The power of ordinary clammy discomfort
The show: # MoreThanMean The moment: The swallowing The camera cuts from Julie DiCaro, a sports broadcaster and columnist, to Sarah Spain, a sportswriter and radio/TV host. Each woman sits on a stool.
On a stool opposite them, one by one, real guys read aloud — to their faces — real tweets the women have received.
(The women are familiar with the tweets. The men aren’t.)
It starts simply enough: “Nagging wife,” reads one. “Scrub muffin,” reads another.
Then the men get to this: “One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are.”
The music drops out. As the men continue reading, the tweets fill up with words like “b----” and “c---” and “hate-f---.” The men begin apologizing. They swallow audibly.
A producer in the background is heard urging, “Read them, they’re just mean tweets.” By the time the men get to the final ones — “I hope you get raped again”; “I hope your boyfriend beats you” — they can’t look the women in the eye.
This four-minute video recently won a 2017 Peabody Award for public service journalism. Its mes- sage is simple: women in sports are harassed online just for doing their jobs.
If you can’t say something to someone’s face, you shouldn’t type it, either.
But its power lies in the clammy discomfort of the ordinary Joes reading the tweets, as they struggle to absorb the volume of misogyny directed at women in sport — and indeed, women online in general — as well as the casual entitlement with which it’s delivered. #MoreThanMean is available via YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.