Women and Politics

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

We all expect outrageous commercials during the Super Bowl. But CBS has taken sexist advertising to a whole new level by choosing to air an anti-choice ad sponsored by Focus on the Family.

Jehmu Greene, President of the Women’s Media Center (WMC), recently wrote a piece on Huffingon Post, which challenges CBS’ use of Super Bowl Sunday to promote their socially conservative agenda:

“Super Bowl advertising has always been a showcase of overt sexism. This year the biased barrage also includes CBS’s and the NFL’s decision to air a seemingly subtle ad highlighting college football star Tim Tebow’s story, sponsored by Focus on the Family, which aggressively works to strip women of medical choices. This decision should be seen as a referendum on the status of women in the media and marks the first time the Super Bowl will be used to push a polarizing, political agenda”.

Read the rest of Jehmu’s post here.

The Women’s Media Center has also simplified the reasoning behind why CBS should remove this ad in their Top 10 Reasons the NFL Should Tell CBS to Scrap the Ad .

Jehmu and WMC echo the voice of WCF and many other organizations in demanding that CBS to pull the ad and refrain from injecting Americans with anti-choice rhetoric during the Super Bowl.

Take action: join the Women’s Media Center and add your voice now!

In deciding to air a Focus on the Family ad during the Super Bowl, CBS executives have effectively outed themselves as anti-choice and anti-woman.

If CBS is trying to avoid controversial issues in Super Bowl commercials, I think it’s safe to say that they’ve failed miserably. Even putting aside the negative frenzy the ad has already caused, let’s remember that Focus on the Family is one of the most contentious, intolerant, and extreme organizations in existence.

Not to mention that reproductive rights is one of the most controversial and dividing issues of our time.

To approve an anti-choice spot and reject an ad for a male dating site (among their past rejections of progressive organizations) shows blatant hypocrisy and bias.

We can’t show two guys making out, but we can talk about abortion?

Defenders of CBS’ decision say yes—that despite its divisive and political message, the ad itself is positive and uncontroversial. Bill O’Reilly asks, how can anyone be offended about Tim Tebow being alive?

But now I have to ask: What if a pro-choice ad had been submitted for the Super Bowl? What if it featured an uplifting story like Tim Tebow’s?

Picture this: Fade in. Moving music plays. Video of children playing. A woman talks about how happy she is that the birth control pill was available to her. She wanted to make sure she became a mother when she was ready. Because of her ability to make that choice, she now has two children who she’s fully able to support. End on picture of happy family. Fade out.

And what if this ad was for Planned Parenthood or National Abortion Federation? Something tells me CBS wouldn’t approve their message to over 100 million Super Bowl viewers. And I don’t think Bill O’Reilly would deem this a “positive message.”

It seems both are making this decision solely based on the ad—not its message, political connotation, or extremely divisive views of the creating organization.

Many organizations, including WCF, are demanding that CBS pull the ad.

TAKE ACTION: Join the Women’s Media Center and add your voice now!

The issue of women’s reproductive health belongs in doctors’ offices, family discussions, and women’s hands.

It doesn’t belong in our government or with politicians. And it most certainly doesn’t belong in the Super Bowl.

(Please welcome our friend PunditMom to the WCFF blog! She will be cross-posting from her blog during the conventions and we are so happy to have her. Look forward to more of her posts!)

While there are no statistics to prove this, it feels like there are a record number of events for political women at the Democratic National Convention. That’s a really exciting thing in terms of where political women go from here when the 2008 election is done in November.

NOW’s EqualiTEA, the Unconventional Women forum being put on by a variety of organizations, including The White House Project and the Women’s Campaign Forum, and the EMILY’s List reception, just to name a few, are places for progressive, activist women to gather and start planning the next phase of their political lives and agendas.

The Women’s Media Center is also presenting their report called, “From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry and the Press in the 2008 Election,” and apparently we need it, and not just for the guys who insisted on giving Hillary Clinton short shrift during the presidential campaign.

In an article called Hillary Clinton Fans Tough to Woo, Christy Hoppe of the Dallas-Morning News wrote about the increased number of women’s gatherings in Denver, referring to them as an “estrogen-fest.”

An estrogen-fest.

Is that supposed to make us think about hundreds of hormonal women creating a ruckus like a bunch of sorority girls? Because I hardly think it’s the right turn of a phrase to describe gatherings with the likes of Senator Hillary Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the scores of other high-profile Democratic women, especially when one Clinton almost became the party’s presidential nominee.

Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you read anything written about a political event populated by men called a “testosterone-fest?”

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The fact that the media, women members included, continue to write about gatherings presented and attended by women — especially political women — in derogatory and dismissive terms like this one never ceases to amaze me. I guess that’s my problem. I should be used to it by now.

But if we can’t even get other women to stop describing serious women and serious events with a vocabulary that can only diminish and mock us, how will we ever get the likes of Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson, or the whole team at Fox News to stop referring to us as “bitchy” and “castrating?”

If any of you run into Christy Hoppe at the DNC, let her know I’d like to have a word with her. I just hope that she doesn’t run into Gloria Steinem or Nancy Pelosi first. That just won’t be pretty.

(Cross-posted from PunditMom.)