I like to think I’m funny.
I like to watch funny shows, read funny books and listen to funny people. I surround myself with humor. When I was tasked with reading a work of book-length journalism for my literary journalism class this semester, it’s no wonder I was drawn to Tom Shales’ Live From New York, an in-depth look behind the scenes of “Saturday Night Live,” my favorite show to watch every week.
I watch SNL every Saturday night – or Sunday morning if college called. By Monday I’m repeating the lines from each sketch, trying to impersonate the characters from my favorite skits. When I recount my own stories, no matter the content, I try to put a humorous spin on them.
With all of this in mind, when it came time for me to write my final project for the same class, I set out to write a literary journalism piece with a satirical spin.
Here’s the socially relevant, hard-hitting, newsworthy question I set out to answer: What is the difference between how guys and girls get ready for a night out?
I pictured myself finding a group of boys at Fairfield University who were willing to befriend me and allow me to spend time with them. Like an anthropologist, I would be a fly on the wall on a Friday night and observe their behaviors before that night’s festivities. I pictured myself sitting on a couch, my feet on a rug in need of vacuuming, looking at nearly blank walls and watching a group of guys throw on the first things they found and heading out the door.
In retrospect I don’t know why I thought this was such a good idea. I ended up being the target of cyber sexism. The joke was on me, and it wasn’t funny.
Not what I intended
I came up with a plan: document my own getting ready ritual, talk with other college women about theirs, and then spend time with college men to find out what they do to get ready to go out. But as I tried to set the plan in motion, it was anything but comical. When proposing the method to my professor, I was strongly advised not to go alone to the home of a group of boys. I wondered how often my professor had to warn her female students of this sort of danger.
After reaching out to the class of 2016 through Facebook, asking the male students to open their doors to me, the replies were quick and unhelpful. The comments poked fun at my effort in such a way that it would be difficult to report to an authority figure, easy for the perpetrators to defend themselves, and obvious to my peers that I was being made of. The joke was now on me.
I felt defeated. Frustrated. Angry. These boys were taking advantage of this education they were being offered. They were taking advantage of my vulnerability. They were taking advantage of how I trusted my peers.
All comments but one were from male students who each tagged the names of their friends. To the naked eye it might have seemed like they were trying to get their friends’ attention to the post as if to say, ‘Hey let’s do it, let’s help her out.’
In actuality, they were pointing and laughing at my efforts. One comment seemed to sarcastically offer to help, noting that their door was open and they would be expecting a message from me. Against my better judgment, I reached out only to receive silence in return, making it obvious that I was the butt of their joke.
Like I said, difficult to explain or report, easy to defend. But after showing the comments to other females in my grade, there was no question. I was being made fun of for simply trying.
Instead, I reached out to others
So I went for help. I met with my professor to ask what to do. It was difficult to explain what they were doing to me and how they were doing it. It was a generational gap issue. After a long conversation and support from my classmate Megan, it was decided. My project had clearly changed. Now I would focus on cyber sexism and how I had found myself one of many targets.
Today there is a serious epidemic, a phenomena, if you will, happening on our devices that connect us to the internet. Women who put themselves and their work online are attracting trolls and attacks. As if to say “How dare you try?”
This is not a problem specifically for female journalists. Any woman who has a passion for what she does risks getting attacked online when she publishes on the internet. Sonya Huber, an author and English professor at Fairfield University, has had her fair share of online trolls.
“Whenever I publish anything that is either political or personal, I have to be ready for a range of sexist online comments and often even direct emails–people taking the time to harass me by first researching where to contact me directly. After one of my books was published, a commenter on Amazon called me a parasite and said I didn’t deserve to live,” Huber recounted.
Luckily for Huber she had the support of fellow female writers who were able to come together and get the comments removed. Other female professionals have not been so lucky.
Recently, online news source The Guardian, published an article about women who get attacked online with no promise of protection from authorities. The article focuses on a young female professional in London, Suzanne Fernandes. For over a year she was targeted online by the same two attackers, threatening violence, rape, and even death.
“After making 126 crime reports to the British police and numerous reports to Twitter and Facebook, Fernandes feels destroyed and defeated,” the article stated. Because of the anonymity of the Internet, online attackers are safe behind their screens. Just because one of their accounts gets deleted doesn’t mean they can’t make a new one and continue with their reign of terror.
A change needs to come…
There have been too many cases like the one mentioned in The Guardian where little to nothing gets accomplished in terms of punishment or protection. Fairfield senior Meaghan Conlon, executive editor of the Mirror, a student newspaper at Fairfield University, believes that the sexism in the workplace is unfortunate, yet concrete.
“I think that people need to change their views to fix this [sexism], but since I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon, I think women just have to work even harder to prove themselves, which sucks,” Conlon said.
Communication Professor Kate Fortmeuller of Fairfield University tries to encourage her female students to break the glass ceiling even as she prepares them to face sexism.
“I think it is important for young women to know that they will encounter sexism, but that shouldn’t scare them away from pursuing any particular career path. There isn’t one magical profession where sexism doesn’t exist, so it should never stop you from anything,” Fortmeuller said.
This begs the question…
Why must we warn young female professionals of the dangers of sexism and online abuse, but we don’t tell young men and women not to post nasty comments online? Why must we tell young women to do her journalism research with a buddy, even if it’s on her own college campus, but we don’t tell the young men to treat the young girls with respect? Why do we tell our daughters not to wear that top that bares her midriff, but we don’t tell our sons not to take her clothing choices as an invitation to sexual advances? Why does my mother have to call me and tell me to be careful about what I put online, but she doesn’t have to lecture my brothers?
Senior Angela Sammarone, also an editor for the Mirror, recalled a time where she had to question what role her gender was playing in her networking abilities at the reunion for the Mirror in the fall of 2015.
“We were standing in this office and we were talking with this guy I had a great conversation with him and then Pat [editor in chief for the Mirror] had come over and again I won’t know if it’s sexism for sure… He had a business card and he was about to leave for the day, he’s like ‘so I would give this to you but I’m going to give it to him, I hope you understand’ and then left and gave it to Pat.”
Sammarone looks me dead in the eyes at this point and laughs as if to imply how ridiculous the situation was to her.
“And I just sat there with my mouth dropped,” Sammarone continued, still with a smile and nearly laughing. “And I couldn’t helps but think about the fact that he gave it to Pat because he was a man and because he’s editor in chief and why would he give it to the girl that works under him and that’s exactly how I felt and Meaghan [Conlon] and I felt the same thing.”
Whether that was the reasoning behind the business card exchange or not, we must ask what made Sammarone believe that it was likely a sexist move on the alum’s part. The pattern of sexism in a professional setting has been so ingrained into our minds. The gut feeling that a women didn’t get a promotion or didn’t get a business card, all because of her biological anatomy, is not an outlandish assumption.
As a journalist, I was taught to take myself out of my story
I have been trained to look at situations and events and stories from a bird’s eye view. But what happens when I, or other female journalists, get attacked for doing our jobs, for doing what we love?
Female sports writers Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro both recently faced the nastiness of the online Twitter abusers. In a video inspired by Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets”, the women had the Tweets and comments read aloud to them by men. This brought to light what they face on a daily basis for simply following their passion and going to work every day.
Comments included profanity and even threats of physical violence including one that said, “One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick.” As the video went on, it is clear how shocked and uncomfortable the men are as they tell the women the horrible things that were being said to them.
These online trolls are not arguing with the opinions of the journalists or asking challenging and insightful questions. The attackers are trying to discredit these women, making them out to be unintelligent and even going to far as sexualizing them, threatening violence and rape.
It may be a long time before this phenomena begins to subside. It may even get worse before it gets better. But somebody needs to start that conversation; somebody needs to bring this to the public’s attention in a way that will get them to listen.
This is not the paper I set out to write
I was always aware of the sexism, but I never took a class or wrote a paper on it, nor did I feel the need to – at least not until it started happening to me.