America may be on the verge of electing its first woman president, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that rampant sexism has left the building. That point was just pounded home in a very personal way. A child kidnapping case that gripped the hearts of Minnesotans for 27 years was solved last week. The man who snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 confessed and led authorities to the child’s body. I lived in Minnesota when Jacob was kidnapped and know only too well how visceral that crime was – and is – to Minnesotans. News that his remains had been found quickly sucked the air out of the entire state. It was all anyone talked about.
Well, almost. That, and the couture of a young female television reporter. The diversion came from a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist who noted that Jana Shortal wore jeans on TV while reporting Jacob’s story and didn’t look good in them. Cheryl Johnson, whose column is called simply “CJ”, wrote that somebody at the local NBC affiliate “didn’t do Jana Shortal any favors with that wide camera shot. . .She looked great from the waist up in a polka-dot shirt and cool blazer, but the skinny jeans did not work. I was among a number of media types who found them inappropriate and, given the gravity of the day’s subject, downright jarring.”
So much for Minnesota Nice. So much for Jana’s bold and daring efforts to abandon what she calls the “lady uniform” as a prerequisite for delivering the news, a lingering legacy of the Roger Ailes school for women in broadcast journalism. Jana, who has been doing a daily breaking news show for the past year, goes on camera in her own clothes because the emphasis is on what she is reporting, not on how she looks. That should not be, but unfortunately is, a revolutionary move for television news in 2016. There was, to say the least, a major firestorm over the C.J. column, which the newspaper promptly pulled from its website and replaced with a full-throated apology.
It is so sad that there are still forces measuring the worth of a woman by how she looks, and a man by what he does. I wrote a research paper on this subject in 1983. It described and quantified a societal tyranny in which women had to either conform to the way a male-dominated culture insisted they look, or pay the price. Mostly, they paid the price. The currency was life threatening eating disorders, chronic stress and/or repeated rejections for the better jobs as a result of not looking the part. The phenomena back then was called “lookism,” and it painfully enforced this toxic double standard. Today, the term is “body shaming” and, as the newspaper columnist demonstrated, it is every bit as insidious.
I gathered the studies more than 30 years ago, all of them showing how companies made hiring, pay and promotional decisions on the basis of how women looked and on what men could do. The empirical evidence was staggering, but not surprising. I was a morbidly obese man when my journalism career took off in the 1970s. Despite being between 200 and 300 pounds overweight, I had the choice of beats on my newspaper and won countless awards and accolades. Women just as capable, if not more, were held back if they were carrying an extra 25 pounds or just didn’t have the “right look”.
Nearly two generations later, not much has changed. Jana Shortal is critiqued not on the quality of her reporting, but on the cut of her jeans. We have a Republican presidential candidate who insults men based on their behavior, but reserves adjectives like fat, ugly and disgusting for the women he wants to diminish.
I cringed when I read Jana’s Facebook reply to the CJ column. Although eloquent and poignant, it was painfully obvious that the columnist’s words hit her hard. A short snippet from her post: “I wore my clothes. The clothes it took me a very long time to feel comfortable in no thanks to the bullies like you who tried to shame me out of them.”
Here was this bright, strong, young woman, anchoring her own news show in a major regional market, and doing it her way, making it about the journalism instead of about herself. And right smack in the middle of reporting the biggest local story of the year, she is attacked by a veteran columnist for not looking good in skinny jeans. It stung something fierce because, far below the intellectual surface of gender equality, complete with its admonishment of body shaming, lurks this ancient notion that women, no matter what else they do, must “look good” doing it. It’s a notion that needs to die. Now.