Tag: Body Shaming

LONGING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF MITT ROMNEY

The date was Oct. 2, 2012. The day’s top political story? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for permanent immigration reform. Elsewhere on memory lane, do you remember Romney’s biggest gaffe on women? It was during the second presidential debate. He was excitedly describing his diversity hires from his days as governor of Massachusetts and said, “We had binders full of women.” With those six words, Romney created an instant internet meme and one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2012. Four years later, his successor spent the weekend trashing a former Miss Universe and then called the New York Times to complain about how his opponent said bad things about the women her husband slept with. Oh Mitt, we hardly knew ye!

It’s all such sweet, innocent nostalgia now, but it wasn’t always thus. As we approached the 2012 election, those of us on the left side of the aisle saw Romney as the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. We couldn’t imagine anything worse than a Romney presidency. Now we can. He is still the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. But if Hillary Clinton’s numbers suddenly go south, and if we could make a quick deal with the devil, well, Hail to the Chief, President Mittens!

During the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has been vacillating between two of his current obsessions: the body size of the 1996 Miss Universe, and intimate details of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal life. The two are linked only in the byzantine torture chamber that is Trump’s mind. HRC caught the Donald off guard during last week’s debate when she introduced Alicia Machado, the beauty pageant winner and one of his many body shaming victims. Trump left the debate sputtering about how he might have to “get nasty,” as if he’d been teaching a Dale Carnegie course all these months. He later clarified, in the call to the Times, that his new appeal to women will be to drudge up Bill Clinton’s affairs and “reveal” how Hillary criticized some of the other women in her husband’s life. That would be an October surprise only to someone who has never heard a country-western song or read the Starr Report, whichever came first. Then, a few hours later, he reversed course and complained to a Pennsylvania rally that Hillary has never been loyal to Bill.

In the beginning, Donald Trump was a joke, the Pat Paulsen candidate of 2016, someone who parodied the antiseptic, polished, focus-group-tested rhetoric of real politicians. In one of the cruelest twists of political fate our country has ever seen, the joke caught on. Many of us stopped laughing a long time ago. This campaign is no longer about issues or public policy. It’s about human decency and dignity and civility. It’s about showing respect for people you disagree with, or who come from different backgrounds, ethnicities or experiences. This qualification for office was unwritten and unspoken but has always been there, and until now, was always followed. We Americans argue about everything else – taxes, foreign policy, education, the environment, – but we have always shared the desire to be led by a decent, dignified president. Prior to August of 2016, every presidential nominee, regardless of party affiliation, met that standard.

Trump does not. He is mean, vindictive and cruel. He delights in name calling, in hurting anyone who differs with him. He embodies the very worst of our current culture and its screaming, divisive discourse of verbal abuse and incivility, of dismissing contrary views with brutal, painful attacks on those who hold them. Sadly, this election is not about any of the vital policy matters facing this country. We don’t reach those issues, because this election, first and foremost, is about only one thing: keeping a man who delights in hurting people out of the White House.

BODY SHAMING THE NEWS

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.