YouTube “sports” personalities Just Not Sports made a video highlighting the sexist treatment of female sportswriters by online harassers. The video, which was titled #MoreThanMean and inspired a similarly named hashtag, features the hosts of Just Not Sports, all male, reading to female sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. The video starts off lighthearted and dismissive, with descriptions of the writers as “like a nagging wife,” “just sort of there,” and a “scrubmuffin [sic],” but it escalates quickly to a suggestion that DiCaro be “beat to death with a hockey stick like the [expletive] you are.” The men were not given the tweets beforehand and clearly get quickly uncomfortable with the content.
The lowlights of the video come at 1:55, when DiCaro is proposed as “Bill Cosby’s next victim” and again at 2:55, when a tweet to Dicaro, a rape survivor, is told by a commenter, “I hope you get raped again.” The video ends with profuse apologies from the readers and the statement, “We wouldn’t say this to their faces. So don’t type it.”
After the story went viral, DiCaro tweeted an unfortunate update: