Isobel Hawes
A group of Alpha Chi Omega sorority girls from Arizona State University went to a Sept. 30 baseball game that turned into a national news story. Announcers for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are 50- and 61-year-old men, mercilessly mocked the sorority girls for, of all things, taking selfies.
“That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today,” one announcer scoffed.
“Every girl in the picture is locked onto her phone. Every single one is dialed in. Welcome to parenting in 2015,” the other commented. As if these college students, presumably 18 to 22 years old, need parenting. They are not children — they are women. While the announcers’ rant was weirdly paternal and overtly condescending in its own right, it didn’t end there. The video of the announcer’s comments spread like wildfire, inciting more than a few critics to jump in with their own comments. One writer from the New England Sports Network wrote, “Apparently, an actual game was played, but you could have slipped it by these future world leaders.” One of the sorority members said another commentator described them as having “the combined IQ of a burnt tater tot.”
The women were invited on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to talk about the incident. When asked about the tater tot comment, one of the sorority members responded, “It’s funny because we are all on dean’s list and half of us are on academic scholarships.”
We live in a world where women are openly and frequently criticized for whether they live up to a standard of traditional beauty. Women are taught that looks are their sole value, then criticized when they take selfies, put on makeup or pay any attention to their appearances. It’s a lose-lose situation any way you look at it.
Many criticized the girls’ intelligence based on this incident, sending the message to girls and women that if they care at all about their appearance like society tells them to, they automatically are assumed to be vapid and brainless.
It’s the same vein of subtle misogyny we saw in June when Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Tim Hunt said labs should be segregated by gender because women were distractions to men. By telling girls they are inherently troublesome for crying, falling in love and basically existing, Hunt told them that they are inherently lesser. We as a society need to stop telling girls and women that their intelligence is based on whether they fit the stereotype of a “smart girl.” You can wear Coke-bottle glasses and a lab coat, or you can wear 6-inch heels and a miniskirt and still have the same value and intelligence. Who you are as a woman is not how you package yourself; it’s not what’s under your shirt but what’s in your head that has the potential to change the world.
This is why hashtags such as #ILookLikeAnEngineer are so important. This hashtag encouraged hundreds of girls to post selfies of themselves, showing that “smart girls” come in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and ages, and from many backgrounds. They are showing young girls that they are welcome in these fields, regardless of their appearance. You can take selfies and be intelligent — imagine that. If we keep criticizing girls for acting like girls and telling them they can’t be world leaders because of it, then they will continue not to be. And that is the real trouble.
