Story of the Month: June
Rise Above Marginalization
In 1997, Time magazine voted Kim Polese, CEO of the software company Marimba, one of the most influential people in the country. Interviewers besieged her, but they couldn’t quite figure out this very attractive thirty-something who had excelled in the male-dominated field of technology. Like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy, being smart and beautiful at the same time just didn’t compute. Kim remembers it well: “As CEO, I would be interviewed by all these magazines, but the articles would be all about me, in a way they didn’t write about male CEOs. It got weird because of the undue amount of attention I got; I knew it had nothing to do with my merit. But this type of attention promoted a perception that I was going out there to promote myself. It took on a life of its own.”
So when Fortune requested an interview, Kim insisted that the article focus on the company, not on her. The reporter agreed. Before the interview came out, the reporter called Kim and said, “You probably won’t like how the article has turned out.” She explained that she had written a version, but the editors made her rewrite it. The Fortune editors, all men, had decided in advance that they wanted a controversial hit piece, which they do when it is time to take someone down. “If you’ve been getting a lot of attention, they savage you,” Kim told me. “The angle they had adopted was this sex-object, bimbo image. It was all about playing up the seductive vixen CEO thing. The title of the piece was ‘The Beauty of Hype.’ It was amazing to see that appear in a publication the stature of Fortune, which holds no stature with me anymore.”
Kim’s story highlights how objectification distorts women’s power and wisdom. When a woman is cast as a sex object, her worth is her sexual appeal. This creates a paradox where a woman is at once visible and invisible. Her sexuality is in the glaring light, but the woman herself is not revealed or known any depth. She is seen but not known. When the media played up the sex vixen thing with Kim, they at once vilified her femininity and disempowered her. Since when are sex vixen’s viewed as leaders? As a veiled dancer, she cannot possibly emerge as a leader. When faced with an oddity in the technology industry, which Kim was, prestigious magazines like Fortune chose to exploit and diminish a competent woman. In so doing the magazine marginalized her as someone not to take too seriously. Neither Kim’s stature nor the magazine’s reputation held any safeguard against her being objectified. This stereotyping and degradation of the feminine is excused with the following bizarre rationale: there aren’t enough women out there, and if there were more women in power, people like Kim would not be treated as an oddity. That’s true, but why does the scarcity of women in power give the media the permission to smear them? The article on Kim was clearly aimed at diminishing her and stripping her of her authority. Misogyny is alive and well.
For decades, feminists have spoken up against objectifying women for just these reasons-it limits who a woman is and distorts her power. Along the way, that message got distorted into feminists not wanting to be feminine or sexy. We are actually seeing a backlash where younger women seem to be willing to objectify themselves. Seduced by the power of sexual appeal, some women have confused titillation with genuine feminine power. So we have the Paris Hilton’s and Jessica Simpson’s, who turn women’s progress on it’s heels as they happily let themselves be objectified. They’ve successfully marketed a personality of being rich and carefree and sexy. Wouldn’t it be fun if you could all be like me? That’s fine except these vacant-eyed starlets are also sending the message that they are stupid and isn’t that cute.
Well, actually, no it’s not cute. Although media savvy, they are probably not even aware of the implications of their own actions. There are so many cultural, subtle messages that diminish a woman’s power by limiting her worth to her physicality. Often we absorb these images and aren’t even aware that we do. Rather than seeing ads reflecting the confidence women have in themselves as women, rather than celebrating their differences and recognizing their importance, most ads divide women rather than unite them. Images of women become a tool for self-policing, a constant comparison test for women in an effort to live up to these ideals. Never thin enough, young enough, rich enough.
When women are unaware of the subtle messages that diminish them, then we see women allowing themselves to be reduced to hot babes posing in little more than body glitter and stilettos on the covers of men’s magazine. We see young women getting plastic surgery in order to achieve some kind of cookie-cutter ideal. Many women, unwittingly, find themselves perpetuating and supporting a system that keeps them in their place, that is relegated to the sidelines.
Iron Butterflies recognize these subtle messages. They know that objectification leads to marginalization. They know that if you are put on a pedestal, those who put you up there will just as easily tear you down, just as they tried to do with Kim. Kim is an Iron Butterfly and she used the situation as an opportunity to make people aware of the veils of distortion that the media drape on women. Among other actions, she and the reporter spoke to a journalism school and started a buzz about how women are treated in the press.
It’s not easy to take a stand against marginalization; you get the rolling eyes and the “what’s her problem” look. But if women don’t take a stand, who will? There’s more to being a woman than just being a babe in boyland. Just ask an Iron Butterfly.