I am worried that Americans I have met on my journey across the country, seem very hopeless and are feeling powerless to make change and are feeling passive. I'm not blaming them. But one thing we need at a time like this is for people to feel empowered and angry.

We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.

Since Reagan, it's almost impossible to get funding for research on sexual pleasure. You can find sexual behavior research, but not sexual pleasure. And let alone lesbian or homosexual sexuality.

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

We need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.

In the US, the 50s and 60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering televison journalist Edward R Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme Hunger in America.

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.