Miss Ogyny Attends the Olympics

Wedding rings? 

Back when I taught journalism at College of the Redwoods, I told my students that once they found the story their goals were to get it right and make it interesting. Recent reporting on women competing at the Olympics has been interesting, but not quite right.  Women make up 45-percent of the competitors, and more than half of the U.S. athletes at the games this year are female. But as Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak points out, that doesn't mean they'll be treated equally. In case you missed it,
here's a link to her article on sexism in reporting at the 2016 Olympics.

www.washingtonpost.com/local/women-make-history-and-their-husbands-get-the-credit-how-infuriating-is-that/2016/08/08/192df022-5d70-11e6-af8e-54aa2e849447_story.html

Men who get a little prickly at news about sexism might want to step out for some port and a cigar. Here's my favorite excerpt: 

“Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics,” the newspaper [Chicago Tribune] tweeted Sunday. Not even her name. Or her event. Or the fact that it was Cogdell-Unrein’s second Olympic medal in trap shooting, in her third Olympic Games. The most newsworthy part: She’s married to NFL lineman Mitch Unrein.

[And who is this being featured in split screen while his wife swims her way to a medal?] "Shane Tusup, husband and coach of Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu, celebrating her world record performance. One commentator called him “the man responsible” for her gold medal. (David Gray/Reuters)"

[So why, you ask, if I think this is such wrong-headed reporting am I showing pictures of Shane instead of Katinka? Because I'm writing about the bizarre emphasis on the athletes' husbands.]

So far, the sexism of this year’s Olympic coverage hasn’t even been that subtle. An NBC commentator, describing the members of the powerhouse U.S. women’s gymnastics team, said, “They might as well be standing around at the mall.”

Flashback to the mid 1960s, to a young wife of a second lieutenant in the Army. She married one year short of getting her BA degree, was caring for a girl toddler, and had begun to become aware--just a mere tickle of awareness at the edge of her subconscious--of the notion of feminism. Nothing to write home about, certainly not to her stepfather who had told her that the women's movement would never last, it was going to blow over.

But write about it she did--privately, almost furtively--on her husband's stationery.

I concluded my whispered lament thusly: "I have been caught off balance at the realization of the gap between my concept of a fulfilled modern woman and my flesh and blood self--getting the same deal that wives have been getting for years. It's like having Dior create a dress just for you and  donning it to find it's the same thing you've been cleaning the toilet bowl in. No matter who designed it, it still makes you feel more like toilet bowls than the Academy Awards . . . I'd like to know about that new woman who seems to have escaped me entirely. Where is she anyway?"

Those of us who have been on this ride the longest keep looking over our shoulders at the long wake of this ship we're trying to turn, hoping to chart a truer course for girls. For now, with all eyes on Rio, it's still very much about the boys.

#writer #author #writerslife #pauladvorak #olympicreporting #olympicsexism #sexistreporting #womensmovement #feminism