Geena Davis Says No to Women as Only "Eye Candy"

[Source: Washington Examiner, by Nikki Schwab, July 13, 2011]

Actress Geena Davis is not a fan of how women and girls are portrayed throughout the media. But she's not calling out any of her Hollywood colleagues. "I'm in the industry and I want to keep working," she said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "We are kind of like Switzerland, we don't put down specific movies, we don't single out anybody."

Instead of pointing fingers, she engaged lawmakers like Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., and put her celebrity behind a bill called the "Healthy Media for Youth Act," that uses a three-prong approach to encourage healthier images of women in the media. "We know that the more hours of television a girl watches the fewer options she believes she has in life, so clearly girls are not seeing girls doing a wealth of things," Davis explained.

The bill would offer grants to nonprofits to help educate young people about the media, would fund research on how images — like super-skinny models — affect girls, and would create a national taskforce that would develop voluntary industry guidelines.

Davis, who founded the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media, said she first became aware of the gender disparity when looking at children's programming for her young daughter. She noticed the many male characters to the few female ones. And the women often didn't have careers.

"Of the female characters that were there, the vast majority, as we've mentioned, were either highly stereotyped or were serving mainly as eye candy," Davis explained. "So the concern was clear, what message does this send to young children about the value of girls?"

On a more positive note, Davis explained that once certain images are out there, they stick. "As far as girls are concerned, if they can see it, they can be it," she said. "[Like] being president," she said, loudly coughing, getting laughs from the crowd for her oh-so-obvious reference to her role on Commander in Chief.