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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

"Degrading" Doesn't Mean The Same Thing As "Sexist"



*Note: I hesitated to post this for only one reason. I did not want anyone reading this to think I was making a personal attack, mainly because I have great respect for one of the women involved in the group that I speak about. Please keep that in mind when reading this. Thanks. -Alison Faye

Three weeks ago, I was browsing Facebook, as I do just about every night, when I came across a group's page that made me do a double-take, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. To make you understand why, I need to give you some background information.

The group who's Facebook page I was looking at was a group that was founded to bring together female soccer fans and help expand the visibility of women in the sport. While I am not a member, I applauded their initial goal of trying to raise the view of women in the sport from just "silly fan girls" to educated fans that are equal to men.

Now don't get me wrong...I fan girl. I fan girl all over the place. But I also can be a well educated fan who can sit and talk sports for hours as well as any man (granted, my sport of preference is baseball, not soccer). So, I'm not saying I'm perfect.

The reason I did not decide to join the group is that I noticed that the main account that the group would tweet under seemed to forget its main mission sometimes. It would occasionally tweet extremely odd comments, talking about how great some player looked with his shirt off or who the top five hottest players were on the US Men's team are. To me, these comments are fine for personal accounts, but coming from the official group account, made for a bad taste in my mouth. This screams "fan girl" to me. But again, this is my opinion only.

So flash back to three weeks ago and the Facebook page. Right on the main banner is this phrase in large letters: "Let us blow your mind." Now, I fully admit that I thought at the time that I could have been way out in left field but the first thought that came to my mind was "Is this for real?" All I'm thinking about when reading this is "Let us blow your mind instead of your...well, you know..." So I did what any normal person would do. I asked three other people for their opinions. And shockingly, they all said the exact same thing I did. That it made them think that they were being offered an alternative to a blowjob.

I felt that for this group, that claims their mission is to elevate the status of women in the sport of soccer, posting this phrase was possibly unintentionally degrading to women. I also felt it would behoove me to let the founders of the group know how it made me feel because it was obvious from talking to others that I was not the only one who made that connection. I decided to contact the founders of the group through their contact form on their group website. I described exactly as I did above, stating that I thought they might be unintentionally degrading women, and I knew that this was not their mission. I hoped that my notifying them would be received positively and with the knowledge that I was just trying to help promote their mission.

Fast forward a week and a half. No response has been received. No change was made to the Facebook site. Basically, I'm sitting here thinking one of the founders got my email and filed it in the round filing bin. Which now just pisses me off. It's about this time that one of the new women's soccer teams, the Portland Thorns, released a t-shirt with a slogan that read "Feeling Thorny?". The group's Twitter account tweeted asking what people thought about this. To my boyfriend's credit, he wasn't going to let the fact that they ignored my email slide, so he replied, asking if it was better or worse than the phrase on their Facebook page. The group replied that they forgot that they got a "sexist complaint" about it.

In no way did I EVER say that what they wrote was sexist. I used the word degrading. The two words mean something completely different. Being sexist means you foster discrimination based on gender. Being degrading means that something lacks honor or causes humiliation. In their conversation, the group account continues to use the word sexist, even though my boyfriend tried to point out that they had missed the point of possibly projecting the wrong image.

Fast forward another week and a half. Nothing has changed. Still no response. Phrase is still there. Hence the blog post. I didn't want to write this because it is a touchy situation with those involved. But I don't deal well with the degradation of women as a whole. And I deal worse with having my words misconstrued to make it seem like I'm ignorant.

All I did was try to help. If they don't want to take down the phrase, fine, that is their prerogative. But the polite thing to do is reply and say "Thank you, but we are ok with it." It isn't that difficult. Ignoring me is just plain rude.