What’s The Problem?
CNN contributor Roland Martin gets it – it wasn’t the racism, it was the sexism.
The media kept up with the race side and did their best to ignore that the players were attacked and belittled because they were women and they play really good “roundball”. For those that missed it, not all of the players on the Rutgers team are black.
And while we are on sexism, let’s address the comments issue again. It isn’t the “heat in the kitchen,” it’s the cockroaches. No one should put up with cockroaches in the kitchen, but a sign saying “no cockroaches” isn’t the solution.
From the AP: Man Sentenced For Printing Lewd Stickers
A Byron [Minnesota] man, who distributed sexually vulgar stickers featuring his ex-girlfriend’s name, phone number and address, has been sentenced to four months in jail after pleading guilty to a felony harassment charge.
Thomas Carl Tiedeman, 62, who appeared in Dodge County District Court on March 21, was also ordered to serve five years on probation, perform 32 hours of community service and pay a $100 fine.
The behavior is illegal. It is important to file charges. People can be tracked down using the information their browser, blogging software, and site counters provide. Don’t ignore it; stomp on them.
If they switch to e-mail, e-mails provide a path back to the sender. That’s how the big ISPs have been winning cases against spammers; that’s how PayPal et al. break-up up the phishing schemes. The “raw view” of e-mails provides all kinds of information, and Microsoft programs provide even more than you want other people to know.
I wasted entirely too much of my time in law enforcement talking to people who didn’t want to get involved and then complained that nothing was being done about the problems.
Please get involved. Don’t ignore the problem – shine some light on it, so it can be fixed.
7 comments
Y’know, you’re the first blogger that I’ve seen mention the dreaded “sexism” word, like that shit doesn’t exist anymore. ‘Cause, y’know, women who say “sexism” are just complainers who aren’t “team players.”
Ugh. I used to like this country. Then I got a job in radio.
Shoulda known better.
Amen.
Been making comments and blogging in that direction, myself,
I thought it was obvious – they weren’t all black, but they were all women. BTW Martin is black, so I assume he has some experience with the problem.
Think about it – they defend him by referencing rappers. Since most rappers are black, it isn’t likely to be a race problem and his defenders know it. He was slamming them for being women who play a “man’s game”.
It’s the same crap I heard in the Air Force – women in the service are all either lesbians or prostitutes. There aren’t any women in the military who are patriotic, or looking to get a break, or trying to getting away from a life they hate.
After a while you get really sick of hearing it.
Kinda like how the Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about the rapes of American servicewomen in the middle east, BY THEIR FELLOW SOLDIERS, or the PTSD male soldiers who come home and beat, abuse, rape and murder their wives.
That’s the sociological meme of a republicunt culture: Women are devalued to the point where they are brainwashed into believing the marketing that they are either saintly “madonna” breeders, or expendable whores who must be skinnier, younger, perkier, more obsequious than the next whore, because all that really matters is whether or not they can ketch themselves A MAYYUUNNNN. It’s remarkable that it could happen so fast, Bill Clinton’s treatment of women sure as hell didn’t help, but the pompous hypocrites that follow self-appointed “moral deciders” like Newt Gingrich were just chomping at the bit to roll back the evolutionary clocks to pre-feminism days, those golden ages of yore when Mrs. Cleaver did housework in pearls and pumps and never complained ONCE about her life as a glorified housekeeper/harem girl.
But by letting Jackson and Sharpton shape this “debate,” by letting the MEN of the remainders of the “civil rights movement” decide that it’s all about “race” instead of sexism, it made it easier for all of the men attached, all of the way around.
I hope to hell that most of those girls are lesbians, ’cause they definitely deserve better than what’s been rendered by their “rescurers”, those great “men” who leapt to their defense, as if they couldn’t do it themselves.
Everybody goes on and on about how “quiet” and “classy” and “subdued” that these women were at their “dignified” press conferences. Personally, I think that most women and the women on that team would’ve gotten far more satisfaction by dragging Imus’ sagging old ass out behind the barn for a good old-fashioned stomp-down. “Classy” and “dignified” don’t mean shit when you need to render a good ass-whuppin’.
It means that while the millionaire will have to “retire” a bit early, he still, basically, hasn’t suffered even a fraction of the sexist violation that these women endured. Setting the “bar” for “civilized discourse” FOR these women is just as condescending and exclusive as treating them like a fucking minstrel show.
If anybody had really THOUGHT about how to handle this shit, they’d have hired Donna Brazile to speak for these young women, not those old men (who, it might be noted, have about the same track records with women as Bill Clinton) who wanted to frame it exclusively about race and how much money and attention THEY could get off of these girls’ suffering. No men should have been brought in to “arbitrate” or push this issue. The coach and her team should’ve had it in their own hands, for their own decisions, and they should’ve picked their OWN spokespeople, not to have Jesse & Al appoint THEMSELVES.
But of course, if MEN handle it, then nobody can call it “sexism,” ’cause those saintly old fuckers are “taking care” of these “poor, defenseless” girls, right.
Shit.
Those girls are way the hell more able, more healthy, and more physically astute than any old fucker, whether it be slImus, Jackson or Sharpton.
Never forget how Sharpton made his money — by “protecting” and “defending” Tawanna Brawley, and what fucking good did he ever do HER???
Fuck this shit. And fuck Sharpton and Jackson. Marsha Warfield, Donna Brazile, Camile Cosby, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou — they would’ve had no shortage of older, wiser, intelligent black women who could speak for this team and defend them to no end. But they were never even given the chance to ask for help, they were commandeered by the rapidly-descending-old-men coalition and THAT is who got to define the conversation for all of us, and it still pisses me off.
Two more thoughts: 1. If this team had been made up of young men, would Imus think himself “hip” enough to call them “mah niggahs” or some similarly derogative “term of endearment”? 2. If he had said similarly offensive slurs against a male team, would they “need” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to “defend” them or would they go down to Imus’ studio and tend to it THEMSELVES? And if they did handle it themselves, would they then hear the condescending bullshit of how “well” they handled it, of how “demure” and “calm” and “ladylike” they were in doing so?
I’m sick of seeing Al and Jesse pulled in every time something happens. Al knows NYC, and Jesse is based in Chicago. The media is their national constituency. The media calls on them for sound bites and controversy.
Why didn’t they get few women in sports to comment. There are female sports reporters who could have added some insight. There are black women in political office, why weren’t they on the shows. Where was Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she’s on NPR all the time.
There are a lot of women, including minority women, in radio and television, who could have been asked, but they didn’t want to deal with it. They didn’t want the sexism talked about, the same way the military doesn’t want to talk about it. They all want to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Why should the “deciders” bother with “women’s” opinions? After all, we’ve had the clock turned-back to the pre-women’s-lib days, so women only count when they’re either popping out some spawn or pole-dancing their way to “fame.” To the marketing slime who have destroyed the news media, you’ve got to be Katie BobbleHead Couric or that rabid republicunt bitch Elizabeth Vargas (who “interviewed” Larry Flynt so that she could make fun of the way that the stroke-victim talks), you can’t be a woman with an actual brain, actual morals, or, heavens forfend, OPINIONS about anything and the knowledge to back them up. Women like that are “dangerous” and “unattractive” and not what the NASCAR crowd wants to see on the teevee.
Lord, but I miss Barbara Jordan. She would have used “THE VOICE” on the wimpy talking heads, and this crap would get better.
We really need someone who can project real gravitas, to speak on these issues with genuine moral authority. What we get are a bunch of wimps who keep changing their positions while claiming to be “absolutists”. The Christianists are a prime example: they represent “family values” and back serial bigamists like Gingrich, Giuliani, McCain, et al.