Gloria Steinem was always more of a feminist icon than a TV personality. Still, her appearance at a memorable Television Critics Association press tour gathering in July of 2011 packed a Beverly Hilton ballroom.
The social movement advocate, who passed away Sept. 2 at 92, was at TCA to promote Gloria: In Her Own Words, a HBO documentary.
Steinem was asked on that occasion if she thought that, far from coming “a long way baby,” the women’s movement had slid back from the strides made by the early ’70s. That was an activist era, after all, when landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Roe vs. Wade resulted in, as Steinem labeled it, “reproductive freedoms” throughout North America.
Nonetheless, in 2011, women were still being objectified. Just look at that fall’s TV schedule. Shows being promoted that summer at the Beverly Hilton included a remake of the “jiggle” series Charlie’s Angels on ABC; Pan Am, a nostalgic series about stewardists in the ’60s (which featured Karine Vanasse from the Canadian Traitors plus Margot Robbie and Christina Ricci); and another retro ’60s drama, this time from NBC, The Playboy Club.
Were these all attempts to get back to an era when America was great again? That they all bombed probably had more to do with poor scripts than capturing a moment or a movement.
Then again, here we are 15 years later and forget abortion — womens’ right to vote is being called into question.
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Steinem, a former journalist and co-founder of Ms Magazine, held her perspective.
“The hierarchical response has two poles,” she said: “The very worst men are into sadomasochism, and the very best men are into nostalgia. So I think this is like the nostalgia industry. It’s like the World War II industry. It’s the last time we were really right. So someone told me that we had actually put more money into making films and television series about World War II than we put into World War II. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it would be interesting research to figure out.”
There was a follow up question. Steinem was asked if she was surprised people were still fascinated by High Hefner’s sex life. Besides that fall’s Playboy Club drama on ABC, a few seasons earlier the aging magazine publisher limped through a cable reality series where he was supposedly living it up with The Girls Next Door.
Show of hands, asked Steinem. “How many people are fascinated by Hugh Hefner’s sex life? I mean, if I had made him up, they would hang me from the highest tree.”
But people watch that kind of Bachelor-y reality stuff, the reporter persisted.
Said Steinem, “People watch train wrecks too.”
The activist knew the Playboy empire from the inside. In 1963, she famously went undercover as a bunny in a New York club. It all went into a magazine article she wrote exposing, among other less savoury things, poor working conditions.
The Bunny Clubs were all gone by 2011, but there was still places like Hooters. Fifteen years later there is Only Fans plus a tidal wave of free Internet porn that makes the way Playboy magazine objectified women look like a church bulletin.
Steinem admitted she did despair from time to time, despite progress in wages and job opportunities for women. Was she challenged by what still needed to be done? “It depends on what day it is,” she replied.
The women’s movement would outlive her, she concluded. “A movement really has to last about ‑‑ I mean, if you think of the suffragist, abolitionists, and other movements — it has to last about 100 years to be really absorbed into a culture, and we’re about, you know, 40‑some years into this. So I don’t know how to break it to you, but I would say we have, like, 60 years to go. I mean, I’m old, but the movement is young. So I hope people take encouragement from this documentary.”
You can still find Gloria: In Her Own Words on HBO Max.
