You spend your entire life scraping and scratching for every opportunity, a difficult task after your father suddenly dies when you are just nine years old and your mother is tasked with being the sole bread winner. You’re raised around junkies and gangs, but you focus on making yourself better, education is your key to getting out from under the poverty and challenges your family has endured, stay the course and focus on being your best. You earn a spot and scholarship to a college prep school, but the hard work is just beginning. In order to attend college, you can’t just be good, you have to be exceptional, because, in order to attend, you need a scholarship.
Your hard work is rewarded when you are designated valedictorian of your class and you enter Princeton on a full scholarship, followed by Yale Law School. Then many years later, you are nominated as a U.S. Supreme Court Judge, the highest court in the land. Your father would have been so proud. Your hard work has paid off. The nation is watching you, they are talking about your accomplishments. Lots of people are talking. All the sacrifices and the heartaches have brought you to this very point and then you hear:
“Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something.”
Sotomayor is not the only accomplished woman that has been the subject of a sexist sound bite. On August 31st, the Women’s Campaign Forum, the Women’s Media Center and Political Parity launched “Name It, Change It,” a media campaign focused on putting the spotlight on sexism in the media. For years, women have politely ignored the host of comments about PMS, driving, blondes, butts and breasts and the GIRLFRIENDS are getting together and Naming Names! We are getting down in the dirt; we’re going to spar on the mat of ignorance and come out the victor. WE ARE NAMING NAMES and focusing the BIG BOLD LASER OF SHAME on the culprits.
The best part is, WE now have a Website. That means we are organized! And, we are organized on Facebook and Twitter AND we have a place to REPORT IT.
So get out there, become a fan of “Name It. Change It,” and join the cause. Once we NAME IT, Change is inevitable.
I’ll get you started. Here’s my list of sexist comments in the media:
“The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.” – Chris Matthews on Hillary Clinton during the Presidential primaries in 2008.
“There’s also this issue that, on April 18, she gave birth to a baby with Down syndrome… The baby is just slightly more than 4 months old now. Children with Down syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of vice president, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?” – John Roberts on Sarah Palin’s VP nomination (on national television).
“If we get rid of the moon, women, whose menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get PMS. They will stop bitching and whining.” – GOVERNOR Arnold Schwarzenegger to Howard Stern during his radio show.
“Without ‘Fascistic Hatred, Malkin Is Just a ‘Mashed-Up Bag of Meat with Lipstick.” Keith Olbermann on Michele Malkin.
