I saw ghosts in October. I could sense that female athletes were out there being sportsy and all, but in my local newspaper mostly they were invisible. I decided, on an irritated whim, to monitor the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of women’s sports for one month and write a Letter to the Editor each day, a horrifying exercise that left me cursing the Chronicle. Jump to the Oct. 31 letter below for a recap and the curse. Or follow along in these excerpts: Oct. 1: 10 pages, 22 stories, 13 photos. Women = 2 sentences. Nothing on the two exciting WNBA […]

Name it to change it

January 29, 2015
Mink rape Sandler Stanford video
Cynthia Brown, Mink, rape, rape culture, Sandler, sex discrimination, Stanford

(Video: Title IX expert Bernice Sandler on why words matter.) We swim in a sea of cultural assumptions. Norms surround us like the air we breathe, scarcely noticeable until we find them toxic, and then hard to explain to someone who isn’t feeling their poisonous effects. Parting the sea, cleaning the air of sexist assumptions takes time and effort, and even the cleaners may feel residual toxic effects. Women from the early history of Title IX have described to me insecurities from internalizing the sexism around them in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bernice Sandler initially believed a colleague when he told […]

Journalists ignore women’s sports

Name it to change it