“Mexican TV sportscaster Ines Sainz has a smoking-hot body—the kind most women would kill for,” said Jenice Armstrong in the Philadelphia Daily News. So when the blond former Miss Universe contestant showed up at a New York Jets practice recently in a low-cut blouse, “painted-on jeans,” and heels, the football players and their coach acted like frat boys in a bar, hooting, wolf-whistling, and openly ogling her. Their boorish behavior triggered a national firestorm: The NFL reprimanded the Jets for treating a female sportscaster with disrespect, while a multitude of men—including radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, and several other football players—insisted that Sainz was, in effect, “asking for it,” since she dressed for work as if she were posing for a cover of Maxim. Now there’s a piggish reaction for you, said Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post. Sainz is entitled to be treated like any other sports reporter. “And if she dresses for attention, so what?”
As a female sports reporter, said Ashley Fox in The Philadelphia Inquirer, I have to disagree. Yes, “athletes can be pigs,” and women have to have very thick skin to work as journalists in the macho world of professional sports. To have any chance of being accepted, women must follow three simple rules: “Don’t flirt,” ask knowledgeable questions, and “if you want to be treated like a professional, you have to dress like a professional.” Sainz’s TV network, however, promotes her “as a sex symbol, not a journalist,” and she happily cooperates, posting photos of herself in skimpy bikinis and provocative evening wear. That undermines the credibility of us all. “Women have worked long and hard for equality” in the world of sports, said Andrea Peyser in the New York Post. “We don’t need a publicity whore to muck it up.”
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