Well I’m very glad to say I finally found a new apartment. It is a modern, very beautiful space in an excellent location and I’m very happy about it. It also has a lot of modern appliances that I’ve lived without for many years, including a dishwasher, a washing machine (for clothes) and a refrigerator. Technically I had a “refrigerator” at my old place but it was so defective that it was mostly used as a freezer and rarely had anything in it other meat for the cats.

But this new apartment also has something else I haven’t had in a long time – a television. And the other night I watched an American movie on that television and it shocked me. Theoretically on the face of it, the story of the movie was about a woman and her career as a television producer. At the beginning of the movie, she was fired from one producer position and then hired as an executive producer at a struggling network and through hard work and relentless dedication she becomes everyone’s hero and the movie ends with smiles and cheers.

However for me the level of sexism in this movie was staggering. Although nominally the story of the movie was this woman’s career, every single challenge she faced was about pleasing men. Even though she was in a leadership position and literally the boss of most of the men in this movie, she was constantly supplicating and kowtowing to them and humbling herself before them just to get them to do their job. She ends up rescuing the network and becoming a hero at the end of the movie when all of the men in her life finally take one small step towards doing their job, which was what they were supposed to have been doing all along.

I am quite aware that sexism exists in Romania and I have seen it in many forms. But it is quite amazing how much better things are here for women. I think Communism had a lot to do with it because right from the very beginning (under Lenin himself), women were encouraged and rewarded for working outside of the home. All of the (now former) Communist nations on Earth were never hearing messages that women should stay home but that they too should join the factories and work alongside the men to build the glorious future for the proletariat.

You can see some of the effects of that even today. Although Romania has never had a female prime minister, it always seems to have several ministers who are women and it’s never a big deal. Everywhere I look there are female politicians. I don’t think I know a single Romanian woman under the age of 80 who never once held a job and “just stayed home with the kids”. I lived in two university towns (Timisoara and Cluj) and there are a ton of young women who are students in university. There are women doctors and engineers and chemists and it never seems shocking or upsetting or unusual to anyone.

Even the Romanian media reflects this in some ways. The lead news anchor for years on ProTV has been a woman and it’s no big deal (meanwhile when it happened in America it was front page news). There are female commentators, reporters and journalists everywhere you look. Nearly every single media appearance in any form I have ever done was coordinated, produced or arranged by women. Female reporters even do the sports analysis on TV here, which is considered shocking and unusual (or even offensive) in the United States. And yet here I’ve never heard even one (Romanian) guy even remark on it.

And yet amidst all this relative equality in the media, whether paid positions (actresses or news reporters) or just in terms of screen time (women in government or positions of leadership who appear on the news), there is a totally different mindset being beamed in from the United States. On ProTV I’ve got a female news anchor reporting on a story with a female correspondent talking to a female police chief but switch over to an American movie and suddenly we’re back in super sexist mentality, where a woman’s entire reason for being revolves around looking good and pleasing men.

If you get a chance, I highly recommend watching the documentary Miss Representation, which details at length exactly how corrosive and endemic this mindset is in American media. According to them (and I have little reason to doubt it), about 97% of all the people who decide what content you see in American television shows, movies, videoclips (for songs) and print material (think Cosmopolitan, Vogue, etc) are men.

Just think about that for one minute. Even if all of those men were the most kind-hearted and wonderful people on the Earth, 97% of the content you see beamed into your home (and now mine) is chosen by men. And as the tag line for the documentary says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Which is the whole point. In Romania you see women being everything from politicians to journalists to professors to lawyers to judges to mothers and grandmothers and in American media you simply don’t.

If you live in Romania, do this little experiment. Tune into a channel showing American content. You can do this at any time of the day or night – it doesn’t matter. Leave it on the channel for five minutes and count all the women you see. Make a note of how old they are and what profession the women are involved in.

I guarantee you the vast majority of the women you see in your five-minute perusal of American media will be aged roughly 22-35 years old and they will be in some kind of junior position. No matter what their job is on the show, they will have a male boss. And even if they have male coworkers of a more or less equal status, they will be battling it out with them just to receive the tiniest amount of respect.

Now do the same exact “test” with Romanian media. I nearly fell out of my seat as I switched to ETNO television because I saw they were advertising a show (forgive me as I’m new to this but I think it was called bucatarie fericita) which starred one man, one woman and one grandmother. A real, honest to God grandmother, not a 35 year old woman with make-up playing one. Quick! Name one television show in the entire history of American media which has ever had a grandmother in a top role. You can’t. Elderly women do not exist in America media unless they looked supernaturally young for their age*

Top manele singing stars are female. Top folkloric and muzica populara stars in Romania are female. I haven’t watched much television in years but I remember Teo running her own top-rated show. And while I hated Surprize, Surprize for personal reasons, that too was a show run by a woman. Last time I checked Teo was neither 25 years old nor a supermodel and Andreea what’s her name didn’t even have (or need) a male to co-host her show. I’m sure I can find some more current examples if I find the free time to watch what’s on the air these days.

But this mostly free from sexism mentality inherited from Communism is now doing battle with the vicious degradation of women being dumped in every form of media in this country. And I think the perfect example of this is the utterly pathetic and shitty journalist Alison Mutler and her “news reporting” last year.

If you’re new to this blog, you might not know who she is or why I hate her so much. But this post from April 2011 goes a long way to explaining it. Alison Mutler, herself a woman mind you, but the inheritor of this poisonous mentality of the American media, dug through a Romanian gossip magazine until she found a tiny story on a female Romanian politician who went to a hairdresser.

Roberta Anastase was the politician’s name and at the time she was the speaker of the parliament, an extremely important position in the government. What Ms. Anatase’s policy positions or public statements or voting record or any other goddamn thing of real value was of no interest to Ms. Mutler. No. Only the fact that Mrs. Anatase went to the hairdresser interested Alison Mutler. That plus the fact that Mrs. Anastase was accompanied by bodyguards. Of course Mrs. Anatase is also accompanied by bodyguards when she goes to the parliament and when she goes on official state visits and when she goes to the bank and when she does every other thing in her life.

But to Mutler, it is inconceivable that a woman can have both ordinary female needs (go to the hairdresser) plus hold position of great responsibility and power (and thus need bodyguards) at the same time. And so she took this piece of crap gossip article in a Romanian tabloid and wrote about it in English and sent it out on the wires of the AP, where it got rebroadcast and reprinted in thousands of “regular” and “serious” newspapers around the world.

In Mutler’s American mind view, a woman can’t be feminine and powerful all at the same time and thus must be mocked and ridiculed. In Romania, a woman can be powerful and feminine without it being much of an issue at all. Again, I’m not saying it’s some kind of perfect paradise here or that women never face discrimination but the clear difference in this one particular instance truly illustrates just how much better it is for women in Romania than in America. In Romania, the hairdresser plus bodyguard story was a piece for the tabloid gossip paper. In America, this was a piece for the serious newspapers. Mutler’s article got reprinted in the Washington Post for goodness’ sake.

Watch the documentary. If you consume American media, it’ll open your eyes.

* – Actually I lied because as far as I know, neither The Golden Girls or Murder, She Wrote were ever broadcast in Romania and are little known here. It is interesting to note that these two shows, where the leading stars were all grandmothers, are two of the most popular shows of all time and still have hordes of dedicated fans years after they went off the air. However these two shows are the exception to what’s portrayed in American media and not the rule.