What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power by Marianne Schnall Page B

magazines, even in magazines that are made for other women. The images don’t coincide with the reality of who we are. It’s such a difficult thing to endure that. How do you maintain a healthy self-esteem when you don’t have images around you that reflect you? I can’t stress enough how damaging it is — the constant barrage of thinness and youth and a kind of racial monochromatic idea of what beauty is. It’s really a tough thing for women. I don’t know how girls survive. Even manifestations of women’s strengths. When you talk about “girl power,” even that’s sort of a belittling thing, because they won’t call it “women’s power” because that is somehow too dangerous. . . . Girl power, that’s okay — that’s somehow defanged and acceptable, whereas women’s power is terrifying and emasculating. So there’s even a problem in language, there’s a problem in the media, there’s a problem in society. There are just so many things challenging girls and women in their search for power and strength, that we need to do all we can to help that along .
    —M ARGARET C HO
    In my view, representations of women have regressed so much one would think feminism had never happened. NBC’s show The Playboy Club springs to mind, as well as the many mindless cable programs featuring walking Barbie dolls like the Kardashians and the so-called “real housewives.” In these shows, women’s intelligence and social consciousness are certainly not highlighted; nor are women’s artistic, literary, civic, or political contributions featured in any way. . . . For girls growing up in this media culture, it’s a terrible message: that women are only valued for their looks, and only then if their looks conform to some ideal constructed by the corporate media purely for profit. This is all happening at a time when women still hold little political or economic power, are sorely underrepresented in fields like science and engineering, and are victims of violence in epidemic proportions — and these media representations aren’t helping to change any of that .
    —M. G IGI D URHAM, AUTHOR AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AT U NIVERSITY OF I OWA
    The media could do a much better job, that’s for sure — especially the media that targets women. . . . Their message to women is all about consumerism, looking sexy, and pleasing men in bed. And yet they have the potential to make profound changes for the better in women’s lives .
    —I SABEL A LLENDE
    Media are highly influential in creating and communicating societal norms about proper roles and behaviors for men and women. If more women were involved in the production of entertainment and news media, we would see more women on screen and better roles portraying women as powerful subjects instead of passive sexual objects. More images and more diverse images of women in media would lead to a revolution of identity and leadership if millions of little girls grew up thinking of themselves as fully capable, ambitious human beings instead of bodies to be worked on in order to get validation through male attention .
    —C AROLINE H ELDMAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT O CCIDENTAL C OLLEGE

ANA NAVARRO
    “I think the reason that there are fewer women — that there is a gender gap in the media, there’s a gender gap in elected office, there’s a gender gap in high-level corporate America — it’s all the same reasons. Because, until very recently, women have been the ones that bore the brunt of family and home responsibilities. And it’s not been until recently that that has begun to change and we are now in an era where shared responsibilities have become the norm, not the exception.”
    A NA N AVARRO IS a Republican political strategist with expertise on Latin American, Florida, and Hispanic issues. She is a political contributor on CNN, CNN-Español, and CNN.com . She is a frequent speaker and commentator on political issues and current affairs. Born