Dylan Ratigan’s Women’s Moment
Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 03:16PM I was feeling better about my neck.
I went to a physical therapist about the neck pain I’d been experiencing. So a few days ago, I was distracting myself by watching Dylan Ratigan’s “Morning Meeting” on MSNBC while I practiced the boring exercise regimen Melissa, my therapist, prescribed. Ten reps three times for each exercise holding light hand weights as I hang over the bed.
The segment led with a rhetorical question about whether this could be the breakthrough time for women. La la. Heard that one before.
Dylan reported the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit was going on out in California. That’s a yawn—I went to the Fortune Summit five years ago. And that was supposed to be the time for women. Though I didn’t remember it making a media splash like this before.
Oh, I see. Mika Brzezinski was there—well of course MSNBC would want to highlight that. And Joe Scarborough was on her panel, joking about how intimidated he was walking through all those women to get to the stage—he compared himself to a character in the John Irving novel, The World According to Garp. Cute, huh? Does he think estrogen is contagious?
The Fortune Summit story led into an interview with Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist with visible cleavage. Why does that still shock me when I see cleavage on a woman appearing on television? I mean boobs are standard issue for women. And better visible women’s boobs than some of the male boobs that, for all our progress, still dominate the punditry.
Dylan asked Karen to comment on an article I saw yesterday about how women legislators perform better than their male counterparts—they pass more legislation, secure more co-sponsors, and bring home more bacon to their districts. Well, that’s certainly not news—it’s become a regular trend story ever since the UN and McKinsey almost simultaneously discovered a year or two ago that once parliaments and corporate boards reach 30% female representation, the quality of decisions improves and the guys behave better. (Maybe estrogen is contagious.)
Karen opined that women are more collaborative about the legislative process (a real bulletin here—no one said “catfights”!), and then cheerily observed that we haven’t seen women involved in sex scandals like men have notably been of late. Well, all that sex subterfuge would make it hard for men to find as much time for actually legislating, now wouldn’t it?
Next, Dylan reported that women could equal men in the workforce as soon as this October. Pink and blue numbers flashed on the screen to show part of the reason: during the recession, women have accounted for 26% of layoffs while men accounted for 74%.
Hello, where have they been? This has been bubbling on recession blogs and in the feminist media for at least a year.
Dylan lobbed a throwaway “what do you make of that?” question at Karen—maybe he had a few extra seconds to fill.
She replied, “Let’s not kid ourselves. Part of this is that women come cheaper,” pointing out that women tend to hold the lower paying jobs, and when companies are cutting costs, they lay off the more expensive, higher paid men. So perhaps we aren’t as close to gender equality nirvana as it appeared.
The media critic part of me rolled eyes at how superficially this “women’s moment” package had been lashed together without one single new piece of information in it. I finished my exercises as the segment ended.
But as I tucked my hand weights back under the bed, I began to realize that the real story was one that had not been announced: The mainstream media narrative had finally noticed and seen fit to tell the same story women’s blogs had so long discussed amongst ourselves, while complaining that no one else was picking it up.
Apparently someone or ones have been watching. The big story of the day wasn’t any one of the disparate parts of this MSNBC Morning Meeting segment. It was that the overall “women’s moment” story line has entered the cultural bloodstream.
That’s when my neck began feeling a whole lot better, and it wasn’t just from the exercise.
Do women realize this is a game changing moment? And what are we doing to make sure the story on Dylan Ratigan’s morning show isn’t just another fleeting blip on the gender power screen?
You see, I’ve been tracking the MSNBC website, looking for the segment I described so I could link to it. So far, they have posted almost every other segment from that program, but not this one. Is women’s news still not considered as important as men’s? Is that why the “women’s time” segment seemed fluffy?
And, whoops, this just in from Atlantic Monthly’s the AtlanticWire via blogger Lucinda Marshall who analyzes quite nicely the problem we face when a Top 50 list of commentators is still almost entirely men—41 male (only two of color) to nine female (all white), to be exact.
Guess we still have a bit of therapy to do.
http://www.GloriaFeldt.com/powered-women-blog
Gloria Feldt
Please be sure to read this outstanding article by Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake for a more serious look at these issues, especially as they relate to women in the workplace (or not).
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Reader Comments (9)
Nice rant, Gloria. Yeah, the layoff numbers aren't shocking at all. And I'm willing to bet that once the economy turns around and we're see the creation of new jobs, that women are going to be expected to take a back seat to their male counterparts. I unfortunately have history on my side to back up that prediction.
thanks, Serena. A good rant now and then is good for the soul.
Yes you have history on yoru side, but my goal is for us to write the next chapter differently :-)
I think I'm willing to bet that once the economy turns around and we're see the creation of new jobs. your story is just awesome.
Jeux Pour Enfant--thanks for the comment. I suspect we'll have to work hard to keep the positive direction of things. I hope the book I'm writing will help to show women how.
Dylan Ratigan is the only choice, here. I’ve followed his move from CNBC to MSNBC, and while I was hopeful that the new show would be more truthful than most shows out there, I’m just completely blown away by how awesome the new show is. I’ve been angry about the bailouts since they happened, and I can’t even count how many Howard Beale moments I’ve had reading about them over the last few months. If it weren’t for people like Barry Ritholtz and Dylan Ratigan, and websites like The Daily Bail, I probably would have given up the fight long ago. Bravo to Dylan Ratigan!
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