Lalouie wrote:
tv is a visual media. every tv anchor/host et al in such a capacity has to look good,,,female AND male
if you don't believe me look at zach lowe's transition from basically a shlubb with a pastey slicked hair combed nerdilly to one side to a better looking zach now
i don't want to watch a gnome anchoring a tv desk
I would say it’s not within a hundred miles of being universally applied. There are tons of older, overweight, balding, or just plain looking guys doing tv sports. I’m not saying some of them aren’t obviously trying to look as presentable as possible with what they’ve got (others don’t seem to GAF, especially ex-coaches and ~ players). But like Nick Wright? Stephen A. Smith? Pierre LaBrun? Bob McKenzie? Woj? Dennis Scott? Rex Ryan? Etc. Again, not saying these guys are trolls as you describe, but they are not on tv as eye candy either, I can’t think of many female equivalents.
Anyways, a lot of people are trying to be all ‘real talk/just the way it is’ about this, but that kinda reasoning has enabled all kinds of horrible crap over time. W/o getting into excuses for slavery or police violence or w/e, just sticking with this theme, there was quite a long period where women at work were expected to put up with constant sexual harassment, butt pinching, being expected to get the coffee, all that crap and the same kind of ‘hey, boys will be boys, if women want to be in the game this is how it’s played in the real world’ rationale. Female sports reporters specifically were subjected to all kinds of this stuff, some of it just because ‘boys will be boys’, some of it because male athletes and coaches were hostile to the idea of female sports reporters so would do stuff like make sure to be totally naked when interviewed by a female reporter, or worse. I read a book by a female baseball reporter from back when that was a very new thing and she would CONSTANTLY get this kind of crap…’hey George bet me a hundred bucks I couldn’t make you scream by eating your ___’, let’s split it, but they gotta watch so they know I won’ or like not just being naked but getting up on a chair so she’s face to face with his junk, ‘let’s talk about why you really want to be in the guy’s locker room’, etc.
Though it’s absolutely gotten a lot better over time, there is still a lot of the male sports world that thinks of itself as a male preserve, who are anywhere from irritated to seriously pissed off about having women intrude on that. Some express that through anger, short non-answers to questions, etc. but more commonly to hyper-sexualize them and the situation either to kinda reclaim the male preserve by putting the women intruding into it in a role that fits with the frat boy sensibility, or to try and emphasize how much they don’t belong, or just to make them as uncomfortable as possible. And how was all of this stuff allowed for so long? ‘Hey, let’s cut the bull for a second and tell it like it is; men are men, this is just how it goes, if they can’t hack it maybe this isn’t the job for them’. Let’s get as far away from that as we can. And more to the point, I said it has gotten a lot better, but it wouldn’t have if everyone maintained the old ‘good luck getting groups of men to not treat women like women’ excuses.
