Tales from the Frontlines: ‘Why Don’t You Smile More? Like a Lady?’
Today, a “Tales from the Frontlines” from Jennifer Pozner, the executive director of Women In Media & News.
My first journalism job was an internship at Courier Life Newspapers in Brooklyn . Summer of 1993 … It ran on a small staff. There were no women working as reporters, and only one woman who wrote a column. The editors were all men, too. So, because the columnist only came in a couple of times each week, I was usually the only woman in the office — and, being 19 or 20, I had to choose my battles. So, for example, I let most of the generally sexist and racist comments that were part of the air and water there go by without challenging them, so that I could call them out when they said something particularly egregious (as when I insisted that perhaps it was completely inappropriate for the crime reporter and the editor to be making jokes in the middle of the newsroom about how overweight a rape victim was, and how maybe she was lucky to have been raped because how else would she have gotten some guy to screw her…etc.)
In any case, this photographer would come in to the newsroom every couple of days to drop off his pictures. He reminded me of the blustery, heavyset bird in that old comic strip “Shoe” — crossed with Al Bundy. He always gave me these very exaggerated visual once-overs, would make minor comments about my body, and would be generally gross… but I figured that since my editor saw what was going on (we all worked in the same area) and no one was calling him on it, there wasn’t much I could do to get him to stop it. I figured I’d just ignore him until the internship was over at the end of the summer.
But I finally lost it one day when, in addition to the leering once-over, he started blowing kisses to me. Blowing kisses! In the newsroom! I gave him the dirtiest look I could muster and kept on typing, but then he said — within earshot of my editor — something along the lines of, “Why don’t you smile more? Like a lady?” and then something about how he always “compliments” me and I never thank him.
I just lost it. I got up from my desk, marched over to him and went off, screaming, “I’m not a LADY! I’m a REPORTER!” I remember saying that word for word …
The photographer never bothered me again. A week or two later, the editor said something about how I had “spunk” or “moxie” or some ridiculously outdated phrase that reminded me of black and white films, and started giving me better assignments.
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