Just when you start to have confidence that the world is a decent place, something like this comes around and takes out the wrong Jenga piece, sending your perception crashing down to square one. First pointed out by @msois on Twitter, a screen shot of ESPN.com's "Contact Us" page shows a specific section just to state your dislike for women sports commentators. To double check and make sure it was not photoshopped, we went to the site and took the same steps. Sure enough, there it sat highlighted in blue under our arrow: "Commentator - dislike female commentators."
The complaint was on a list occupied with things like "graphics/bottom line," "national anthem," "team selection," and "story ideas." Nowhere else is there a selection to choose any specific male position. The other strange part is that the option is only available for specific sports. We picked men's college basketball, but the choice is not there for college football, a sport heavily covered by women reporters and commentators. Maybe it's time ESPN incorporated a drop-down menu specifically for "Ways ESPN Is Sexist."
[via Jezebel]
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random February 7th, 2012 at 11:26 PM
this isn't sexist. I'm sure espy has just had a lot of complaints about them, so they're making it more efficient for sorting. simple enough
Tanya February 8th, 2012 at 12:26 AM
Really? Replace the word female with another word... black, white, asian, latino. What would we call it then?
random February 8th, 2012 at 01:16 AM
its not sexism. it would be sexism if espy were the ones complaining. but they're not, they're going out of their way to hire female commentators, which you could even argue is reverse sexism. clearly, espn is having a lot of complaints about those female commentators, so to streamline their customer service, they created a specific file for those complaints. its just a way to quantify the complaints to better file things, nothing more, nothing less
J February 8th, 2012 at 02:35 AM
Every time I turn to a bball game and Doris Burke is commentating I pick something else to watch.
Izzy February 20th, 2012 at 12:14 PM
Because she's a woman? Or for some arguably legitimate reason, like she's bad at it?
Mouse February 20th, 2012 at 07:03 PM
This is a really dumb post. If the complaint gets its own section, that only means that they get enough of those complaints to warrant its own category. Who's to say the designation isn't to make it easy for ESPN to ignore those complaints? Hate it when Jezebel jumps to conclusions for snark's sake. Bad look.