Jessica Mendoza and the privilege of the booth

Jessica Mendoza when she was on the United States Olympic softball team in 2008. She is now ESPN’s first female baseball analyst. Credit Al Bello/Getty Images

The outdated assumption that there are men’s realms and women’s realms has been a stubborn one to eradicate. It infects much of our cultural and political discourse, is at least partially responsible for the way people react to women politicians like Hillary Clinton, and have kept women from fully entering some areas — sports writing and broadcasting, for instance.

Doug Glanville addresses this in The New York Times, focusing on the sexist response to ESPN broadcaster Jessica Mendoza. Mendoza is a solid commentator, probably the best on a bad booth team, and makes a strong effort to get past the shallowness that diminishes the national approach to the game — specially when compared with the outstanding Mets’ broadcast team, and probably many other locals that live each day, each game with the teams they cover.

 Criticizing Mendoza — or any color commentator, or anyone, really — is fair. There are things she does well and things she does not. But focusing on her gender, assuming that she is disqualified from doing a good job based on her being a woman, that’s where the sexism comes in. We’ve seen this in other areas: Comics, video games, politics, television roles. The geeks — and by geeks I mean the passionate ones (anyone who thinks that hardcore sports fans are not geeks is lying to themselves) — have invested a lot of time in “things as they’ve always been”; male geeks, in particular, tend to respond as though their very passion and existence is being threatened.

The impact on politics is particularly dangerous, or course, because it re-enforces gender and race biases, grants legitimacy to the kind of ranting BS we hear from Donald Trump and his most avid supporters. They will claim that it is not about race or gender, but Trump’s language always comes back to racial and gender stereotypes, often framed as a threat, and his fans/supporters react as though these changes represent existential threats to their own lives.

But this is not about a threat to existence. It is about privilege, about defending “things as they’ve always been,” about power and who gets to claim it.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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