Another Banned Book, Another Failure to Crush the Human Spirit

 

Pakistani authorities announced Nov. 10 that they were banning Malala Yousafzai’s book, I Am Malala, from private schools and libraries throughout Pakistan.  Calling her “a tool of the West,” insufficiently respectful toward Islam, and too sympathetic to religious minorities, the authorities have banned the book from more than 40,000 schools.  In so doing, they’ve enlarged the target on Malala’s back.

 

 

Malala visits President and Mrs. Obama and their daughter,
Malia, in October.

They probably have also set in motion a response that will increase sales of the book and heighten the determination of those who believe this brave young teenager’s message deserves to be heard. 

Remember Reading Lolita in Tehran?  It’s a great example of why removing books from classrooms usually has the opposite effect of what the banners intend. But then — the Taliban and its cronies in Pakistan probably haven’t read that one.

 

I Am Malala is on the New York Times bestseller list and is likely to stay there for a good while.  The young author joins a long and illustrious list of writers whose books were banned, burned, or pulped.

James Joyce (Ulysses), The Arabian Nights, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (required reading when I was in high school), Darwin’s Origin of Species, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  Among the most ludicrous was the ban on Anna Sewell’s youth novel about a girl and her beloved horse, Black Beauty, banned in apartheid South Africa because the word “black” was in the title.  (A wonderful source for banned book titles is http://www.postdesk.com/banned-books-list-reasons-why-censorship.)

The fact that the interest in, and loyalty to, banned books is heightened by the attacks on them  continues to be lost on communities, and community groups, that believe suppression of information solves a problem for them.  It never does.  Nevertheless, efforts continue around the world, led not just by political leaders but also by groups of all sizes.  Their persistence gave birth to Banned Books Week.

Banned Books Week is the national U.S. book community's annual celebration of the freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. Banned Books Week 2014 will be held September 21-27.

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982. According to the American Library Association, there were 464 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2012, and many more go unreported.  For a list of the most challenged books of 2012, go here: http://bannedbooksweek.org/about

 

It is sad that the children in so many of Pakistan’s schools will not be able to read Malala’s book. But I imagine they will know about her story regardless of the ban. As of this writing, I Am Malala is No. 5 on the New York Times list. Millions of people know that.  And there’s not a thing the Taliban can do about it.

  — Sheila Gibbons, Editor

 

This commentary is reprinted from the Fall 2013 issue of MEDIA REPORT TO WOMEN.  For details about that issue and how to subscribe to this quarterly  news journal, visit www.mediareporttowomen.com

 

 

No Good Answer to Daughter's Question: "Why Aren't There More Women on the Front Page?"

Nine-year-old Mellie Ahearn, reading The Washington Post over breakfast (way to go, Mellie!), turned to her mother and asked, "Mommy, why aren't there more pictures of women on the front page of the newspaper?"  This conversation, recounted on today's Washington Post reader feedback page, led to Mellie and her mother, Laura, conducting a study on the frequency with which the Post featured photos of women and girls on the front page.  The results:  20% for the month of August, their study period.

"I kind of thought it would be lopsided," Mellie said, "but not that lopsided."

This kind of continuing imbalance is damaging to the way girls see themselves, Laura Ahearn says -- and it can't help the Post with selling newspapers to women.  Indeed, women, as a proportion of newspaper readership, have been declining for years.

Read about the Ahearns' enterprising study here.

"Turning Women into Drawings and Passing Them Off As Real"

Blogger Laura Willard, on her Upworthy site, posted a video that purports to show "the power of Adobe Photoshop" by converting a lovely woman into a Barbie-ish version of herself -- all with Photoshop software and a mouse.

"I want to show my daughter, over and over, why the images of so many women she sees aren't realistic," Willard writes. "And what I really want is for us to stop turning beautiful women into drawings and passing them off as real."

In 37 seconds, the woman in the video is made up, bewigged, and then with the wonders (or horrors) of Photoshop, has her contours reduced, her eyes enlarged, her mouth turned into a pout, her legs lengthened and her skin lightened.  The result is an all-too-familiar image type that dominates fashion and feature photography images of women and girls.  The nicest thing one can say about it is that the image is unhealthy.  The  more honest comment is that it's sick and feeds devastating thoughts about self-image.  See it for yourself.

Google's Autocomplete Tool: Sexism at Your Fingertips

Adweek Magazine has published a powerful campaign by UN Women to demonstrate how insidious sexism is by how much of it is embedded in user searches.  Conducting an actual search on one day in September 2013, it became apparent that negative beliefs about women -- their rights, their image, their aspirations -- are so prevalent that Google's autocomplete can anticipate them and provide them as a search choice.  

"These ads do a stellar job driving home the daunting fact that enough people around the world share these vile opinions that Google has come to expect them," Adweek says.  Check out the results in Adweek's article here.

Keep Your Clothes On, Girls, Says Welsh Recording Star Charlotte Church

Charlotte Church

Another veteran musical performer has weighed in with advice in the wake of singer Miley Cyrus's recent sexually explicit live and video performances.  Charlotte Church, invited to give the annual John Peel Lecture October 14 to broadcasting executives at Britain's annual radio festival, made some of the same points as Sinead O'Connor in cautioning young female performers about crossing over the line into performance pornography.

"The irony behind this is that the women generally filling these roles are very young, often previous child stars or Disney-tweens, who are simply interested in getting along in an industry glamorized to be the most desirable career for young women,” Church said in the lecture, as reported by The Telegraph. (No joke:  Miley Cyrus starred in the Disney Channel's "Hannah Montana";  another child star turned musical sexpot is Britney Spears, a veteran of Disney's "Mickey Mouse Club.")  "They are encouraged to present themselves as hyper-sexualized, unrealistic, cartoonish, as objects, reducing female sexuality to a prize you can win," Church said.  She endorses a system that would give age-appropriate ratings to music videos.

Church, 27, has described being whipsawed in her own career by differing visions of her sexuality as she went from a breakthrough classical vocalist at age 11 to an adult musical interpreter with crossover appeal. In an interview with the BBC, Church said that early in her career,  "There was a big clamour to cover my breasts as they wanted to keep me as young as possible. Then it became, "You should definitely get them out, they look great."

Church talks about this worsening issue for popular female musical performers, her own career, and women in music in this interview with the Women's Hour of the BBC, which happily includes many other women active in the music industry.

An Honest Look at Source Gender Balance in One's Own Reporting

Bryna Dabby of Women in Games in a 2011 interview in Vancouver.

Hats off to Adrienne LaFrance, who had a math whiz at the MIT Media Lab analyze a year's worth of her own reporting for gender bias in sourcing.  A feminist alert to the widespread pattern of male voices dominating news sourcing in every medium, she put her own work to the test -- and came up dissatisfied with her performance. In 136 articles, LaFrance mentioned or quoted 2,075 persons, of whom 25 percent were female, she says.  That put her right at the average for reporters worldwide, according to the Global Media Monitoring Study, which has been tracking these numbers for two decades, as have other groups before it.

LaFrance writes a thoughtful piece on the problem. "Underrepresentation of women in media is one of those topics that’s so big and so multifaceted that a lot of people don’t really know how to begin to talk about it, let alone do anything to make a difference," she says, adding that saying "Journalists are simply reflecting the imbalance that exists all around them" is a poor excuse that makes it possible for nothing to change."

She has written one of the most thoughtful pieces on the subject I've ever read.  She concludes that both sides of the equation have to work harder -- journalists to track down appropriate sources who are female and women being willing to be quoted.  LaFrance notes a reticence among women that is less of a problem with men she contacts for interviews -- she's not the first person to notice this or wonder why it is the case.  Her account is a good example of why we're still talking about this and why we need to get on with fixing the problem.

Why Are Women Still Being Told They Must Overcome Their Personality Traits to Succeed in the Workplace?

This is a discussion well worth having -- but it's amazing, and awful, that we're still having it.

The gender disparity in news media management and so many other fields persists and people at the top don't even seem embarrassed about it, let alone motivated to do anything about it.

So when Australian newspaper editor Kylie Davis unpacks the problem for us, lays out the research showing how well women manage life in general as well as their work place responsibilities, you have to wonder about the management decisions that leave so many of them behind.