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Let me make this very clear from the outset. Chris Gayle’s comments were inappropriate and unprofessional, and yes, they can certainly be deemed sexist.
Mel McLaughlin handled the situation professionally and I sympathise with her for the awkward predicament that unfolded.
But that is where things should have finished.
McLaughlin chose not to pursue the issue beyond iterating to her employer her displeasure of the incident and being the intelligent professional woman she is continued with her job during the match.
She expressed her desire to put the issue behind her thereafter and that is a credit to her.
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If someone cuts you off in traffic during the day you invoke some level of road rage at the time, perhaps stew on it shortly thereafter and then the next day you are back on the road focusing on getting to your destination.
News that Gayle has now teamed with high-profile lawyer Mark O’Brien to launch a defamation law suit against Fairfax Media is a headline that should only be read in a work of fiction.
Now before you cry foul and say ‘Oh but Gayle’s been doing it for years, he deserves it!’, let me remind you that you yourself had no knowledge of Gayle’s previous sexist remarks to female reporters in years gone by, nor did you have any knowledge about his apparent indecent exposure.
We have only arrived to this point of understanding because of the bizarre circus that has been allowed to foster over what many view as an ignorant yet harmless series of comments.
This doesn’t excuse Gayle’s behaviour past or present but it further makes you scratch your head as to why it was necessary to make such an example of Gayle without having previously arrived at this (now well documented) position.
How did we get to this point? Why the media witch hunt against Gayle?
I’m going to brazenly say it – it’s because equality is the hot topic. In the eyes of a growingly alarming PC media, men don’t just make mistakes or have accidents, they are vindictive sociopaths with a mission to undermine women at all costs.
Sound extreme? So does the beat up around this incident.
Perhaps the most poignant point we have been offered in the week since Gayle’s interview was the video of a UFC weigh-in woman ogling quite literally every single professional fighter who entered the weigh-in area. Whether staring at their pectorals, abdominals or the crotch, her eyes were bulging out of her head – not an exaggeration.
Both Gayle’s interview and the UFC weigh-in videos have gone viral, but there is an alarming difference in the reaction to the two.
Take a quick scroll through social media relating to the two issues and you will find that the general consensus for Gayle is ‘sexist pig’ whereas the UFC woman receives ‘good for her’, ‘can you blame her?’ and ‘looks like she loves her job’.
Given the well stated double standards that permeate through society at all levels, it is shocking that two similar incidents can be viewed in such a starkly different way.
Why are these double standards being encouraged? Equality is extremely important, it should exist, we have made enormous necessary progress in the last few decades – but the goal of feminism and equality should be equilibrium, not a free pass when we see a discrepancy.
True equality says that if Gayle is on the verge of being banned from the BBL then perhaps the woman herself should have her employment reconsidered. Workplace harassment is not a feminist issue – it’s a respect issue, respect that has been undermined.
McLaughlin is a professional doing her job on live television and there was no place for Gayle’s comments especially considering he completely ignored the questions asked of him. But let us remind ourselves that these UFC fighters are also professionals and were at the time all doing their job, so in a logical world where is the difference in the two scenarios?
Both professionals in each circumstance can be seen to have been undermined and disrespected.
Perhaps the most important part though is that beyond basic respect being ignored, we shouldn’t be caring – at all. I couldn’t care less about the woman ogling the fighters, it really is a non-event and in all seriousness it’s quite funny to watch.
Gayle, perhaps rightly, is held to a higher standard and would obviously have received extensive media training. I’m not here to defend him, his comments were unnecessary but the demonising has to stop. He paid his fine, has publicly apologised and has dealt with global condemnation, why is this not sufficient?
What if a female reporter was chatting up a male simply going about his business? That’s not a hypothetical – that happened in December 2014, live on air on Sunrise, Channel Seven’s morning programme.
Substitute weather presenter Nuala Haffner approached a “hunky mystery man” as reported by The Daily Telegraph (inappropriate reporting if we hold the same standard) and proceeded to drop every cliche pick-up line as painstaking as the words Gayle offered.
Here’s a transcript from the article.
“I might embarrass myself on national TV,” she said nervously.
Then came the nail-biting moment.
“Hello I’m Nuala,” she said as she introduced herself. “Do you come here often?”
The hottie said he was a regular there.
“Are you single?” Hafner continued.
I want you to picture in what mainstream publication that would be acceptable by today’s standards if the genres were reversed. Instead of equality the media has engineered reverse sexism which has now indoctrinated itself within the public spectrum.
This is perfectly encapsulated by the fact that senator Jacqui Lambie still has a political career.
In 2014, on live national radio, Lambie, a Palmer United party senator with ambitions of becoming prime minister, stated when asked about her view about a potential partner, “They must have heaps of cash and they’ve got to have a package between their legs, let’s be honest.”
Lambi continued with, “I don’t need them to speak; they don’t even have to speak.”
It is not unfair to suggest that any male politician’s career would be immediately finished with comments equivalent to those. Tony Abbot’s tenure was put in jeopardy and ultimately ended due to the perceived view he was a sexist misogynist. His winking during a radio appearance while listening to a sex worker went viral and was reported in mainstream media outlets with him labelled a “grub”.
No one, least of all myself, is suggesting that Gayle should not have been scrutinised for his cringeworthy comments, nor are they suggesting they were appropriate and should not have been labelled as sexist.
But for this man’s life to now be in tatters with global media outlets chastising him, fines being thrown at him and his career potentially brought to an end, all off the back of this incident, is absurd and completely disproportionate.
The march forward for equality requires a unified and logical front, addressing an issue as opposed to the person, not a media circus and a scapegoat.
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