As an aspiring sportscaster, a female and a fellow member of the human race, I found the video "#MoreThanMean - Women in Sports 'Face' Harassment" disquieting—although it relayed a message that no longer can be restrained, hand-over-mouth.
Two women in the sports reporting scene, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro, were read aloud mean tweets by their male counterparts. The tweets were written by other men via the social media site, and Spain and DiCaro had been exposed to the tweets prior. But having them read aloud and truly facing them was something not only hard for the women to experience, but anyone who watched the video.
The tweets were what the hashtag suggests: #MoreThanMean. They were degrading, harassing and ultimately, most-terrifyingly unnecessary. What were these women unnecessarily degraded and harassed for exactly? For doing what they do career-wise—reporting on sports. They are passionate about their careers, which just so happened to be something historically divided as only part of a man's world (thanks for ending this slowly but surely, Title IX). Why were they unnecessarily degraded and harassed? It's sad because it's evident: because they are women.
Men in the sportscasting world do not receive criticism such as this in the slightest. They are not approached with death threats by means of a hockey puck or wishes of rape upon them by loved ones. I don't mean to say that men are not tried via social media, but women are truly the main targets of these menacing messages; and men are overwhelmingly behind them.
So what is my reaction to this? That I need others to react the same way—disgusted. If people are blind and blissfully ignorant to the shame that society puts on women who rise above their gender-biasing circumstances, we have an unbalanced and false sense of equality. America is the epitome of freedom, in fact, it was built on it. Yet this freedom is being used to ridicule some of its best citizens and biggest successes. I hope others see how extremely messed up these tweets are—and that good men, like the ones who read them to the women with hesitation, regret and remorse—do exist. I need society to see how not OK this harassment is. I don't want to see my sister, my friends, my colleagues being harassed in such ways; I can't imagine seeing the men in my life being on the other side of things, either.
Bad things happen every day, but it's up to our discretion and daily decisions to rise above this bad and choose to not only be respectful, sensible beings, but recognize how disgusting those who hide behind a keyboard to harass 50 percent of the world in 140 characters or less truly are.
