O’Reilly’s wig comment is just the latest attempt to discount women
Heidi Stevens says when will we, as a society, stop focusing on looks when it comes to gender? Not anytime soon, which does us a disservice.
Bill O’Reilly’s “James Brown wig” comment was horrendous.
Mean, mocking, sophomoric — beyond the pale, really, even for a guy whose racially charged comments are his calling card: “If you go to any restaurant, Mexican restaurant in the world, they come out and they’re singing ‘Guantanamera’ with the sombreros on.” Many African-Americans “are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads.” And so on.
(I have seen some forehead tattoos up close, by the way, and they’ve all been on white folks. Mostly at my ex-sister-in-law’s wedding. I’m just saying.)
But let’s talk about the comment leading up to the wig part. “I didn’t hear a word she said,” O’Reilly told his “Fox & Friends” co-hosts Tuesday, after they watched a clip of U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., delivering a speech about patriotism on the House floor. “I was looking at the James Brown wig.”
Didn’t hear a word she said. Too focused on her appearance.
When are we going to stop doing this to women?
When are we going to start placing more value on their words, their ideas, their work, their contributions than how pleasing they are to our visual palate? Not any time soon, it appears. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and British Prime Minister Theresa May met earlier this week, and The Daily Mail newspaper chose to mark the occasion with a front-page photo and the headline “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!”
When human rights lawyer Amal Clooney delivered a speech on ISIS to the United Nations, Time magazine tweeted, “Amal Clooney shows off her baby bump at the United Nations.” I didn’t hear a word she said. It’s such a widely accepted setup — intelligent woman talks; people stare at her hair/ dress/legs/baby bump — that we even sneak it into children’s entertainment. Remember “Lego Movie,” when the fierce, fearless Wyldstyle is talking to Lego Emmet (who harbors a secret crush on her) and all he hears is, “blah blah blah proper name place name backstory stuff.”
Ha ha ha. I can’t hear you. You’re too beautiful. Or you’re not beautiful enough. Or you don’t fit my teeny-tiny definition of beautiful. Something about beauty, which is a woman’s duty to uphold, above all else.
O’Reilly apologized for his wig comment Tuesday, calling it “dumb.”
Indeed. Unfortunately, it’s also part of a long-standing pattern — his and ours.
Call it out when you see it, friends. We can accomplish a whole lot more if we stop tuning out half of the Earth’s population because we can’t get past their looks.