Women on social media were angry when they read the August 7th headline on the LA Times opinion piece about former Vice President Joe Biden. It compared the reality show “The Bachelor” to the Democratic Presidential candidate’s decision to choose a female Vice President. Once again, accomplished women were reduced to a comparison of beauty queens on a dating show.
If the LA Times wanted “clicks,” it sure got them for the wrong reasons. Women on social media were not only angered by the sexist headline that was probably written by a man, but what made things worse was that a woman, Virginia Heffernan, wrote the opinion piece.
Maybe she was trying to be clever in comparing Biden’s choice to the reality show, but it didn’t work. She wrote:
I’m not saying it’s exactly “The Bachelor: Campaign Trail,” but it’s a little weird to watch an old man set out to choose a younger woman to take to the ultimate fantasy suite, the White House.
Maya Harris, who is a well-known TV political analyst, said “Do Better” on Twitter.
She was got a response on Twitter from Sewell Chan, the Editorial Page Editor at the LA Times. He let her know that the headline was changed.
But the new headline wasn’t much better. It still kept the “The Bachelor” theme. The tone-deaf editors just didn’t want to accept the fact that any reality show comparison was an insult to accomplished women.
If the LA Times wanted to lose female readers, it did a good job of doing just that.
Women who were insulted that a woman wrote the opinion piece, finally heard from the writer. Heffernan responded on her own Twitter page saying “If it missed the mark, the fault is mine.”
I have never read any of Heffernan’s work before this story, but her opinion piece is an excellent example of how even female writers can stereotype their own gender.
Rebecca Aguilar 