I have failed most all the women in my life.

Don't worry, this isn't one of those essays. By most of the world's accounting, I've treated women well. I've been a loyal friend and fiercely devoted husband to one woman for nearly a quarter-century—my entire adult life. I have worn the banner of feminism while living in places where that appellation was referred to as "the other f word." I have accepted and supported women in roles of leadership at work and in church or parachurch organizations. I have tried to seek out women writers to include in the curriculum of courses that I have taught, and to treat female students as prospective professional colleagues worthy of respect and deserving of my best efforts to help open doors and provide opportunities.

Increasingly, though, when I enumerate what I have done for women in my life, I find myself thinking of this quote from Henry David Thoreau:

I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.

Those words sting as only the truth can. Because the biggest way I've failed the women in my life is by doing and saying nothing. Statistics are the poor man's debate tool, but here is one that stunned me from Miss Representation, the feature film at the 2012 Women's Film Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont, where I attended last week: 53 percent of girls entering their teen years report they are unhappy with their bodies, a number that rises to 78 percent by the time they reach age 17. You are welcome to argue, if you like, the film's connecting of that number with the 10.5 hours a day that the average American teen interacts with social media (television, film, Internet, video games), but I feel safe in saying that that is not a natural, God-instilled recognition of the imago Dei in all of us. I have to believe it is learned.

Here's another stat from the film: Approximately $235.6 billion is spent in advertising in the United States every year. That's more than the gross domestic production of almost all of the world's countries. Read that again. America spends more money on advertising than most countries spend on everything. Given how much advertising is used to create anxiety and insecurity so that we will be willing to spend money (we don't have) on things (we don't need) to make us feel better, the real surprise is probably not that so many of our young people buy into a sex-charged, secular worldview—1 in 5 report having sex before age 14—but that there are still teens who are able to withstand the inundation of media messages.

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Watching Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the Dixie Chicks, about six years ago was transformative for me. Hearing media comments, particularly that of a famous male pundit who suggested that the band's frontwoman, Natalie Maines, needed to be "slapped around," outside of the context where I was used to seeing or hearing them, had a jarring, defamiliarizing effect. Stripped of the support of the context, many of those comments seemed outrageous, unsupportable, even ridiculous. Some sort of corollary occurred while watching Miss Representation. It was as though I had been the proverbial frog in the stew pot who didn't realize the temperature was getting gradually turned up, that environmental differences were not measured by the number and nature of controversial images or comments that drew outrage, but in the deluge of those that pass every minute of every day without comment.

I started this response with a list of things I have done that make me, in my eyes and that of many friends (and a few of my critics!), an egalitarian male. That's half the story, and it is true as far as it goes. But there is, as always, another side to it. I have silently witnessed and even participated in cruel emotional teasing of my sister growing up, benefiting from and accepting the notion that the needs of boys—emotional, financial, and pre-professional—were more important than those of girls. I have worked in an industry where more than half of Ph.D.s are awarded to women, but only one-third of the full-time teaching jobs are filled by them. I live in a country where women get paid, on average, 80 percent of what men get paid. I have earned money doing freelance writing about an industry where women comprise 7 percent of the directors and 10 percent of the writers—and in which more than half of the films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture failed the Bechdel test. I have treated my work—both because it made more money and because it was mine—as more meaningful and more important than the work undertaken by the person who has been the single greatest contributor to my personal happiness and spiritual fulfillment. Worst, I have done so not so much because I believed it was right but because going against the grain and saying "no" to the assumption of power and privilege was too hard. Thoreau again:

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It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

Those sentiments are not expressed in what we today call gender-inclusive language. I suppose the fact that I recognize that as a cruel irony is a small sort of progress.

As an undergraduate student, I took a class in the American Civil War and remember discussing 19-century views on race and slavery with my friends. What were the things, we wondered, that people would look back on 100 years after we were dead and say: "How could they think that? How could they do that? How could they call themselves Christians and accept that?"

I don't wonder anymore, because I think I know.

Kenneth R. Morefield, a CT film critic, is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema (Volumes I & II) and the founder of 1More Film Blog.

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