How did you become an activist?
After college, I had a job putting ads into a medical journal. I was shocked by an ad for birth control pills that featured a smiling woman's head and the caption, "Ovulen 21 works the way a woman thinks--by weekdays, not by cycle days." Inside the woman's head were seven boxes, one for each day of the week, and inside each box was a picture of each day's activity--Monday had a laundry basket, Tuesday an iron, etcetera. That is the first ad I looked at and thought, "There is really something wrong here." From that point on, I collected ads and examined what they said about what it means to be a woman in this society.
How do you do what you do? Describe your process.
I collect ads and turn the ads into slides, and then I show the slides to various audiences at high schools, colleges and conferences. Eventually, I turned my lecture into a documentary called "Killing Us Softly" in 1979, and then remade it in 1987 and 2000. I have also created lectures and films on alcohol and tobacco advertising, the obsession with thinness and media violence.
How many people are involved in what you do?
I do everything on my own. I do my own research and shoot my own slides. My films are just filmed records of my lectures. But I do have agents who represent me.
What do you like most or dislike most about your job?
I love making audiences respond, laugh, understand. I love traveling and meeting new people. I love the feeling that I am doing something important. But I do about sixty lectures a year, so it can be exhausting. And sometimes I feel overwhelmed because I am up against such extraordinarily powerful industries.
What was high school like? Were you into media activism?
My father was in the magazine publishing business, so we had a lot of magazines around the house. Although I wasn't really looking at them from a critical viewpoint consciously, I think they influenced me. I modeled in high school and became aware of the kind of power that beauty seems to give young women, but also of the drawbacks. I was also involved in drama and debating, which gave me a good foundation for a career in public speaking.
What other kinds of things do you do? What else would you like to try?
I love to hang out with my daughter Claudia. We travel a lot, we ski, we talk endlessly.
