Live Blogging: NCRW Popular Culture and Gender Images

Latoya Peterson (pictured right), our girl from Racialicious.com, is up first.
Pop culture conversations are vital because it reaches so many people across the world. “The U.S.’s biggest export is pop culture; it’s about all we export.”
Dr. Laura Plybon, a self-identified Apache Indian and Girls Inc., speaks VERY briefly about her desire to see people from her culture represented in the media accurately and complexly.
Glennda Testone, from the Women’s Media Center, is up next. I heart her so much. She talks about the Women’s Media Center’s work:

The Women’s Media Center makes women visible and powerful in the media. Led by our president, the Emmy-winning journalist, writer, and producer Carol Jenkins, the WMC works with the media to ensure that women’s stories are told and women’s voices are heard. We do this in three ways: through our media advocacy campaigns; by creating our own media; and by training women to participate directly in media. We are directly engaged with the media at all levels to ensure that a diverse group of women is present in newsrooms, on air, in print and online, as sources and subjects.

She also mentions Rhianna and the most recent Disney princess as potential flash points to look at during the conversation.
This is amazing. Each panelist is basically passing the mic. How refreshing.
Anne Zill of the Women’s Center for Ethics in Action says she’s probably going to be a “little heretical” on this panel today because she wants to talk about ways in which pop culture right now is actually positive in certain ways.
She advocates for throwing away the superwoman archetype and embracing a more communitarian approach to raising families and finding fulfilling work. She also talks about the critical need to foster empathy while raising all children.
Glennda (pictured left) talks about how women are the majority of the population and the majority of consumers are women. Women only hold 3% of clout positions in the media. She talks about an initial meeting with all the bookers and producers from mainstream media that the WMC initially had. They were so excited that there were tons of women with decision making power in the room, but when they went around the room, it turned out that every single one of them reported to a male boss. Management positions in media are 15-24% women.
She proposes the idea of a hiring quota of some kind of people of color and women in leadership positions in the media.
Latoya shows a really interesting graph of Huffington Post’s traffic vs. Feministing’s traffic and reminds us that, though it’s great that we’re “making our own media,” we still don’t have nearly the same bandwith as the mainstream media outlets.
Latoya: “what permeates the social consciousness is at the CNN level.”
She refers to Women & Hollywood’s recent commentary on the ways in which Hollywood just refuses to believe that women go to the movies and want to see more than chick flicks. Melissa Silverstein advocates, from the audience, that women really need to go to women-oriented films on opening weekend. Buying a ticket, she explains, is like voting. You can sign up for her e-newsletter if you want to get weekly information about what films are opening.

There’s a lot of conversation back and forth about how much progress has been made. I also feel like, as often happens, the framing of this panel was too wide–“media”–and therefore the conversation is kind of all over the place.
Latoya is talking about getting real about that one area in which we’ve made very little progress is the images of women and color. “You’ll see this extreme compartmentalization: ‘I need to be a leader, I need to get money’ but then Beyonce is singing about building up her man and letting him take the lead etc. She refers to the contrasting conversation about Star Trek on Racialicious and other blogs.
She also recommends Elizabeth Mendez Berry as critical reading.
A woman in the audience talks about how horrified she was by the idea that young women saw Rhianna as provoking her abuse. She wonders why there wasn’t more of a conversation about hip hop.
Latoya explains that there is an important distinction between hip hop and R&B, and asserts that not all issues to do with the black community are hip hop issues. She then elaborates on what kind of symbol Chris Brown was–a squeaky, clean nice boy that suburban girls felt comfortable swooning over. Thus, the strong and conflicted reaction that so many young women had when he was revealed to be capable of violence.
The conversation continues to wander around…not even sure what to write about. Video games. Heroic symbols of women in art. The importance of a critical mass of images rather than symbols (like Michelle Obama etc.). Need to move beyond “the firsts.”
I’m off to a lunchtime caucus on young leadership…