TV Eye
Girls Now and Then and in the Near Future
By Belinda Acosta, Fri., Nov. 20, 2009
I participated in the Girls Now! Conference last weekend. The daylong event at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, organized by the Girls Empowerment Network of Austin, brought together middle and high school girls to talk about everything from health, cyber bullying, sex education, and planning for college. Attending the conference brought me full circle to something I'd been mulching since watching two things on TV: the season finale of Mad Men and the appearance of former Miss California Carrie Prejean on Larry King Live.
When it comes to Mad Men, I find myself drawn to Betty Draper. Played with icy poutiness by January Jones, the character is compelling. To me, she embodies "the problem" that Betty Friedan wrote about in her landmark 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. That "strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that ... [e]ach suburban wife struggled with ... alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ... afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – 'Is this all?'"
A former model, Betty is smart enough to realize the power of her beauty but not smart enough to realize she can be something else besides a pretty woman. And maybe the pull to Betty is because in Jones' sublimely even performance, I can recognize what many of us have experienced at some point –the niggling sense of a life unaccomplished, of goals deferred, dreams once tantalizingly possible turned into that shrinking dot we watch in the rearview mirror. Yeah, I have a soft spot for Betty. She doesn't irk me like she does some of my fellow Mad Men fans. In the next season, I want Betty to buy a copy of The Feminine Mystique, dump the man she's thinking of leaving her husband for, and reimagine her life.
Fast forward to the present. There on my computer screen was former Miss California and Miss America runner-up Carrie Prejean. She first came under fire for her remarks about same-sex marriage (she thinks marriage is strictly between a man and a woman) and was dethroned entirely about a month after suggestive photos of her surfaced on the Internet. But her most spectacular performance was her appearance on Larry King Live. Disliking the question King had lobbed at her regarding her out-of-court settlement with the pageant, she refused to answer, saying there is a confidentiality clause. That is her right, but instead of just leaving it at that, she went on to call King "inappropriate." But it's the tone of her voice that is the most telling: dripping with superiority. She then begins to take off her mic as if to leave, a stunt that would have been intensely theatrical if she had been able to pull it off. Also missed is the opportunity to discuss how a religious woman (Prejean says she's a Christian) operates in the secular world. Instead, Prejean brings on her double-barrel of entitlement as a pretty woman, cloaked with her self-righteousness, which basically makes the conversation with King dead on arrival.
These recent viewing experiences were wafting through my mind as I attended the Girls Now! Conference, witnessing some of the best and worst behavior among Austin's young women (with more than a thousand girls in attendance, you have to expect a little of everything). A lot is said about how girls are influenced by images screaming at them from fashion magazines about impossible standards of beauty and how that leads to low self-esteem and emotional disorders. But as I observed how these young women interacted with one another (or didn't), I was thinking of what other media influences behavior and the way we treat one another. Where are images of women on TV (or film) that do not include sniping, colluding toward someone's downfall, overpowering (sexually or otherwise), winning a boy, or destroying someone for sport? And more importantly, who are the mediamakers who could make more positive images happen?
Do you have your favorite positive images of women and girls on TV? If so, please send them to me. Right now, I'm drawing a blank, walking around with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, wondering, "Is this all there is?"
As always, stay tuned.
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