The Incident begs the follow-up question to the familiar

Virginia Slims slogan: Have you really?"

 

In 1793, Priscilla Mason said...

"(Men) denied us the means of knowledge and then

reproach us for the want of it.... They doomed the sex

to servile or frivolous employment on purpose to degrade

their minds, that they themselves might hold unrivalled

the power and preemptions they usurped."

 

In 1916, in Social Rule, Elsie Clews Parsons said...

"Even the women's movement we have called feminism has

not succeeded by and large in giving women any control

over men. It has only changed the distribution of

women... removing vast numbers of women from the class

supported by men to the class working for them.

 

In 1990, Melissa Ludtke, the female plaintiff who won her

right to male locker rooms through court order, wrote in the

October 15th issue of Time Magazine

"To be a sportswriter, women learn quickly that they

must observe certain unwritten rules. They must

tolerate an interminable onslaught of teasing tossed at

them. They must bury female sensibilities at the door.

If they linger in the locker room or converse in too

friendly a fashion with players, they are accused of

flirting and talked about in unflattering way that

undermine their credibility and wear them down."

 

And also in October 15th issue of People Magazine, Lisa Olson

the Herald Reporter involved in the Incident is quoted as

saying...  "You put up with a lot of crap covering the locker

room. `The hey baby!'... and `You wanna go out some

time, baby?' stuff. You learn that its part of the job."

 

Though the latter two women do not speak for all female

sportswriters, they do express an inherent inequality to the

enforcement of their right to pursue a profession on an equal

basis, for the male reporters are not required to leave their

masculinity at the door or forced to deal with sexual innuendos.

 

Women sports reporters are being required to play by male

sports reporters' rules, not gender neutral rules. According

to Ann Litwin, a New York based consultant to Fortune 500

companies on gender partnerships in the workplace, "When you

ask women to work and think by men's rules, they can, but

they will be as awkward as if you asked right-handed people

to eat with their left-hands... For true equality, we all

have to find new ways."