Are we supposed to treat women the same as men? Give them the same opportunities and require from them the same responsibility?
If so, the following complaints are nonsense. Male sportswriters are subjected to at least as much nasty criticism, only they complain about it less.
Katie Mettler writes for the Washington Post:
The men in the video, average and unsuspecting, had no idea that the mean tweets they were asked to read would be so mean. They were not written by them but by others, so they didn’t know they would include words that start with “b” and “c,” that they’d be about death threats, beatings and rape.
They didn’t know they’d make people cry.
Recruited to appear in a now viral #MoreThanMean PSA video about the harassment faced by women in sports media by a blog called Just Not Sports, the men were simply told they’d be reading aloud mean tweets to Chicago reporters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro.
The men chuckle at first as they sit on stools in a brick covered loft, directly across from the two women, rambling off mostly benign insults.
“Julie DiCaro is a run of the mill mediocre beat writer,” the men read from one tweet. “Not atrocious, not good, just sorta.. there.”
“I’m actually not a beat writer at all,” DiCaro says, laughing. “But okay.”
Another guy reads a tweet labeling Spain a “scrub muffin.”
“I don’t even know what a scrub muffin is,” another reader remarks.
“I don’t either,” Spain admits.
“I love muffins,” says the smirking reader.
It almost felt like a segment of Jimmy Kimmel’s comedic “Mean Tweets.” That’s what the men thought, too, one of the video’s creators told Forbes.
Not even a minute into the more than four minute clip, the tone shifts entirely. The background music turns less peppy. The tweets get dark. The men, no longer chipper, start to sweat, fidget and apologize.
