Letterman – This is a “Teachable Moment.” Don’t Blow it!!!
June 11, 2009
by Amy Siskind
|This week, David Letterman has provided our country with the second major “teachable moment” to explore the national crisis of the sexualization of our teenage daughters. This is an important opportunity, and we must use it wisely.
Our country blew the first teachable moment earlier this year. When Chris Brown physically assaulted Rihanna, we should have finally educated ourselves on violence against our teenage girls, but we did not. See the video footage on our home page and you will hear about “The Next Generation” which is the crisis of escalating domestic violence against our teenage daughters. You will hear the experts explain how the media and our politicans blew the chance to open a national dialogue.
In fact, a shocking poll conducted by The Boston Globe revealed:
Of the teens questioned, more than half said both Brown, 19, and Rihanna, 21, were equally responsible for the assault. More than half said the media were treating Brown unfairly, and 46 percent said Rihanna was responsible for the incident.
That’s what many of our daughters think. If they get hit, slapped or pushed, then it’s their fault. Our culture teaches that that “they” must have done something to deserve it. This is all part of our current culture of sexualizing our daughters and teaching them that their worth is based on their looks.
I was recently on a PBS panel to discuss “sexting” – another example of the crisis in our culture. Republican Strategist Nancy Pfotenhauer gave a great description of what is happening:
I think technology has turbocharged the sexualization of our daughters and it’s downright frightening.
(my part 3:35, Nancy 4:35)
So here’s what we need to do. We need to pressure Letterman, CBS and the sponsors and demand that the Letterman Show use an episode to open a national dialogue about the sexualization of our daughters. He could start off by explaining why his words are a violation of our daughters and explain why this is so. Explain that by sexualizing a teenage girl, he was perpetuating a frightening trend which looks something like this (courtesy of the American Bar Association):
1 in 3 female teenagers in a dating relationship has feared for her physical safety;
1 in 2 teenagers in a serious relationship has compromised personal beliefs to please a partner;
1 in 5 teenagers in a serious relationship reports having been hit, slapped, or pushed by a partner.
Letterman could also explain that the highest incident of rape occurs for girls between the ages of 16-24: 1 in 5 girls are raped. You know Letterman – like the age group of Governor Palin’s older daughter that you were dissing!
But overall, we all need to work together to change our culture. The New Agenda will continue to speak out when sexism rears its ugly head; but, as I have said on this blog, this is like a game of whack the mole and it just keeps coming back. Our real work is what we call “The Last Mile” which is getting beneath the surface and killing the roots of sexism and misogyny so that our daughter and granddaughters can live in a better country. Who wouldn’t want that?
And again, please donate $17 if you can today – or more if you can afford it. Sending out a press release costs money. Maintaining media lists costs money. Maintaining and updating our website money. Professional for accounting, lawyers, etc. cost money. We need your help. We are spreading our wings to become a national organization with a strong voice to end this national crisis.
It’s official Amy.
The democrats in Virginia’s 35th district have totally lost their minds.
http://www.omeishfordelegate.com/
Bravo. What is going on??? How is it okay that David Letterman thinks he can deem Bristol trash to even laugh about her getting herself “knocked up” at 18, four years her sister’s elder. He keeps saying this over and over that he in no way talks about the rape of Willow at fourteen. How does four years wipe his conscious clean? She’s of legal age.
But, the bigger problem here is that he blames Bristol. What about Bristol’s boyfriend?
Then he took pot shots at Sarah Palin being like a sluty stewardesss? Politics aside, what is going on in America? How is this okay to laugh at these women? Worse yet is Bristol’s child growing up someday and hearing all of this.
I couldn’t agree more. We need to be teaching our young girls to feel good about themselves and the choices they make and to not cater to the ideal image of sex pot who really doesn’t engage in sex with consequences.
Mary Ellen Walsh
http://www.daughtersandmoms.com
Let’s just push for his early retirement.
http://www.firedavidletterman.com/
Teachable moment?
Amy, with all due respect, get the bag off your head.
Major media executives and powers that be make billions of dollars from child pornography and brutalization. This is the underbelly of violence and misogyny that exists in our world and in our society. The importance of Letterman is that he could soften the reality of that by making jokes about pedophilia and violence against women in a gosh-gee amiable kind of way. The execs won’t get rid of him for his attacks on Governor Palin or her teenaged daughters. In fact, they value him for that. They’ll get rid of him because he has been injudicious, exercised poor judgment and let society’s underpinnings out of the bag. People are beginning to pay attention.
The boys governing Letterman and the current Ken Doll in the White House are not teachable. They are savages on a par with Osama bin Laden.
Hey everyone! Please check out this video and post it anywhere you think to do so. Thanks, and God Bless!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCSSJ0x_mXI
Letterman can not accomplish anything for women he is a moron. His show needs to be turned over to a team of women for a week and they need to be from women’s orgs not from liberal zombie orgs like NOW. They should be given a month to plan and they should use humor and straight teaching to talk about what is wrong with corporate media. If CBS does not comply with this demand then it is long past time for real women’s orgs to strongly campaign for women to cut the cable and simply down load only the content they want to watch for free . Women are the majority, 52% of the population and it is time corporate media fear us.
But women do not speak with one voice, sadly. I am constantly disgusted and saddened by supposedly liberal and even “feminist” women who refuse to oppose sexism because in their minds it would mean defending women they don’t like – like Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. The failure to separate issues in their minds reflects a failure in the national media, which plainly regards ad hominem attacks to be fair play if the target selected for a mass loathe-in “asks for it”. Teaching more discriminating and rational methods of debate should also, in my view, be a priority.
Listen ladies, I am a mother of 4 children, 3 are girls 14, 8, 6 and a son 12. The garbage that these kids see in videos tv magazines and is terrible. They grow up around nothing but sex. I hear alot of girls the way they talk to each other is disgusting. They get into arguments and the first thing they do is put each others appearence down. If you see some of these myspace ‘s they are nothing but cursing and nasty pictures of themselves. First, the adults in the media need to grow up.They do the same thing. Especially the women. They first put the women down by her looks as evident with Sarah and Hillary and Michelle Obama. Ones to pretty one only can wear pant suits the other has too much arm showing. I mean come on media is disgracful.That’s what our girls see. Thats what they do. They think its ok to put each other down.
[...] I wrote about last night, our country has our second teachable moment where some good could have come out of Letterman’s ill advised remarks. We could have opened [...]
Leave your Response Want an avatar? Get a gravatar!
Community Room
May 8, 2012 at 11:30 am
May 8, 2012 at 9:56 am
May 7, 2012 at 2:04 pm
May 7, 2012 at 1:37 pm
May 7, 2012 at 1:19 pm
April 20, 2012 at 12:57 pm
April 11, 2012 at 4:39 pm
April 6, 2012 at 1:18 pm
BUILD your NETWORK
Our Network of College Women
Protecting our Teenage Girls
We’re in the Media »
Click to see our latest stories in the media
More Stories »Recent Comments
The Latest from our Blog
Archives
Pioneer Mentors
Blogroll
Find us Online
Subscribe Entries (RSS) | Comments (RSS)
The New Agenda is a 501(c)(4) organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls by bringing about systemic change in the media, at the workplace, at school and at home. More...