Alex S. Jones: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Gloria Steinem, founding mother of Ms. magazine, recently exercised her First Amendment rights in the New York Times. In a scathing op-ed piece about the film The People vs. Larry Flynt, she hammered the filmmakers for lionizing a man she regards as far worse than a low-life pornographer. She asked, "Would the same kind of Hollywood treatment have been given if the man at the center of the controversy had been a Nazi defending his free speech rights or an abuser of animals?" Is the denigration of women somehow allowed, or is she giving the film a bum rap? Gloria Steinem joins us to discuss the portrayal of women and women's issues in popular media and in the news media. A conversation with Gloria Steinem right after this news, so stay tuned.

[music]

Alex S. Jones: When Gloria Steinem's recent blistering op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times, one thing was immediately apparent. That was that it matters when a Gloria Steinem exercises her First Amendment rights. She almost single handedly has put The People vs. Larry Flynt on trial, at least in the court of public opinion. The movie stands accused of turning Larry Flynt into, if not a First Amendment hero, at least into a weirdly likable human being whose only real crime was to have bad taste, very bad taste. The point of the movie is that if the First Amendment protects a Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine, then it also protects the rest of us.

Essentially, in the movie, Larry Flynt's crimes are portrayed as victimless. The women are posing for money. The men are just American Joes gaping at spread legs, and Larry Flynt is an equal opportunity vulgarian who targets every sacred cow from Jerry Falwell to feminists. It's a very entertaining movie. I went to see it, and I came out of it thinking that Gloria Steinem had maybe gone over the line in her criticism. I mean, after all, in the movie, Larry Flynt is portrayed as a sleaze, a drug addict, a greedy opportunist, and probably crazy. The notorious Hustler cover of a woman being put through a meat grinder was in the movie. In case you missed the joke, that cover was a sneer at the feminist complaint that Hustler treated women like pieces of meat.

But I keep coming back to some of the things Gloria Steinem said. Larry Flynt and Hustler are not just about women showing their privates more explicitly than they do in Playboy. There has always been something more, a tone of violence and anger. Women shown dead, women tortured, women shown loving being humiliated, subjugated, treated with contempt. If we assume that most people regard such a movie as history, what is the responsibility of the filmmakers to, if not the facts, then some fundamental truth?

I'm Alex Jones, and I'm very pleased to welcome Gloria Steinem to On the Media for a wide-ranging and freewheeling conversation about women and the media, and we start with Larry Flynt. Welcome to On the Media.

Gloria Steinem: Thank you so much.

Alex S. Jones: I'm sorry you couldn't make it into the studio. I understand your schedule has gotten very hectic because of the Atlanta abortion clinic bombing.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, we were doing a benefit in Washington for Voters For Choice. We were targeted by the Operation Rescue folks, so the security got very difficult.

Alex S. Jones: I'm very glad to have you with us anyway, if only by phone. Listen, what is your fundamental criticism of The People vs. Larry Flynt for the purposes of people who may not have seen your op-ed or seen you talking about this?

Gloria Steinem: You end up with people in the theater, good-hearted people, I'm sure, cheering someone who I do not believe-- perhaps I'm an optimist- ihey would be cheering if they actually knew anything about his life or his work. The same images, even of animals, would have probably meant this movie would not have been made or it would have been made in a very different way. If you want to say that the First Amendment protects the worst, and certainly we all support the First Amendment, that's easy. Then you have to show the worst. Oliver Stone is someone who has bravely done that, shown violence in Vietnam for what it really is. Certainly has not been shy about being critical of powerful men.

Yet, uniquely in this case, the violence, the sadism, the evisceration, the torture, the humiliation, is absent. Larry Flynt was allowed to be a script consultant on the film. It's really a work of fiction. I'll give you one example. If you saw the film, probably you left with the impression that the man who shot Larry Flynt and left him crippled and so on was not caught.

Alex S. Jones: Right.

Gloria Steinem: The fact is--

Alex S. Jones: They explicitly said he was never brought to 'justice.' quote, unquote.

Gloria Steinem: Well, the fact is that he was. His name is Joseph Paul Franklin. He's serving six consecutive life sentences for other murders and he has freely confessed to shooting Flynt. I just use that as an example of how profoundly dishonest this film was. I must say that Woody Harrelson, an honest man, I guess, was asked by Matt Lauer on the Today show because Woody Harrelson is a supporter of animal rights, for instance. He was asked if he would have played this role in the same way, or at all, if the same images in Hustler had been images of animals, and he said, absolutely not.

Alex S. Jones: Okay. I mean, the point is, first of all, let's get the question of the Hollywood issue out of the way. This really is not about Larry Flynt, per se. It's about the way Hollywood elected to portray this story.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, I just think there is a very deep double standard here, and that many women-- and many men too- because it's a libel on men's sexuality to say that it's intrinsically hooked into violence and torture and so on. If they know what Larry Flynt's personal history and also what's really in the magazine, would feel deeply upset. I felt hated, watching someone whose history and work I knew being aggrandized so that the audience cheered him. His only adversary was presented as Jerry Falwell, so the conflict was between pornography and censorship, between the preacher and the pornographer, so to speak.

The vast majority of people, I think, are probably both anti-pornography and anti-censorship, but that movie didn't allow for that point of view. They gave him the most easy possible kind of adversary at whom people laughed and jeered and so on. It just was extremely offensive because I realized that there was just about no group of men I could think of, or even animals, whose victimizer would have been treated in this way.

Alex S. Jones: Why do you think this is true?

Gloria Steinem: I think, you know, I can't look into the hearts of the people who made this movie. I've tried not to address them as individuals, but just to ask questions. I don't know what they knew and when they knew it, so to speak. For instance, Milos Forman has continuously bragged about the fact that he's never seen a Hustler magazine. I do think that if Flynt were famous as an anti-Semite publisher, that Milos Foreman would have made sure to see what it was he was defending. Incidentally, Flynt is an anti-Semite, and he is a racist. I think what we have to deeply ask ourselves is why it is that material that we would oppose under any other circuMs.tance or be critical of?

I'm not talking about censorship. I'm just talking about how we behave towards people who are purveyors of violence and bigotry and so on. Yet, it becomes okay when it's presented as sexuality. I think there are many reasons. One is that the pornography industry-- which is a $12 billion a year industry, it's huge- has for the last 15 years or so, especially since there has been a feminist criticism of pornography, which means for the most part, anti-censorship and anti-pornography, have been trying to portray any criticism of pornography as if it is hostile to the First Amendment.

You and I can stand up and say anything critical about the President, about multinationals, about public smoking, about all kinds of things, and nobody tells us that we're hostile, that we're damaging the First Amendment. Yet, uniquely, when we speak against pornography, that's very often the case.

Alex S. Jones: Well, I think that the fundamental question is, what would be your solution to the pornography issue? I mean, denouncing pornography is certainly something well within your rights. Is the position that you personally, what would you do about pornography if you had the power?

Gloria Steinem: I would make clear, as I am trying to make clear, that pornography, pornae means female slavery. It means the depiction of female slavery. Erotica, which means love and has some idea of equal choice and so on, is something different. In the same way that we have made clear that rape is different from sex or that sexual harassment is about power, not sex, we need to make clear that pornography does not include all of sexuality. I mean, that was the second thing I was going to say, that the pornography industry has tried to make it seem that if you are against pornography, you're against sex, when in fact, pornography is about violence and domination presented as sex.

Now, what are we going to do about it? I mean, I think primarily we're going to do exactly what we've done in the past. We used free speech against the Vietnam war, against smoking, against bigotry, against the Ku Klux Klan, against the neo-Nazi parties, against the militia, against all kinds of things. We, therefore, can, I think, once we get past this notion that to criticize pornography is somehow intrinsically anti-First Amendment or anti-sex, we can make a huge dent in this. What we're trying to do, eventually, is to disentangle sexuality and violence. They are not one and the same thing.

Alex S. Jones: Listen, how do you feel about the argument that in this case, even though this film was dishonest about Larry Flynt, the purpose of this film was to make almost a propaganda movie for free speech, for the idea of what you're talking about, the ability to be able to denounce pornography?

Gloria Steinem: But it's not. First of all, the victory that Flynt won was extremely narrow. It only had to do with the right to parody public figures. It only confirmed case law, longstanding, a quarter-century of case law, at least. There's considerable evidence that he wanted to lose. I mean, he kept saying, "It isn't acquittals that sell magazines. It's convictions that sell magazines," and so on.

Alex S. Jones: But you have a whole theater of people cheering because the First Amendment has been upheld, at least in the way it's framed in the film.

Gloria Steinem: That's too easy. It's too easy. If you wanted to make an effective movie about the First Amendment, then make it about something that is really offensive.

Alex S. Jones: Maybe that wouldn't elicit the support from the public.

Gloria Steinem: Then it's not really testing the First Amendment, and this movie does not.

Alex S. Jones: Do you think that this movie should not have been made?

Gloria Steinem: I try not to deal in shoulds here because I'm not trying to tell anybody else what to do, but I think that, realistically speaking, it would not have been made about any other group, except women.

Alex S. Jones: Do you believe Milos Foreman when he said that the Supreme Court is the hero of his movie, not Larry Flynt?

Gloria Steinem: No, I don't and I don't think anybody coming out of that movie thinks that the Supreme Court is the hero. You only see the Supreme Court for about one minute and they are made fun of too, as, incidentally, Flynt did afterwards, calling Sandra Day O'Connor a token-- I don't know if I can say this word- but it's four letters and begins with c. If he wanted to make the Supreme Court a hero, then why not take someone who believes the Supreme Court as a hero instead of someone who wanted to be defeated and who was ridiculing and hostile towards the court?

Alex S. Jones: You know, there's a curious double-double message going on here, though because this controversy has really probably prompted more conversation about what the First Amendment really means than anything in my recent memory in an intellectual kind of way and I think largely to do with you, frankly, because you've been able to take this issue and really make it a subject of genuine, serious debate.

Gloria Steinem: I'm trying to fill in the enormous blanks in the movie. If the movie had really exposed what Hustler and Flynt do in both life and in publishing, then I wouldn't have had to do this. We could have had this discussion around what was around reality. In the beginning, you were saying what one person says makes all this difference. It doesn't make a difference. My column would have made no difference whatsoever if it hadn't happened to name what many people felt.

Alex S. Jones: If you have a comment or a question for Gloria Steinem regarding women in the media, give us a call. Our number is 1 800-343-3342. That's 1-800-343-3342. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

I'm Alex Jones. Welcome back to On the Media. My guest is Gloria Steinem, who I don't think really needs an introduction. She's been talking for the last, well, two or three weeks anyway, about the issue of The People vs. Larry Flynt, the movie. That's prompted a conversation that's gone well beyond that movie itself, about the responsibility of the media where the portrayal of women is concerned, and others as well. Gloria Steinem, do you feel like this is going to be something that is going to take on a significant life of its own as far as the discussion and a serious examination of the way the media treat women and portray women generally and other groups?

Gloria Steinem: I'm not sure about that general question. That's a conversation that has been going on and needs to continue. I think this is more a conversation about pornography. This is a learning moment that is some small percentage, perhaps, of what the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were about sexual harassment, however, one feels about the merits of those charges, because if we get an opportunity now that we have an opportunity because people seem to be troubled, or some people are troubled by the portrayal of a pornographer as some kind of champion of free speech. Then we have a chance to say and to teach what pornography really is.

Actually, the women against pornography here in New York used to-- and perhaps still do- tours. Take people on tours of sex shops and so on, to see how much violence and torture and humiliation and so on there is in pornography. We're just averting our eyes. It's also coming into our homes now because of the Internet, so it's less easy to escape. Most people, most of us try to survive with a little dignity and safety by not looking.

Alex S. Jones: Let me go back to the question I asked you before. What would you have the solution be to what you consider to pornography?

Gloria Steinem: My radical solution is that we consider women human beings and therefore, women of all races and all ages. Before we make a movie or before we address an issue, we put in the place of women, the name of any group of men. Jewish men, Italian men, whatever, and see if we would do the same thing. I have two radical suggestions. One is that women are human beings and the second is that we exercise empathy.

Alex S. Jones: Empathy and the kind of thing you're talking about is a matter of the human heart and the human soul. What about law?

Gloria Steinem: No, this is not about censorship. I do think that we could enforce the laws we already have when it comes to the use of children. Children are very much used in pornography, and of course, that has been a theme of Hustler that featured Chester the Molester and a cover nude who looked so young that the readers were guessing whether she was eleven or twelve or whatever. Flynt is now getting on television and saying that of course, he doesn't think children should be involved. He supports the v-chip. Well, thank you very much, but I think that we could enforce existing laws and that would be extremely helpful because runaways, street kids, all kinds of kids are used in pornography now.

Alex S. Jones: My guest is Gloria Steinem. I want to get as many of you into this conversation as I can. Peter in Marblehead, Massachusetts. How are you?

Peter: Hi. [clears throat] I was a contributing editor to a magazine that Larry Flynt published in 1983-'84. I really resent Gloria Steinem calling him an anti-Semite and a bigot. The magazine sponsored my infiltration of neo-Nazi organizations, the posse Comitatus, and Aryan Nations. I went underground and helped bring to justice several people who committed murders, who are now in jail for up to 200 years. To call Larry Flynt an anti-Semite is just way out of line.

Gloria Steinem: How did you feel about the endless cartoons of African American men with extremely small heads and extremely large penises? That was certainly a specialty of Hustler.

Peter: That's a question that some of the prosecutors asked me or some of the defense attorneys. The neo-Nazis asked me, "How did I like Hustler magazine?" Well, I don't read Hustler, as a matter of fact.

Gloria Steinem: Why were you putting your work in it? Could you not find someone else who would support your investigative journalism? Certainly, we're all in support of investigative journalism.

Peter: My work wasn't in Hustler. It was in The Revel, a totally different magazine. Larry Flynt has nothing to do with child pornography. If you want, look at this month's Esquire magazine. Here's Dominique Swain purporting to be an eleven or twelve-year-old, if you want. The media's full of images like this, and your fight with Larry Flynt is well-known and longstanding. For you to take it another step and to libel him, why do you think he's an anti-Semite?

Gloria Steinem: There's all kinds of people who have had experiences with him in which he calls them anti-semitic names and talks about lampshades and so on. I don't think there's as much anti-Semitism in Hustler as there is racism, but the racism is pretty extreme.

Alex S. Jones: Peter, let me ask you a question, and I don't know the answer to this at all. Is Larry Flynt's magazine empire of a piece or is there a range of kinds of publications that he publishes?

Peter: There's a tremendous range and I'm not a part of the empire. Wait a minute.

Gloria Steinem: Why are you at pains to say you're not part of it?

Peter: Hang on, can I answer your question, Alex?

Alex S. Jones: Go ahead, please.

Peter: The range of magazines ranges from computer magazines through firearMs. magazines. Plus, his empire included a lot of magazine distributorships, none of them having anything to do with pornography.

Alex S. Jones: Peter, have you seen the movie?

Peter: Yes, I have.

Alex S. Jones: Okay. You're familiar, certainly, with Hustler magazine?

Peter: Sure.

Alex S. Jones: Do you not think that what Gloria Steinem has said about what the part of Hustler magazine that was not presented in that movie is very significant?

Peter: No, I don't think it is at all. It's not Larry Flynt's movie in the first place. If she's criticizing the filmmakers, sure, but I don't think she has a right to criticize Larry Flynt. Script consultant just means they ask him a few questions about whether or not this actually happened. Then it isn't Larry Flynt's movie. It's Milos Forman's movie.

Gloria Steinem: I was making both points, that certainly, I was saying that this movie would never have been made if the images were about racial groups of men or about animals. Peter: Larry Flynt is--

Gloria Steinem: I just picked up, in the airport on my way back from Washington here, a Hustler Fantasies, which is a small magazine. Have you seen this?

Alex S. Jones: I have not.

Peter: I don't read the magazine.

Gloria Steinem: This is called the anal issue.

Peter: I don't like Hustler.

Alex S. Jones: Okay.

Peter: Like I said, it's repellent.

Gloria Steinem: Well, I recommend to you that you try not to benefit things with which you don't agree and you do your good investigative journalism by getting support that you feel more comfortable with.

Alex S. Jones: Peter, thank you for your call. Stan in Brooklyn, you're on the air. Stan? Well, I guess we lost you. Rob in Westchester, you're on the air.

Rob: Hello.

Alex S. Jones: Hello there.

Rob: Hi, I'm terribly sorry. I agree with a lot of what Ms. Steinem is saying, particularly in divorcing erotica from violence and so on, but I'm a little upset by the unequivocalness with which she's saying some of her points. That no other group of people or animals whose victims would be treated this way and so on. I really do beg to differ. I mean, Norman Schwarzkopf and company are treated as great heroes after how many Iraqis did we kill, 250,000 or something and you have 4000 Iraqis dying every month?

Gloria Steinem: You have a good point. I agree with you. That's a good point. This is like making a movie about a general who has bombed without showing what the bombs did in Iraq.

Alex S. Jones: It's like exactly what--

Gloria Steinem: I would say it's analogous in that sense.

Alex S. Jones: It's sanitized the way the coverage of that war was. It was without bodies. It was without damage. It was really without death. Listen, thank you very much for your call, Stan. If you have a question, our number is 1-800-343-3342. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

I'm Alex Jones. Welcome back to On the Media. My guest is Gloria Steinem, feminist writer, founding editor of Ms. magazine, someone who has been on the forefront of the feminist movement from the very beginning. I want to say that she is here as a guest, but she is on the phone, so it may sound a little bit from time to time, a little quirky.

Gloria Steinem: Could I say something about the last caller?

Alex S. Jones: Yes.

Gloria Steinem: I think that I certainly don't disagree with his point that that bombing that we were not shown by and large, what the human cost on the ground in Iraq was of that bombing, and therefore, under those circumstances, to be cheering is really a manipulation of people's emotions. Here we have two people, Milos Forman and Oliver Stone, who I think might perhaps be counted on to make that point. When people who are otherwise critical of violence or critical of the establishment are uniquely praiseful of somebody who is a king of the sexual establishment in the sense that Larry Flynt is, then women feel alone. We feel like we have no allies.

Oliver Stone wrote the introduction to Larry Flynt's current biography or autobiography that's out. He says he was fascinated with him because he was a man who had made love both to a chicken and to beautiful women. I mean, why is this a point of praise? I might add, he killed the chicken. It just takes the heart out of us because it makes us feel like we have no friends.

Alex S. Jones: Well, I think that there are other groups as well, perhaps not as sort of as sweeping as I think you're talking about as far as women are concerned. I think it was interesting that the pairing of Larry Flynt with Jerry Falwell. Here the common cause in some peculiar way in this situation is with your perspective and Jerry Falwell's, at least after a fashion.

Gloria Steinem: No, on the contrary. What my objection, and I think many people's objection, is that for one thing, it's false and far too easy to present Falwell as the only adversary of Larry Flynt. Secondly, they are both hostile to women's freedom. That is, Flynt wants to control women for sexual reasons. Falwell wants to control women's bodies for reproductive reasons.

Alex S. Jones: I'm not saying that you agree on the issues. I'm saying that as targets that are legitimate ones in the society that we live in as far as Hollywood is concerned, Falwell is in that category as well, and the Christian right. I mean, the Christian right, you can say things about that you might not be able to say about animal rights abusers. The thing is it's a group.

Gloria Steinem: I don't think so. I mean, it has not been my experience.

Alex S. Jones: That the Christian right has not been held up to ridicule?

Gloria Steinem: To ridicule, but not to praising someone who is violent towards them-

Alex S. Jones: Well, I don't know.

Gloria Steinem: -in this way.

Alex S. Jones: I think that they're the crazy lunatic Christians are the villains of choice.

Gloria Steinem: Anyway, no analogy is perfect because every situation is unique in some way, but I'm trying to ask that question.

Alex S. Jones: Well, I understand. Let me ask you. What about hate speech generally? What about the whole issue of hate speech, how do you feel about that?

Gloria Steinem: I think mainly it's a problem that we have to deal with in all kinds of ways and everything from child-rearing. For instance, I was greatly interested in a study I saw recently of the Good Samaritans, the people who helped Jews during the war when they themselves were not Jewish and risked their lives to do so. There's been a long effort to try to figure out why they did it, and looking at family situations, at religion, at education and so on, because the people are not that different in what they say. They say, "I'm not a hero. I just did it on impulse, I didn't think of not doing it."

As I understand it, what now seems to be the one shared characteristic is that these people, the good Samaritans, were not abused as children. In other words, if it's not interfered with, there's a natural leap of empathy from one human being to the next, but if it's interrupted by abuse of a child-- psychological, physical, and so on- then you grow up thinking that there's only two choices, to be the victim or the victimizer. We have to look. Child abuse is like an underground river that is producing many of the poison flowers we see and wonder where they're coming from.

Certainly, just from looking at cultures, you can see that where there is not a wide tradition of child abuse, there is not a tradition of sadomasochism in sex. We need to look deeply at these questions and not simply say that--

Alex S. Jones: Let me ask you, do you think that this subject has been given a genuine airing?

Gloria Steinem: No, I don't think so because I wrote 750 words, which is an infinitesimal portion of the amount of press that this film has got. Everything that I've seen has been favorable, and the actors indeed did do a good job. This huge publicity machine pumping out things about the movie, and more to the point, this enormous pornography industry, which is actually bigger than Hollywood.

Alex S. Jones: Is behind this, meaning in terms of promotion?

Gloria Steinem: The biggest, the pornography industry certainly has been saying for at least the last 15 or years or so, that if you oppose pornography, you're against the First Amendment, and if you oppose pornography, you're against sex. I don't feel that we yet have a real dialogue in which we can say so that everybody can think about it, and it's out there for people's consideration, that we need to separate. That sex and violence are not the same thing. That pleasure and pain are not the same thing, that nature's way of telling us something as good for us is pleasure or something as dangerous as pain. It's really sinister to get those two things intertwined, and how does that happen, and what can we do about it?

Alex S. Jones: I want to get some more of our listeners talking. Phil in Gueens, you're on the air.

Phil: Yes. Hi.

Alex S. Jones: Hi there.

Phil: I'd like to commend Ms. Steinem for her article, and I want to tell you that it is having an effect. A number of my friends, mostly professional people, who had thought about seeing the movie, now that we know the movie isn't true or accurate, are not going to watch it. Maybe we'll rent it years from now on a boring day from the VCR store, but we're not going to see it. Thanks for taking a stand. I also want to ask you about what you think about the constant violent victimization of women by the TV networks and their specials and their dramas while making women sex objects in most of the sitcoms and action shows such as Married With Children and Baywatch?

In many of the shows, such as Married With Children having basically teenage girls, usually underage girls as sex objects, and really portraying them in very degrading and humiliating roles. Even when it's a comedy, theoretically, we're laughing.

Gloria Steinem: Thank you for saying that. I would not have gone to see this movie either, except that I had to write about it, but I'm not suggesting that people boycott it. I'm not trying to tell anybody what to do. I'm just trying to put information and questions out there. I do think we need to look at the politics of what we're seeing on television and realize that the average age of men is much greater than the average age of women. That women are there as attributes or possessions of men far more often that they are the objects of violence and protection, but very rarely have agency on their own.

You're right that it gets younger and younger. I see that Lolita is going to be made over again. Certainly, Nabokov was a wonderful writer, but I think we know a lot more now about what it means when an older man is sexually attracted to a twelve-year-old. James Mason, who made the original movie, was sorry that he ever made it, and yet now we're doing it over again. I think that one of the many fundamental questions is this, if we have a male-dominant society and men get born into that society, then through no fault of theirs, they are taught that in order to be masculine, you have to dominate.

Since it's not, this isn't true that men are superior to women, then some men who are hooked on dominance like a drug, turn to children in order to very young girls and young boys in order to have that kind of dominance that they've been told they need in order to be masculine.

Alex S. Jones: Listen, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Phil, but we need to talk about a range of things today, too, and I know this is a particularly fascinating one, but I want to ask Gloria Steinem about some other subjects as well. Thank you very much for your call. While we have you, I want you to talk about the way the evolution of coverage has changed since you became involved in this issue of feminism. How have you seen the media portrayal of women evolve?

Gloria Steinem: It certainly has made a difference at a factual level. That is, when people are reporting the news, they're more likely now to report, for instance, the total unemployment rate, as opposed to only reporting what amounts to the white male unemployment rate. Women aren't supposed to be working, all that that was somehow implicit. They are more likely to include women in the stories. However, there's a big area we haven't discussed here, which is the influence of advertising. I'm not talking yet about the imagery in ads, which is mainly where we focus our attention, but the editorial influence of the ads theMs.elves.

Alex S. Jones: Now, what do you mean by that?

Gloria Steinem: Well, since I'm especially familiar with women's magazines, women's products, let me put it like this. It's another double standard. If you criticize an advertiser in Time or Newsweek or some other magazine, you may have trouble getting that ad or if you criticize the product and that's wrong, that shouldn't be. Uniquely in women's magazines, you don't get the product ads unless you praise the product. That's why when you open a woman's magazine, you will see oceans of beauty copy about where to put your blush on, and fashion copy and so on, all in praise of product categories or specific advertisers.

By the time you're finished delivering all those pages in order to attract advertisers, there's only a few pages left for something independent. The sad part of this, I think, is that when women pick up those magazines, they know they don't need a diagram of where to put their blush on and so on, but they think other women must and it creates contempt in women for other women. The influence of advertising, for instance, the effort, I think, often with goodwill, to try to show older people and older women and people who are not white and not skinny and so on, is really going against the grain of advertising pressure, which is trying to say everybody's 18 to 35 and beautiful and so on.

The imagery we see gets so distorted that we feel somehow that there's something wrong with us.

Alex S. Jones: If you were to take a poll, I have got statistics, but I think that it's a generally changed thing that women today, anyway, feel generally not so defensive, angry, resentful of those kinds of things. They don't feel manipulated quite the same way that I think you feel like they are. Do you think they don't understand that they're being manipulated?

Gloria Steinem: No, no, no. I think, if anything, there's much more anger than there used to be.

Alex S. Jones: Do you really?

Gloria Steinem: We just had a conference of girls 9 to 16, who gathered at the United Nations. They were running this conference theMs.elves. They picked their own themes, and the three themes they picked were the image of women and girls in the medi, and violence, in general, in and out of the media, in real life and otherwise, and girls' rights. What they spent the most energy on was the imagery in the media. It's perhaps I hope that the feeling of despair is less because now we have more ways of speaking out about it and we have some more hope of having an impact because we have seen some change. There has been enormous change in the last 25 years.

Alex S. Jones: Well, I mean, one of the things that has changed is that there are a huge, huge number of women journalists working at very high levels now, not at this high, at the command level as men, but that's inevitably going to happen, or at least it seems to be happening around the country.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, still, they're there, but if you look at television, they're still younger. There's still a different standard of physical appearance to which they have to conform compared to their male counterparts. The assignment situation and the atmosphere of the newsroom is not so conducive to, but it has made a difference, absolutely. I am very grateful for the press because I work on very often, for instance, on child sexual abuse cases, and I have seen that almost the only cases that I've worked on that ever came to any kind of just end did so, not because of the family courts, but because there was some coverage of it.

Alex S. Jones: Well, you've raised a very, of course, timely point. This JonBenet case is so very, very strange, I think. The coverage of it is, there's something really prurient about it, in my opinion.

Gloria Steinem: It is very sad. I think we're all trying hard not to add to the burden of these parents who are suffering the loss of their daughter by criticizing them for putting her in beauty contests and so on. This is not the time to criticize them, it seems to me they're suffering.

Alex S. Jones: What about the issue of the coverage of Paula Jones? How do you feel about the way that has been handled in the media?

Gloria Steinem: I think that the problem with that really has been two things, I think. Not looking at the substance of the charges because I noticed that people frequently compare, and certainly, if people have asked me about the difference between the Anita Hill allegations and the Paula Jones allegations, neither of which we know for a fact are true, so we all make our own judgments, right. Just at the level of allegations, what Anita Hill was saying was that these kinds of advances and everything that went on, was over a long period of time, and she had rejected and said no and asked this to stop many times. It got to the point where her working situation was so bad, didn't she get ulcers or she was in the hospital or something? Anyway, that's the allegation.

In the Paula Jones case, the allegation is that the President, or the then Governor, took her into a room or was in a room with her, made one absolutely unforgivable, indecent proposal. When she said no, then he said to her, "Well, I wouldn't want you to do anything you don't want to do." She left and she was not punished in any way in her job.

Alex S. Jones: Well, I mean, the allegation is that he sent essentially a state trooper out to recruit her. The implication of it, if it were true, is that it was certainly not something that happened uniquely. It's something that happened systematically. Let me ask you this.

Gloria Steinem: Compare the two things and the other problem--

Alex S. Jones: One of the things that has been criticized is the fact that the media has ignored her, in part because there has not been more interest in her case from the feminist [crosstalk]

Gloria Steinem: No. Well, that's just wrong because it's my understanding from the media at least, that the President of now Patricia Ireland, tried to see her and she wouldn't see her. She seems to be in the hands of right-wing groups that are using her. They keep saying this. They keep saying that feminists don't support her as much as Anita Hill. Of course, there are some other differences, too, which is if people had a chance to see both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas over the long term three day, so this is not exactly analogous. Nonetheless, certainly, I have probably said more in support of Paula Jones access to the laws we worked so hard to get than I have about Anita Hill because it's gone along over a longer period of time. The people around her are using this as anti-feminist as well as anti-Clinton propaganda.

Alex S. Jones: I think that's quite true. We'll be back with in just a moment with Gloria Steinem and more of your calls. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

I'm Alex Jones. Welcome back to On the Media. My guest is Gloria Steinem. Stephen in Jersey City, you're on the air.

Stephen: Yes. Thank you for taking my call.

Alex S. Jones: Surely.

Stephen: I'm an African American journalist, actor, media activist. I wanted to ask Ms. Steinem, I agree with her effort here 100%. How do we media activists, if you will, how do we focus on promoting, supporting, enlightening people about some of the admittedly rare progressive type productions that do present a more three-dimensional view of women, blacks, et cetera? There are film and television and theatrical productions that do this. Too few, admittedly, but not instead of focusing on the Larry Flynts, but in addition to, how do we--

Gloria Steinem: You're absolutely right. We need to support that which is complex and realistic and shows people as human beings and so on. I think we can do that as journalists by writing about it and letting other people know that this production exists. Also by having our own film festivals and our own networks to get out the news about good books and to keep them in print. It's not so hard to put on a film festival of good films. It takes 20 people in six months or so, but you can do it, and it gets a lot of support and a lot more audience for those films.

Alex S. Jones: Stephen, thank you very much for your call. Chris in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, you're on the air.

Chris: Hi.

Alex S. Jones: Hi there.

Chris: Yes, I'm very honored to get a chance to talk to you. I recently saw a documentary about a former member of Parliament from New Zealand. She was a woman who-- I can't recall her name- but she went around to different areas.

Gloria Steinem: It was Marilyn Waring, probably.

Chris: Yes. Have you seen the documentary?

Gloria Steinem: It's a wonderful documentary. Yes. It was made by the Canadian Film Board, I think.

Chris: Yes, I wanted to get your view about something like that and why something like that maybe isn't so mainstream as a film?

Gloria Steinem: It's really excellent. This is a woman who single-handedly, because she was the sole vote, managed to get New Zealand to become a nuclear-free zone. I think that the prime minister got a Nobel Prize for this, but actually, she was the vote crossing the aisle. She was the person who engineered the campaign or the movement to do this. She also has been in the forefront of trying to change our economic thinking so that we attribute value to work that is done in the home and to the environment. She's really extraordinary. There's a book called If Women Counted, that is her book, to which, and I wrote the introduction to it. I don't know how to tell people right now to get the film, but I think if you wrote the Canadian Film Board and asked about If Women Counted, with Marilyn Waring, you could get it.

Chris: Unfortunately, I think that's maybe the only way of getting it. I don't think you can go to your local video store and rent it.

Alex S. Jones: Chris, thank you.

Gloria Steinem: That's the problem. It's so much easier to get these mass product and so much easier to get hardcore violent pornographic videos, even on cable, than it is to get anything else. You have to make an affirmative effort to support what you care about.

Chris: Yes, thank you.

Alex S. Jones: Chris, thank you very much for your call. Gloria Steinem, what about the impact on the issue of domestic violence that the OJ Simpson trial? Has it had any long standing or enduring, I should say, impact?

Gloria Steinem: I only can tell you anecdotally because I do benefits and so on for battered women's shelters. In the beginning, there were more people reporting violence, and then there was a feeling that, based on the trial, rightly or wrongly, that men can get away with it, a feeling of fear and so on, there were fewer. I don't know if this has settled down or not, but I do think in the long run, probably there will be more understanding, more sensitivity to this pattern of a man who believes he owns a woman so that any sign of independence on her part is perceived by him as hostility and is punished.

Alex S. Jones: Do you think was that flavor of the month as far as a media subject was concerned?

Gloria Steinem: Well, we got much too much of it and I do think there were racial problems with it because if he had been violent toward or accused of killing his first wife, who was Black, I think there would have been much less media interest.

Alex S. Jones: What about this? I want to go quickly back to something you said earlier as well, about women and their appearance as far as television reporters especially are concerned. Your looks have been something that has been a help to you and Diane Sawyer and some of the other very most successful women journalists as well. How do you find this working now? Is it as critical as it once was?

Gloria Steinem: I certainly hope not. I'm 62 years old. I hope I've outgrown.

Alex S. Jones: You're the one who said, this is what 50 looks like, this is what 60 looks like.

Gloria Steinem: Now I'm 62.

Alex S. Jones: [laughs]

Gloria Steinem: I think it cuts both ways. I think the overall problem is that women are judged by what's on our outsides more than what's in our heads or hearts. Men are judged by what's in their outsides, too, but much less so. More by what they do or what their power is and so on. In the case of women who are supposed to be conventionally attractive, whatever that means, they say that you got whatever you got because of your attractiveness. In the case of women who are not attractive, then they say that you got whatever you got because you couldn't get a man. I think that the overarching thing we share is this attributed over value to the way we look.

Alex S. Jones: Is this a society thing or is it a world thing or is it a television thing?

Gloria Steinem: Well, it's certainly accentuated in television because, and it's also much more accentuated in the minds of the decision makers because when they actually do put on somebody who's older and authoritative and so on, she often turns out to be very popular, but they want to do it in the first place. A simple example lately was First Wives Club, which was extremely difficult to get on. Everybody thought that in Hollywood that viewers would not want to see three 50-year-old women. Of course, it was a huge success. Now the movie moguls I gather, are saying that it was only those three particular 50-year-old women-

Alex S. Jones: Oh, I see.

Gloria Steinem:- which is silly.

Alex S. Jones: It's a good thing they didn't put Meryl Streep in there, I would think.

Gloria Steinem: It could have been Cher, it could have been Meryl Streep, it could have been somebody else, and it also would have been successful.

Alex S. Jones: I want to thank you. I'm sorry to say we're out of time. I want to thank you very much. I've enjoyed the conversation.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, me, too.

Alex S. Jones: Thank you for being with us. Gloria Steinem. The producer for On the Media is Judith Hepburn Blank. We had production to help this week from Setsuko Sato, Signy Peck, and Devora Klar. Our technical director is George Edwards and our audio engineer is Michael Demarck. We'd like to hear from you. Our address is On the Media WNYC, One Center Street, New York, New York, 10007. That's One Center Street, New York, New York, 10007. Thanks for listening and stick around for our next hour when we take a look at how the news media do their rushes to judgment. This time, Dallas, Boulder, other places, it happens all over. I'm Alex Jones.

[music]

Announcer: If you have questions or comments about On the Media, call 1-800-343-3342. Funding for On the Media is provided by the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation, the Edith and Henry Everett Foundation, and the WNYC Foundation. This program is a production of WNYC New York Public Radio in association with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies at St. Petersburg, Florida, a school for professional journalists from across the country and around the world. This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[00:52:12] [END OF AUDIO]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.