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Vitally Useless's avatar

In the Kelly Dennett piece O'Brien is quick to disabuse us of the notion that the abuse she receives is gendered. Of course she does, if she points out that female journalists are routinely subjected to horrid treatment online she then opens up the avenue that she is playing The Sexism Card when in fact, she IS experiencing a disproportionate amount of abuse because she is a woman. It's infuriating. Before anyone come at me with the fact that many of the folks complaining about her are women let me feed you this hard to ear cookie: INGRAINED MISOGYNY IS REAL. When you are raised with the saying "like a girl" meaning "lesser than" as in "You throw like a girl" means you throw poorly, how the hell are women supposed to see themselves as equal? When you see countries where the sex ratio has been so screwed up by generations of sex selective abortions so that men who want to marry women now have to leave their home country to find them, when you routinely have men telling you what YOU find attractive, when you routinely see heterosexual pairings in movies and tv where the man is often twice as old as the woman and you are told this is what women want, when you are told that you are "emotional" and that those "emotions" rule how you behave which makes you unfit for political or business leadership positions....it's easy to start to believe that you are all of those things. It's easy to pick apart other women because the actual job of dismantling a sexist, racist and ableist society is too daunting so let's just say that this journalist is "strident" and "too loud" and let's hope that a man is around to pat us on the head and tell us that "You're not like the other girls" so that we can maintain our proximity to power while not actually holding any of our own (White Women Only Of Course). It's a tiring process to try an extricate oneself from ingrained misogyny, it's easier to laugh at the hack comic joking about his "nagging wife" and call it a day. It's easier to smile at your Tinder date when he talks about how all of his exes are "crazy" even though at some point his actions should probably be called into account. It's easier to just stay still on the subway when an erection is pressed into you deliberately because to call attention to it is just going to get you called "hysterical". It's easier to allow a guy in his thirties to catcall you when you are twelve and make you so self conscious that you go on to develop an eating disorder so that your budding breasts stop growing because clearly you did something to attract his attention so you need to remedy it. Not him. It's a journalist deflecting the truth of the matter because she just wants to do her job with as little abuse as possible.

It's exhausting and it's meant to be exhausting. Tova O'Brien is a superhero and as the old saying goes: She's doing it backwards and in heels.

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Madeleine's avatar

I absolutely found her questioning during the Covid updates to be unnecessarily confrontational, in many cases trying to make mountains out of molehills, and it seemed so rude given the mild-mannered Bloomfield and and credible Ardern, both of whom were trying to steer us through a potentially difficult situation, and were doing it with grace and, it seems, considerable skill.

She also seemed to kept pushing after many felt she'd already been answered.

She was no different here, really. It's just that this jerk 1000% deserved it.

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