Steinem on The Reid Report: “If We Didn’t Have Wombs, We’d Be Fine”

Cortney O'Brien | February 27, 2014 12:15 PM

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has found another platform to insist there is an egregious gender gap in the country while condemning the opposite sex. Appearing on the new MSNBC show The Reid Report, Steinem joined the host in lamenting how women are failing to succeed in the media.

Steinem founded The Women’s Media Center along with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan. They recently released a report, entitled, "The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014," which was biased from the beginning. I’ll be writing a fuller post on the findings in that report for this weekend, but Steinem’s and Reid’s reaction is worth its own post.

Before introducing her guest Wednesday, Reid opened with statistics that only 43 percent of speaking roles in TV are women and about 28 percent in film. As such, she and Steinem concluded that women’s progress in the media has “flat lined.” The host even said the news was, “actually quite depressing” and a “dismal situation.” Steinem agreed, and played shrink for a minute to get to the heart of the problem:

“I think in way, many of the men who are in power now, were raised by women and that was the last time they saw a powerful woman. So when they see another one, they feel they’ve been regressed to eight.”

Somehow, the segment then turned to abortion. Reid indirectly asked Steinem to analyze why Republican male leaders felt the need to “control women’s bodies.”