My Question:
My broader question for you, Melissa, and this blog’s other readers, is: how do you keep the faith while you do this work? How do you avoid short-circuiting with frustration when you behold the scope of the problem? There are some times, especially when I read something like this from a relatively successful filmmaker of 20 years, when all I want to do is give up.

Ela Thier
June 17, 2009 at 8:21 PM

Dear Jennifer,
I read your posting and had to chime in.

To keep hope, I take a two-pronged approach:

1) We need to refuse to feel bad about ourselves. We can’t make progress as long as we’re vulnerable to believing the misinformation about women that we’ve stewed in all our lives. We each need to know that we are intelligent, significant, wanted, and uniquely beautiful. This may require some tears and grief, to heal from what we’ve internalized. If we really truly knew how good we are, we would be unstoppable. So for the sake of our cause: we each have to quit feeling deficient or lacking in any way what so ever.

2) We need to lovingly train men to be our allies, and know that it’s what they really want. They feel so bad about sexism that they just shut down when we take the tone of blame. If we assume their goodness, they rise to our expectations. We can’t win this battle without them joining us, and the good news is that we don’t need to.

I knew a guy whose sexism was driving me up a wall. One day I asked him: “Have you ever witnessed a woman being treated badly?” Within minutes he was talking about growing up with a single mom, and all the hardships that he watched her face. When he spoke about how hard she worked without ever getting promoted, he broke into tears. I kid you not. He was crying in my arms by the end of the conversation. Men carry so much heartache from having watched women get mistreated, and they never get to talk about it.

I have a dream of one day compiling a book in which I interview men in Hollywood about instances in which they witnessed sexism, and what advice they might give to men and women in handling those scenarios. I never ask men about their own sexism because it’s too hard for them to talk about it. They feel super guilty, shut down, go into denial mode, and we, in turn, get mad about it! if we can leave out the blame and expect men to want to assist us, they come to life.

My book will be called: Women in Hollywood and Our Allies