WATCH: Men Read Out Fkd Up Comments Female Sport Journos Cop On The Reg

By

Published

April 27, 2016

Online harassment is a very real, and very damaging phenomena. And the experience of women in media vastly differs from that of men.

But few areas of media attract more horrendous, vitriolic, violent sexual and verbal harassment than sports broadcasting.

The field can be a treacherous one for women who are simply doing their job in an area they love. And yet the comments (almost universally from men) that come flooding in from online tend to vary from the disgusting to outright sickening.

The problem being that everyone’s a hero given a certain degree of anonymity. An online comment has no emotional accountability for the author; no immediate or visual sense of how those words can affect the intended target.

This extraordinarily powerful video takes that curtain away.

Taking ordinary men and placing them in front of sports broadcasters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro, forcing them to read aloud some of the horrendous things comments (not necessarily penned by the men in the video) that have been directed towards the pair in the past.

By lifting the veil, the video shows just how shocking and horrible the mean tweets are; revealing that people have trouble speaking the things that we’re all way too quick to say online.

And despite just how important, moving, and fucking vital an experiment such as this is, even it has attracted online bullshit in its wake.

Unbelievably, Spain and DiCaro have attracted hate and vitriol for the apparent ~grave crime~ of appearing in a video like this one.

People are genuinely accusing us of inventing these mean messages. Some are from Twitter, some Reddit, FB. This isn’t a Twitter-only issue.

— Sarah Spain (@SarahSpain) April 26, 2016