A Quote by Anna Biller
Plenty of women say, "I'm just going to make myself into a sex object." But they often can't stay afloat doing that. They can't maintain their sanity. Some women can, but many cannot. They think they can, but self-objectification is really dangerous.
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In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest.
Prejudice against womenis many, many times intensified against older women. You are viewed not as an intellect but as a body.... Astonishingly, even women's liberation has paid extraordinarily little attention to the older woman and to the fact that her job is limited because she is [older]. They say that women shouldn't be sex objects, but you damned well better be a sex object if you want to get ahead in television.
Even if I wouldn't wear something myself, I think I know how women feel, how women want to look. I can really relate to women, I get on very well with women... Some women don't. I want to empower women, make women feel the best version of themselves.
[Demystifying lesbian sex for an interviewer] In a way, the sex isn't really that different... From what I can tell, no, not really. All the things that men and women do together, think of everything that men and women do together, women and women can do together. And that makes you realize that sex is just simply about connecting with another person, or about intimacy.
I thought it would be easy to cast a Bond girl, because there are so many beautiful women in this world. But not many of them can act. Their acting needed to be really strong and three-dimensional. Historically, the role of women in the world has changed. You can't have someone in a Bond film just as a sex object.
I think that our culture is doing something to women - let's say women in their late 30s and 40s and probably even 50s, - where they really are expected to keep this insane level of fitness and youth. I find that just a real waste of women's lives. I really do think that.
Every time a journalist will say: "Can women be funny? Can women be pilots? Can women be scientists?" It's less of a question and more of a statement after a while that makes you believe that maybe we can't. I think that's dangerous. I was really happy that I didn't have those barriers, but now I recognize the barriers of many other people.
In many developing countries, girls don't go to school. They stay home. They are at the water wells, bringing water back and forth to the village. Or they are doing chores, preparing meals, farming. Some cultures think girls and women shouldn't be educated, and those are very often the places where the treatment of women and girls is the worst.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as male objectification…I think that word exists only with women because there are societal pressures for them to behave a certain way and to look a certain way. Someone put it to me once: Women are sex objects and men are success objects. That was really interesting to me.
A third myth is that men think that women like guys who are dangerous. As a result, guys will often smoke cigarettes, drink too much, and ride a motorcycle without a helmet. The reality? Women don't like guys who are dangerous. Women want us to think that because women are trying to kill us.
I went to a girls high school and I went to a women's college and when I first started teaching at Georgetown it had been a single sex school and so they wanted to have some women professors when they went co-ed, and so I originally was hired to start a program there, and really encourage women to go into foreign policy. I always have done that, and I really do think that things are better when women are involved.
I never thought of myself as a sex symbol. I just do the cover of magazines. I think it’s really unfair men or people in the world think you can’t be both – you can’t be a sex symbol and a serious businessperson. Who says I can’t be both? Who says I can’t do the cover of Maxim and run a production company? Women are complex. Women are beautiful and intellectual and spiritual and social and entrepreneurial. They’re everything. And I think I’m a great example of that.
I think it's a great thing that women went out in droves to see Sex and the City movie. I think it's wonderful and I think women have always shown they're looking both to be entertained and challenged in a theatre. I don't think women are afraid of movies that make them think; make them feel sad. The movies that I've been associated with are not exactly Sex and the City but women are leading the way to the theatre on those. They used to call it a date movie where the girl gets to choose.
What I would say to young women is: Pay attention to the real. Pay attention to what you're really thirsting for. What do you really want? And I think that's much harder to decipher in a culture that has no interest in it. What interests me is, are we going to wake in time? Are human beings going to wake up to ourselves, to the incredible poverty that's on this planet, to what we're doing to the earth, to what we're doing to women, to what we're doing to boys? That's what's important.
What I do care about is that it's an obstacle to other women entering politics, because they'll say, "Why would I do that? I have plenty of other options." And women with plenty of options are just the women that we want to be in politics and government.
What's surprising to me now is that now that I'm talking to a lot of women about this, so many women are doing this. Straight women, lesbian women, bisexual women, poor women, White women, immigrant women. This does not affect one group.
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