Herald Reporter Uses Her Platform to Silence Less Fortunate Voices
Herald reporter Lauren Beckham Falcone today called Coakley an “ice queen” and a “mean girl” for declining to answer a campaign finance question during a press conference about her work as AG. I wish I could rant about how shocking it is for women to use gender-based slurs in order to demean other women, but sadly, it happens all too often. So, in commenting on this I’m going to skip over Falcone – about whom this incident reveals truth, and skip over Coakley – about whom this incident reveals nothing. Rather I’ll focus on the women whom this incident actually hurts: women who have no newspaper column, no press conferences, no voice.
This hurts the single mother with no healthcare who needs her viewpoints represented in healthcare debates. This hurts the female office worker who hears men in the next cubicle laughing about the headline and wonders how she can possibly ask to be paid as much as her male colleagues in such an environment. This hurts the female engineer who wonders how she can ask her co-workers to tone down the sexual innuendo of office conversations and the unwelcome comments about her figure without being labeled an “ice queen.” This hurts the idealistic teen girl who is inspired to study government and to someday run for office, but doesn’t know whether our society really accepts powerful women.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a public official declining to take a question. After all, President Obama has declined to engage with an entire cable TV network. But there is indeed something wrong with vindictively using a women’s vulnerability as a female in order to silence representation of the voices of other women whose struggles she represents.
6 comments
Well said!
Thanks for writing this.
My first thought when I read this was “would there even be a column about this (in the Herald) — about a candidate who deflected one question — if the candidate was a man?”
Really, Martha has been called “timid” and now “mean girl” – so, she can’t win, she is being portrayed as both too weak or too strong!
Interesting discussion about how women candidates have been historically portrayed in the media here:
http://www.alternet.org/politics/79646/
Thanks for your blog!
Keep on speaking out on behalf of Martha.
[...] Women for Coakley points out, these kinds of incidents don’t just hurt Martha Coakley—they are detrimental to all [...]
Thank you for responding so quickly to this extreme and sad sexism.
We have responded on our blog as well: http://womenandpolitics.org/archives/sexism-is-in-the-air-martha-coakley-called-ice-queen-and-mean-girl/1447
Keep up the great work!
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by GenderParityUSA: Womenforcoakley respond to sexist Herald article: http://tinyurl.com/ylxrtag #Martha4MA…
[...] Herald column testifies to the level of sexism still considered acceptable in politics (amply illustrated earlier by the Ice Queen article.) Carr said: If you want to know which men in your neighborhood are henpecked, check out the [...]
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