Last week, 3.34 million people watched Annie Johnson and her best friend eat ice cream.
“You gotta give it that old … lick, slurp,” remarked one viewer on TikTok. “What we all wanna know is why aren’t they in the kitchen! Making that delicious ice cream!” exclaimed another. The suggestive online comments continue.
Annie and her friend were not on OnlyFans. They were not in an advertisement for Haagen-Dazs. They were attending the Men’s College World Series finals between the Tennessee Volunteers and Texas A&M.
For nearly 20 seconds, ESPN cameras zoomed in on the two young women enjoying their ice cream treats near the dugout.
The anchors were quick to provide commentary: “You gotta get it before it melts,” one said. The other replied: “On a night like tonight, you’re working fast.”
Sure, it was sweltering in Omaha that evening, but was it necessary to single these women out? No. In doing so, ESPN engaged in a practice that is as old as broadcast: Objectifying women on live TV.
For sports fans, the possibility of seeing yourself on the jumbotron comes with the territory. However, Rosenblatt Stadium, site of the Men’s College World Series, holds 23,000 fans, a far cry from ESPN’s gargantuan audience. Nobody — save the athletes, umpires and coaches — goes to a sporting event thinking they would be broadcast on live television for more than a couple of seconds.
“We woke up getting compared to the Hawk Tuah girl,” Annie said in a TikTok video about her experience. (For those unfamiliar, “Hawk Tuah” is in reference to a woman who recently went viral for using colorful language — “spit on that thang!” — during a man-on-the-street interview by Tim & Dee TV, which is essentially this years version of Girls Gone Wild.)
Yet Annie and her friend were not doing anything sexual: “We just wanted to enjoy a baseball game and it was 100 degrees so god forbid we eat some ice cream. Then people sit back and wonder, hmm, why don’t women feel welcome in these environments? It’s crazy; it’s like we can’t sit and eat our food in peace.”
This is far from the first time the sports network has unnecessarily panned to a woman — hello, Taylor Swift! — during a sporting event. Remember the 2013 BCS National Championship Game between Alabama and Notre Dame? ESPN announcer Brent Musburger took particular interest in AJ McCarron’s girlfriend (now wife) Katherine Webb, who was Miss Alabama the year prior.
“Well, I tell you, you quarterbacks, you get all the good-looking women,” Musburger told his colleagues, cementing his place in history.
The origin of the practice dates back decades. Slate, the online magazine, said that father of Monday Night Football Roone Arledge and longtime ABC director Andy Sidaris brought the “honey shot” to sports television in the early 70s.
In an interview with Los Angeles Magazine at the time, Sidaris (who died in 2007) was described as being “to cheerleaders what Hugh Hefner has been to centerfolds.”
He told the magazine: “Once you’ve seen one huddle you’ve seen them all… So you either look at the popcorn, the guys or the ladies. The choice is clear to me.”
More than 50 years later, the choice ought to be clear to everyone with a camera. Keep your lenses off of the ladies. Yet many men in this world cannot do that. Consider all the horror stories to come out of the iPhone era. The hidden cameras in Airbnbs. The thousands of upskirt photos. The countless bathroom stall creeps. The women who get videotaped on the beach in their sleep.
Last summer, I was heading home on the subway from a Yankees game when a man jumped out of his seat and whispered in my ear: “I was filming you the entire time,” before gesturing at my chest. He then ran off the train, my body stored on his camera.
Imagine how many creeps have saved that video of Annie and her friend eating ice cream. While ESPN probably did not intend for the clip to go viral, it did — unsurprisingly. The network needs to do more to police salacious content, starting by leaving the “honey shot” on the cutting room floor.
Jessica Karl is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and author of the Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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