Today, a set of tweets from the producer of The Bachelor, Bachelorette, and other programs contributing to the inanity of American culture and transmission of limiting gender norms has gone at least semi-viral.
According to this author at Huffington Post, he’s a hero for standing up to an annoying airline passenger. And she does sound annoying.
But if you read the tweets, slowly but surely, the narrative for me shifts. Instead of being a story of chiding someone for being rude and self-centered, it’s about a celebrity male bullying a woman, telling her to “eat her dick,” provoking her, then using his media presence as a source for shaming.
I don’t care how annoying “Diane” was. This isn’t justified and it wouldn’t have happened if Diane were a man, particularly a big man.
This is gendered. It is not heroic. It is bullying.
I'm not so sure about bullying (that specific action has been thrown around my person way too much for good measure and *reason* lately, and I do think we're overusing it and losing when someone's really being bullied in the rubble), but I do question the massive jump from 'hey, we're being clever behind your back because you think the world revolves around you and you're being impolite about it' to a very overtly aggressively sexual 'eat my dick'. What happened to shaming with wit? About letting the person make the case without the opposition making a single move? Because, obviously, 'Diane' was not someone I'd want at my Thanksgiving table initially, only now I kind of do because she was a woman told to repeatedly "eat…[a]… dick", which is more like sexual harassment than anything else.