WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE
Would you say to someone’s face the things you would post about them on the Internet?
Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro are women working in the sports industry. A new video provides a jarring look at some of the feedback they receive online, with men reading to their faces online comments about them.
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“One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick…” one man says, as he trails off.
“Like the whore you are,” another reads aloud.
The men reading the tweets out loud are not the ones who wrote and sent them; they were simply told they’d be reading “mean” comments to the women’s faces.
The messages get dark very quickly.
“This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our c**ks sucked or our food cooked,” one man reads out hesitantly, appearing uncomfortable.
“There’s a lot of C-word,” another man says, as he looks through the messages.
WATCH: Full #MoreThanMean video — DISCRETION ADVISED
The women involved, who the messages were originally directed toward online, had read the messages before filming began.
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“Hopefully this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim, that would be classic,” says one message. Another commenter wrote they hope DiCaro, who has spoken out about being sexually assaulted, gets “raped again.”
“I hope your boyfriend beats you.”
The video was put together to start a conversation about the anonymous abuse women in sports face online “just for doing their jobs,” with hashtag #MoreThanMean.
“Harassment…has been proven to have long-lasting emotional effects,” says Stacey Forrester, the organizer of Vancouver’s Hollaback! movement, in an email to Global News.
“It can result in people limiting their participation in civic, academic, political or other aspects of day to day public life.”
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“In many ways the anonymity of online harassment can be scarier — you can’t see the person to know how to best act to protect your safety,” Forrester says.“Imagine a man you know nothing about expresses a desire to kill, rape or harm you? How do dismiss that?”
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