I completely missed the highly objectionable line in question when I read this NYT article about the new female Sesame Street character, but my friend (from the Yaxuna trip) Hilarie was right on top of it and sent the following to The Times:
August 20, 2006
Letters: Cherry Jones; Jay Greenberg; Early Music; Abby Cadabby
ABBY CADABBY
The Muppet Gap
To the Editor:
Re “A Girly-Girl Joins the ‘Sesame’ Boys” by Susan Dominus [Aug. 6]:
How disheartening that as the Sesame Workshop makes a much-needed improvement in its show’s gender representation — by introducing a new female Muppet, Abby Cadabby — one of its executives would disparage Lulu, an earlier attempt at a female character, by saying, “She wasn’t that attractive.” As unintentional as this counterpoint may have been, it indicates that the continued use of physical attractiveness as a measure of girls’ personal worth is still too prevalent in American society.
Hilarie Ashton
Manhattan
Double congrats to Hilarie for both being published and for crossing off an item on your life to-do list :)
Forgive me for having some inside information here, but I asked around and spoke to some people at work after reading this post and the article. The quote is being misrepresented here — let’s at least put it in the full context of the article.
The show had tried to introduce a character for just that purpose in 2000, the short-lived Lulu, a shy monster who “had a kind of quirky personality,” Truglio said. “She wasn’t that attractive.”
Attractive is defined as “having the power to attract,” as “pleasing to the eye or mind especially through beauty and charm,” as “having the power to arouse interest,” and a variety of other connotations. In fact, the letter your friend sent in went on to modify it by explicitly saying “physically attractive,” something that was very clearly not said by the executive that was quoted.
It’s quite clear, when you read the article, in context, that, immediately following a comment on the character’s personality, attractive is not being used here to mean physically attractive. Perhaps you completely missed this your first time through because there’s no controversy? (Other than the one someone eager to take offense creates.)
Ian, yes, I believe the first time I read the article I interpreted attractive to mean “appealing to our viewers”. But, the context is anything but “quite clear”.
The article affords us with exactly one sentence worth of context, in which Trugilo is describing the characteristics of Lulu. The use of “attractive” here is simply ambiguous, and while I’m guessing Trugilo did not mean physical attractiveness, when you’re quoted in the New York Times, you need to pick your words carefully.
The problem stems from Trugilo selecting Lulu as the subject in her sentence. If she had instead said, “Viewers did not find Lulu {compelling, interesting, or even attractive if that’s what she meant},” the meaning would have been much more straightforward.
I do appreciate you looking into this, though.
We can debate the clarity of the quote, but I find it disingenuous to write a letter to the editor that casually changes “attractive” to “physical attractiveness” without making the assumption clear. The phrase “physical attractiveness” only exists because the word “attractive” doesn’t necessarily imply of a physical characteristic. Reading the letter, as written, and the way it quoted from the original piece, gives a very different impression and refuses the right of interpretation to the reader.
I would argue that, given the history the organization, and the degree of thought that went into the process, as reflected in the original piece, Sesame Workshop and the executive quoted really deserve the benefit of the doubt here. In the realm of children’s programming, there are far more lucrative and unambiguous targets to go after first.