"Deal with it.""Oh, it was only a joke.""You just want to take all the fun away."-responses to a request to tone down the misogyny
I am tired of it being assumed that I am "taking things too seriously" and that I "have no sense of humor" when I fail to be amused, and am indeed insulted by the constant objectification and degradation of women on a great number of sports websites.
This post has been a long time in the making. When I started this blog, I never thought I'd be making any kind of "feminist" statement, until I did, in defense of Sloane Martin (defense? statement of solidarity? personal hashing out of feelings?) A lot of what I said then is still true now. A few important things are not.
I have long prided myself on having a particularly "thick" internet skin. I may rant about my frustrations with the general population of these electrons in private, but until recently I accepted that if I wanted to talk about sports with sports-intelligent people, I'd have to just deal, I'd have to just accept the constant belittling of my gender, the ever-present deluge of judgements and assumptions.
I grew more and more uncomfortable with both the unthinking behavior I was surrounded by, and the outraged response by some when asked to, for instance, stop posting nearly-nude images of women as "rally images" (and those images were then ranked and stripped of all humanity by the hordes, who reduced women down to "would/would not.")
The final straw on the proverbial camel's back came just the other day-after seeing the opinion of their female fans held by one baseball club, a friend of mine was insulted and then mocked when she asked that members of a website behave themselves a little more like human beings.
Silence, in many cases, is implied agreement. I cannot let myself be silent anymore.
