On this week’s 51%, we hit the books. University of Virginia Professor Andrea Press explains how today’s media can better represent women in her book, Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism. And Dr. Sharon Ufberg speaks with Take the Lead’s Gloria Feldt about her latest title, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for Everyone’s Good.

Guests: Andrea Press, University of Virginia professor and co-author of Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism; Gloria Feldt, co-founder and president of Take the Lead and author of Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for Everyone’s Good

51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It’s produced by Jesse King, our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is “Lolita” by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue.

Follow Along

You’re listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women’s issues and experiences. Thanks for tuning in, I’m Jesse King. 

We’ve got a pair of interviews with some fantastic authors today — and we’re going to start by getting a little meta and talking about the media. The media we consume can be a powerful thing: it can reflect the cultural and social norms of our time, make us feel heard and seen, and challenge society by exposing audiences to new ideas. So how is media faring when it comes to women? Well, if you ask our first guest, not too great — but it’s complicated in this digital age.

Andrea Press is a professor of media studies and sociology at the University of Virginia, and her new book with Francesca Tripodi — titled Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism: How U.S. Audiences Create Meaning Across Platforms — is out now on the State University of New York Press. In it, the pair explore how feminist messaging is blunted (or in some cases, created) in its consumption, and how media can better represent women of all backgrounds. 

Press says the idea for the book started with an observation she and Tripodi made years ago.

“There was this pervasive idea in the culture that feminist activism had been successful and was finished, and there was not an ongoing problem. And that contradicted many experiences that women were having in their everyday lives,” Press explains. “And so, as sociologists, we were really interested in that disconnect between experience, and the way people understood their experience, and acted upon their experience. And as media scholars, we felt the media were playing an important role in this disconnect.

Just to start off at the beginning, what do you define as media-ready feminism?

Well, media-ready feminism was what we found when we examined the iteration of feminism in different media platforms. And the way we define media-ready feminism is a feminism that’s focused on the struggles of largely white, very affluent, successful women in the culture. It’s a version of feminism that kind of downplays the need for revolutionary change and sort of focuses on much more smaller reforms needed, but purports the idea that feminism is largely an accomplished goal. A good example of media-ready feminism would be the recent #Metoo movement, where we had a focus on the struggles of very glamorous, mostly white, affluent actresse