It’s no secret the Internet is a place where some people show their true feelings while hiding behind keyboards. It’s also no secret there are sexist pigs in the sports world.
To illustrate how dehumanizing this combination can be, Chicago-based journalists Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain had men read mean comments to their faces in a YouTube video.
“I don’t know if you ever get over someone telling you that they hope you get raped, or that you should be gang raped,” DiCaro said in a phone interview.
What the hell? Watching the facial expressions of these men, who were not the authors of the comments, while calling these women bitches and the C-word is more than sad, it’s unacceptable.
“They were all apologizing as if they had written it,” DiCaro said. “It sort of reaffirmed my faith in humanity because they were so bothered by it. I mean one guy was actually crying.”
For DiCaro, the issue is larger than individual people.
“Twitter is something that has become essential to those of us who work in sports media,” she said. “We have to be there or we can’t do our jobs.”
In terms of harassment control, “Twitter needs to step up and do a much better job than what they’re doing,” she added.
And because people can be the worst, there has even been backlash against the video. DiCaro said there are men replying that “it happens to men too” and to “find another line of work” if the harassment and misogyny bothers her.
As a small silver lining, the #morethanmean hashtag has spent the day trending, so there are good people out there.
Please, everyone, it’s 2016. It’s time to realize women are sports reporters and that words tear people down. There’s no place for that, period.
“We were trying to show the difference between what’s a mean tweet and what’s harassment,” DiCaro said.
Chicago-based One Tree Forest Films shot the video last week.
DiCaro and Spain will address the treatment of women in sports media as part of a panel of female journalists at the Blog with Balls conference Wednesday at Ovation Chicago.
