There are a lot of people who still think that women do not belong in sports reporting, even though we just had a woman call Monday Night Football. Doris Burke is one of the most respected reporters in the basketball world, and she has worked in the NBA for a long time calling and doing sideline reporting for their games. Cam Newton has now laughed at a female reporter who used basic football terminology when asking a question, and in football, it looks much worse than it would in any other sport.
The question was benign
Asking about formations at a press conference or even by the locker is really not that big of a deal.
Guys ask these questions all the time. We see guys who are asking race drivers about how they took a particular corner, and we see other guys ask players how they rotated off a screen. There is never any laughter even though these guys do not know any more than these women do. That means that the women are being held to a different standard. Cam Newton has also advanced a message about women in football that is, frankly, disgusting.
Women get mistreated because they are seen as weak
Women are abused by men as a matter of control because women are seen as weak and men are seen as strong. A big man who is telling a small woman that she is a joke is pathetic for the man because we already know that he is bigger, stronger, more famous, and richer than her.
He really has to be a pretty terrible human being to think that he also has the right to laugh at her asking a question. Sadly, football players will continue to perpetuate this image of the NFL until we Grow up as a nation. Toxic masculinity has effectively ruined Cam Newton's image for me because he thought that he could do as he pleased.
We need to train men how to have feelings
We have a major problem in America with men having feelings. We teach boys not to have feelings, and they will go on to disregard the feelings of others in the future. This is true for Cam Newton. We never knew if he knew anything about Auburn reportedly paying for him to go to school there, but if he did, he acted like it did not bother him.
He seemed unbothered by the fact that he personally insulted someone in public for all to see. It is really sad that the men of this country actually think that they can be so flippant about how studied other people are, how they feel, and how they would respond to being insulted.
Cam Newton needs to apologize, and he needs to take a course in sensitivity.
