairs without a broad, diverse, proportionally representative range of experts including women, people of color, queer folks, workers’ advocates, and other public interest voices, turn them on to all the articulate, media-savvy experts and activists you know and point out organizations doing relevant work that they may not know about.

  • BE FIRM BUT POLITE. Make your case sans insults, rants, and vulgarity. Nothing makes it easier for editors and producers to dismiss your argument than name-calling. Good idea: “Your discussion of the rape survivor’s clothing and makeup was irrelevant, irresponsible, and inappropriate. Including those details blames the victim and reinforces dangerous myths about sexual assault.” Bad idea: “Your reporter is a woman-hating incarnation of Satan!”

  • CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES. Avoid utopian demands; calling for The New York Times to transform itself into a socialist newspaper will get you nowhere. Specific suggestions for improvement, such as requests that quotes from industry executives be balanced by input from feminist economists, and labor and public-interest groups, are more likely to be taken seriously. Don’t complain to Clear Channel that its shock jocks are “insensitive” or “impolite”; do advocate for the radio conglomerate to adopt and adhere to a no-tolerance policy against hosts spouting hate speech or advocating violence.

  • TARGET THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Familiarize yourself with news beats and who covers them. If you send a complaint about a paper’s lack of reportorial objectivity to the opinion-page editor, it’ll just get tossed. Also, while we’d all like to see fewer female bods used to sell beer, asking the networks to reject such ads is a waste of time. Instead, aim your ire at the companies producing the ads that offend.

  • ADAPT YOUR APPROACH TO YOUR GOAL. If you want your letter printed on the letters page, keep it concise and informative; a couple of well-documented paragraphs will always be better received than an emotional three-page manifesto. However, if your goal is to raise concerns within a news outlet, you can send a more detailed, researched letter directly to a spec
ific reporter or columnist and his or her editor or news manager, offering data to correct inaccuracies, a brief critique of problematic rhetoric, and/or further information for follow-up stories. Tailor your language, rhetoric, and angles to match the tone of the outlet you want to reach—what works in Glamour wouldn’t fly in The Wall Street Journal. No matter what, though, be sure to proofread—nothing peeves an editor more than typos or bad grammar. Plus, know that notes on organizational or personal letterhead faxed or sent in the mail are often taken more seriously than e-mails, especially those that seem to be mass-generated.

  • COMMEND GOOD COVERAGE. Positive reinforcement can be as effective as protest. Speak up to both reporters and their editors or producers in support of news stories that you consider fair and accurate, journalism that exposes governmental or corporate corruption, and articles that offer a variety of perspectives and allow women, people of color, and others to comment on the issues that affect their lives. Likewise, applaud TV networks and movie studios when they offer entertainment options that are enriching, enlightening, and challenging. Ask for more of the same.