Women's Views on News |
| Posted: 11 Apr 2014 04:15 AM PDT
Our regular cross-post from Bitchflicks. By Ren Jender. Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don't mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in a movie can many times be summed up as "the liar." The student in The Children's Hour, the girl in Atonement, the girl in The Hunt, the two teenagers in Wild Things, the Demi Moore character in Disclosure are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges. This scenario is the opposite of the common real life situation, in which a woman or girl lies (or pretends nothing is wrong) when she has been raped, sexually abused or sexually harassed. She doesn't bring charges. She tries to function as if the rape, abuse or harassment hasn't occurred and decides not to disrupt her own family or career by calling public attention to what has happened to her. Those stories we pretty much never see played out in film. Unless that film is Anita, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Freida Lee Mock about Anita Hill, the woman who came forward during the confirmation hearings, over 20 years ago, for Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Thomas had sexually harassed Hill when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that is supposed to implement Federal laws against discrimination, including sexual harassment. She had never pressed charges and had even kept a professional relationship with Thomas (for the sake of her career) after moving on from the EEOC. But when officials were interviewing his former coworkers and assistants for a background check, Hill felt she had to tell the truth. The FBI file that contained Hill's private interview was leaked to the press. Women politicians and reporters were outraged that the Senate had been prepared to confirm Thomas without looking into his past conduct, so hearings were called in which Hill was subpoenaed to testify in person. We see the media following her with cameras and lights even before her appearance in the Senate, as she makes her way across the University of Oklahoma campus where she was a tenured law professor. "I just want to teach my class," she tells them. In a humorous moment that didn't make it into the news stories of the time she mentions what was then her legal specialty. "I can answer any questions you have about contracts." The Senate committee grilled her for hours at a time over the course of days, but Hill never lost her composure in spite of being forced to repeat, on national live television, the explicit details of Thomas's harassment, which included references to pornography and his own anatomy. The excerpts of the hearing are the most striking part of the film, and the documentary could use more of them. The Republicans on the committee (we see some particularly despicable moments from Alan Simpson and Arlen Spector), eager to confirm Thomas, portray Hill as a liar. These old white men do their best to denigrate her, and although the footage of the hearings shows that they never succeeded in diminishing her clear-eyed, precise testimony, they did succeed, in the off-camera arena, in diminishing her reputation. The film shows, so we don't forget, that Hill's testimony was confirmed by four others whom she had told about the harassment at the time it was occurring. They gave their sworn testimony in front of live national television and one of them, another African American woman even mentions why Hill had kept in touch with Thomas, "My mother always told me, as I'm sure her mother told her, that wherever you leave, make sure you leave friends there, because you never know when you will need them." She goes on to detail that for this very reason she exchanges Christmas cards with former colleagues she can't stand. The film also includes the information that Thomas had harassed other women in the workplace, at least one of whom was also subpoenaed, but mysteriously never called to testify. In the live question and answer period after the showing I attended, Hill explicitly blamed now Vice President, then Judiciary Committee Chair, Joe Biden, for this decision. She explained the "he said, she said" narrative the committee wanted to put forth would have been disrupted if more than one woman had offered testimony of how Thomas had harassed her. Because of the all-white membership of the committee, Thomas could get away, in his own testimony, with labeling the hearings "a high tech lynching" (the folly of that description is pointed out in the film by the male African American corporate lawyer whose testimony confirmed Hill's) while ignoring that Hill too was African American.Hill sums up this narrative as "I had a gender. He had a race." Hill always had the support of her large (she is one of 13 children), close family. In another clip that never made its way into the news stories of the time, we see her 79-year-old mother giving her a hug at the Senate hearing witness table and stand beside her outside of her family home back in Oklahoma, when the media ask for a statement on Thomas's confirmation. Dignified as always, Hill tells them that she hopes her testimony will encourage other women to speak up about harassment in their own workplaces. In spite of her tenured position at The University of Oklahoma, Hill felt the pressure from local Republican politicians (who targeted not just her, but also went after the Dean and the institution itself) to resign and eventually moved across the country to a position at Brandeis University, where she is now at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She also travels around the country lecturing on sexual harassment, which, she points out, she wouldn't have felt free to do if she had stayed at the University of Oklahoma. We see that Hill even has a supportive, long term boyfriend. Although the footage of this part of her life is less dramatic than that of the testimony I understand why the director includes it. After people in her own hometown angrily confronted Hill on the street about her testimony, after famously being called "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" (by a writer who later recanted though the slander lives on), in spite of Thomas being confirmed and sitting on the court to this day when even Hill's lawyer's 12-year-old daughter told her Dad, "I believe Anita," and in spite of politicians and courts still explicitly or implicitly labeling women as liars when they seek justice against powerful men, we need to see at least one happy ending–to give the rest of us the fortitude to continue fighting. Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer currently putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.  |
| Radio DJ Liz Kershaw on sexism at the BBC Posted: 11 Apr 2014 01:09 AM PDT
Liz Kershaw is a bit of an anomaly in the British media industry – a female radio DJ with a 30-year career and a regional accent. In her autobiography ‘The Bird and The Beeb’, released last month, she tracks her career from local radio in Leeds through to BBC 6 Music, highlighting competition scandals, the fight to save 6 Music and her one-woman campaign for women on BBC Radio. Talking to Women’s Views on News, Liz said the under-representation of women on BBC Radio was something that had been ‘bugging’ her since her days at Radio 1. "When I first started at Radio 1 it wasn’t a shock that all of the DJs were men, but it was a shock that that translated into a culture where, as a woman, you were seen as an interloper. "Your career prospects were defined by your gender – you couldn’t be a prominent stand-alone peak-time presenter if you were a woman." Liz’s peak-time career in the early 90s was as one half of the weekend breakfast team ‘Bruno & Liz’ on BBC Radio 1, with Bruno Brookes. It was a gig she had from 1989-1992, until she was ‘let go’ and Bruno was moved on to a solo slot. After a stint at Radio 5 Live, she joined BBC Radio Northampton to became the first and only woman to present a solo radio breakfast show on the network. She later moved to BBC Coventry & Warwickshire where she presented the drivetime show and, later on, the breakfast show. "I was the only woman doing a breakfast show on my own, out of 54 breakfast shows across the BBC. I couldn’t accept any reasonable explanation except prejudice and discrimination," she told WVoN. "It had been bugging me since Radio 1 and now I was in a position of strength. I started asking why this was the case." But even as recently as 2008 Liz was told to shut up for her own good after raising the subject with BBC local radio management, and warned not to mention it in an upcoming interview with a women’s magazine. The case was finally taken up in parliament by Nadine Dorries MP in 2011, despite a letter two years earlier to the then Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman, which, Liz said, solicited ‘no reply’. The evidence, all gathered from the BBC’s own public sources, was provided by Liz, yet despite the fact that it all pointed to a gross under-representation of women on the nation’s airwaves, she remained the lone voice of discrimination in BBC radio. "Women would tell me ‘well done, you’re a fighter and really brave’, but because of the culture of fear they don’t like to stick their own heads above the papa pit – it would make them vulnerable," she said. "I just thought ‘sod it if there are repercussions!’" In October 2012, the BBC began an independent review into the culture and practices at the BBC, a review that was in response to the investigation into Jimmy Savile. Liz had already spoken out about her treatment at Radio 1 and so was asked to participate. The findings of the Dame Janet Smith Review will be published later this year. "I am really looking forward to the results of the review, to hear what an objective QC has got to say about it. I’m delighted it’s been done, it was a long time coming," she said. "The culture of the past is still dominating today – it has manifested itself in the lack of women. The review won’t address the lack of women in BBC Radio, but it will help us to understand the legacy," she continued. According to Liz, being a woman at the BBC does still make a difference, but things are changing. "I don’t want to see tokenism – I don’t want good men to be sacked. It will take years to change, but there are signs of change – Radio 1 has recruited more women and Radio 4′s Today programme has a female co-presenter. "The BBC’s target was for 50 per cent of breakfast shows to have a female presenter or co-presenter by the end of 2014. It’s April and we’re at 30 per cent, so I don’t think they’ll achieve their goal," she continued. It is still better than when Liz took up the cause in 2011, when only 17 per cent featured a female presenter. "There is absolutely no excuse. There are so many girls who want to do the job, and if you look at Newsnight and the Politics Show there are women doing an excellent job." Despite fighting the corner for female presenters at the BBC for the last ten years or so, Liz doesn’t see herself as a feminist. "I’m not a feminist, I’m an equalist. I don't think feminism is a dirty word; I want to be an equalist where gender is irrelevant. In a professional capacity men and women should be treated equally." Liz Kershaw’s autobiography, ‘The Bird and The Beeb’, is out now in paperback and ebook format.  |
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