How women are centered and silenced in the major media

Communications professor Allison Butler discusses her new book, The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture with Spencer Graves. She compares how women like Britney Spears, Anita Hill, and Monica Lewinsky have been portrayed with the treatment of comparable males. She notes, for example, that, "in the years since the Dobbs (2022) decision, fully sentient female bodies have fewer legal rights than either fetuses or embryos. She asks, "Why aren't women allowed to be complicated?", documenting how men are allowed to abuse their power for personal gain, but women are more likely to be demonized for comparable offenses. Her recommendations include critical media literacy, asking how stories are told, and who gets to tell them. "The vast majority of the mainstream media in the United States are approved, produced, and distributed by private, for-profit corporations whose primary priority is profit. ... Once we understand that, we can work to make a change. We can say 'no' to unfair or limiting stories of women and girls by simply ignoring them (and therefore not contributing to further views, clicks, or likes of them, online), and we can actively push back by demanding change from media producers. Media producers profit off our attention; if we shift that attention, we may be able to shift their power." Butler is a senior lecturer and associate chair of Communication and Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is author or co-author of multiple books and articles on the need for and implementation of critical media literacy, including the following: Educating media literacy: The need for critical media literacy in teacher education (Butler 2020), Key scholarship in media literacy: David Buckingham (Butler 2021), Critical media literacy and civic learning: Interactive explorations for students and teachers (Maloy et al. 2021), and The media and media: A guide to critical media literacy for young people (Project Censored and The Media Revolution Collective 2022). She also has a 2024 book on Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools (Higdon and Butler 2024). A moderated discussion of these issues is available in the description of this interview in the companion "How women are centered and silenced in the major media" on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Allison Butler and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.