In the world according to U.S. News & World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe, voyeuristic video of a female sportscaster primping naked in a hotel mirror is ultimately, in part, the blame of female sportscasters and sports fans.
In Erbe's July 27 blog post, the PBS "To the Contrary" host notes that she wishes "women would stop propping up men's sports" and that this type of a perverted incident would not happen "if women didn't attend NFL games or NBA games, or even watch them on TV to help drive up ratings."
Erbe adds that if they do this, "they would be doing more to stop men from behaving badly than they could ever do otherwise." By that logic, women should just stay out of anything that is predominantly male, in order to keep men from fantasizing and becoming perverts. Erbe went on to explain the popularity of the story on the Internet by explaining, without any awareness of the irony that:
[t]he story exploded anew after that, with a second round of echo-chamber effect in the blogosphere. Everyone has an opinion. That's the Wild West we today call the blogosphere.
Shouldn't Erbe, who's clearly shooting from the hip with her swipe at women who love sports, take her own advice and cease firing?
No such luck. The purposely "child-free" reporter went on to lecture that if parents encouraged "their sons to play sports instead of paying to watch other people play baseball or football or basketball or soccer, they would be sending the message that athleticism is good, but pro sports culture is bad. And it is, nothing but bad."
With Bonnie Erbe's logic, parents shouldn't try to educate their kids on politics, keeping up on the news, or how our government works either, because in doing so they would be promoting the perverts that have come into the limelight in government and journalism over the years.
The key issue here is not the "sports culture" which both American men and women celebrate, it is the decency of men and women in our society.
By blaming anything or anyone other than the culprit, the person(s) who video taped Andrews and placed the video online, in a sense Erbe blames the victim, something to which she is not new.
