Our cover story is the New Bedford march this weekend. I know, I kind of overdid it with the detail, but…hey, it’s winter. We’ve got pages to fill, and Glenn took such great pictures.
Plus, it was fun. If I could’ve transcribed the whole thing, with every word every speaker said, I would have.
But, you know me, right? This is one of my things.
So, there was a bit of controversy over a women-only event held before the march, the “Women’s Forum and Persisterhood Luncheon.”
No men were allowed, not even male members of the press. Both the Standard-Times and WBSM sent male reporters. Both were asked to leave. A female video operator for the ST was allowed to stay. The ST reporter briefly mentioned it in his article.
But Taylor Cormier from WBSM wrote a very long complaint, including in it that he believes his exclusion was illegal because it was held at BCC, a publicly owned building.
When he got there, Dana Rebeiro, an organizer of the event and a New Bedford City Councilor, asked him to leave. And he did.
I wasn’t there, I got to the forum late, so I missed that, and I missed the first couple of segments. One of those was a #MeToo segment that encouraged women to tell their personal stories of being sexually harrassed. Ms. Rebeiro said that the exclusion of men was to make sure women felt comfortable telling their stories.
I have to admit, I’m not sure how I would’ve acted if I had seen a colleague getting asked to leave. Would I have been heroic and stood in solidarity with my fellow journalist? Would I have decided to stand in solidarity with other women?
I don’t know, to be honest.
I knew it was for women only and I knew the organizers were disappointed that the ST and WBSM would not send female reporters. They decided ahead of time they would not accommodate that request.
I did not realize the reporters would be asked to leave, though. Would I have left, too? I don’t know. Probably, if not in a well-thought-out show of solidarity, I might have left simply as a practical matter: It would’ve been too uncomfortable to stay if I had witnessed a colleague being removed because he was a male. On the other hand, maybe not.
The thing is, that I understand the desire to have the woman-only space.
But, reporters are not supposed to participate or interfere in events they cover. We’re just supposed to observe and report. Photographers, myself included, can be a little more disruptive because they are moving around trying to get the good shot. But, for the most part, the coverage should not interfere with the event.
I don’t like events that leave out men or women. But I do, as I said above, appreciate the woman-only space.
I’ve been a women’s rights and gay rights activist for about 30 years now, and a feminist long before that. I had hoped that, by now, we wouldn’t need woman-only spaces just so we could feel free to be ourselves. But, alas, here we are, with a man in the White House who brags about his shabby treatment of women, and a whole lot of enablers and explainers who dismiss his rhetoric and his behavior for their own reasons. It doesn’t matter what their reasons are, the damage to women is real. So maybe men can try to understand why women need our own space sometimes. We are under seige, and we know it, even if the men around us do not. The attacks are real, and they are dangerous: attacks on birth control access, attacks on abortion rights, attacks on workplace protections. All those things hurt women in real and physical ways.
So, here we are, at a place when a group of women wants some coverage for an event, but still wants it to be a women-only event. Why is that so hard? The newspaper would not accommodate that request, for whatever reason. The radio station could not because they truly do not have any female reporters to send. That’s the saddest part of all in this. Not a single woman at WBSM, on the air, or out in the field gathering the news, or covering features. None.
What does that say about them?
Sad, I say. Very sad.
Even sadder is that Ms. Rebeiro said she saw female interns at WBSM. She told me that she asked WBSM to give one of them a chance for a good story. She goes there a couple of times a week to do a segment or two with on-air personalities and has met the interns.
So, there it is. The man who runs the show did not want to send a woman. Maybe that explains why they don’t apply for jobs there, as he stated in his posting.
Maybe he wanted to make a point. And I think he did, just not the point he probably wanted to make. The reality is that he did not want to accommodate the women, for whatever reason, however righteous it may sound.
Why does that not surprise me?
Until next week then..see ya
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