It's more important to represent women as complete, whole, complicated humans as opposed to saintly, perfect women. The point isn't that they have to be good people. It's that they have to be people.
Interpretation
Women should be portrayed as complex individuals rather than idealized versions cloaked in perfection.
Kerry Bishe emphasizes the importance of representing women in media and society as multi-dimensional beings, acknowledging their complexity, flaws, and humanity. Rather than confining them to archetypes of perfection, it is essential to embrace their true essence as people with diverse qualities, experiences, and perspectives.
In practice
During a panel discussion on women's roles in media, this quote can be used to highlight the need for authentic representation.
It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.
In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.
I spent most of my career in business not saying the word 'woman.' Because if you say the word 'woman' in a business context, and often in a political context, the person on the other side of the table thinks you're about to sue them or ask for special treatment, right?
I was always longing to do, emotionally and physically, what my male counterparts always got to do. I just felt envious, every time I saw a movie that I was in awe of, and it was usually a male lead. And those kinds of roles weren't available. They just weren't being written.
I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.
When women and men can shed an equal quantity of tears in public, that's when we'll have equal power.
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