Let me tell you, it’s quite a shock when Britt’s head spins around and that forked tongue starts flecking…
Anyone who spends much time watching TV knows that “lookism” is the way of the world in the broadcast news business. From Nora O’Donnell on ABC to Robin Meade on HLN to Erin Andrews and the bevy of Fox blondes, it is obvious that if you are female, talent as a reporter won’t get you as far as some beauty contest creds. Plain, even conventionally pretty women are at a great competitive disadvantage in this field.
One of the more blatant beneficiaries of this bias, ESPN’s Brit McHenry, has just been outed on the web as an ugly human being in a flashy disguise. Her car was towed, and a camera caught the reporter taking out her frustration on the poor clerk who was tasked with collecting her fee.
“I’m in the news, sweetheart, I will fucking sue this place,” McHenry says as the video opens.“Yep, that’s all you care about, is just taking people’s money,” she continues. “With no education, no skillset, just wanted to clarify that. … Do you feel good about your job? So I could be a college dropout and do the same thing? Why, cause I have a brain and you don’t?…Maybe if I was missing some teeth they would hire me, huh? ‘Cause they look so stunning … ‘Cause I’m on television and you’re in a fucking trailer, honey.”
“Lose some weight, baby girl,” she taunted as she left.
Yecchh.
ESPN suspended McHenry, who delivered a standard issue apology about making “a mistake,” writing,
“In an intense and stressful moment, I allowed my emotions to get the best of me and said some insulting and regrettable things. As frustrated as I was, I should always choose to be respectful and take the high road. I am so sorry for my actions and will learn from this mistake.”
It’s no mistake. It’s signature significance. Nice, decent, kind, good people don’t treat people like that, not once, not ever. She’s a classic mean girl, a spoiled cheerleader who loved feeling superior to the fat girls, the pimply girls, the girls who couldn’t afford nice clothes. She stole their boy friends and laughed. We all know people like that, and show business breeds them like swamps breed mosquitoes.
Will ESPN fans use the popular evil twin excuse that served Bill Clinton so well—that private conduct, no matter how despicable, is distinct from professional conduct, and that people who are atrocious on their own time can still be trustworthy in the workplace? Maybe. Brit McHenry is a trivial pleasure for the trivial-minded. On the other hand, unlike Bill Clinton, she’s a generic pretty face and figure, not a uniquely talented professional. Surely there are beautiful women who are not bullies and miserable human beings who can do McHenry’s job—looking lovely while reading what others write for her—as well or better and who will not have their audiences wondering whose mother or sister or dog she will be abusing after the cameras stop running.
It will be interesting to see if McHenry’s beauty will be enough to save her career, now that we know it’s a facade. She’s not beautiful. She’s an ugly human being.
I don’t think the facade will be enough any more.
Good.
Ethics Alarms 
But, Jack… she’s beautiful!!
A common misconception.
The hollow between the silicone sagging bags equals the one in its skull; not pretty. PLASTIC.
She knows exactly to the millimeter how pretty she is and how much crap that allows her to dish out to people who get in her way. CS Lewis had an analogy about the things that come out of our mouths when we experience opposition. Something about rats in the cellar not appearing because the light was abruptly turned on. The rats were always there the sudden light didn’t produce them, just revealed them.
What was interesting to me was that she KNEW the interaction was being recorded, and she doubled down. So there’s no “mistake” there, just a terrible, awful person being her terrible, awful self.
Fox flops at ESPN, odd.
What she did was rotten, no question of it, and for a day or two everyone is going to fake being outraged – then the hottie’s, you know who you are, are going to right back to trading on their looks to get out of traffic tickets, cut ahead in line, take from dinner companions’ plates, and generally act like the rest of the world is lucky they are around.
I do wonder if this news about McHenry will be one of the sustaining catalysts of a turning and backlash in our culture against the “dyslooksia” that has enabled many better-looking among us to feel entitled to be jerks.
But, just in case the dyslooksia continues and the more beautiful-looking people need any more help, I re-wrote McHenry’s “apology” to make it more hip to this current, emotion-enslaved Hillarie Antoinette era:
“In an intense and stressful moment, I allowed my emotions to get the best of me and said some things that could be taken as insulting. We should always choose to be respectful and take the high road. I can only wish that I could un-say what I said, and will learn from this.”
Note, in that improved, superior apology above: No admission of or concession to having insulted anyone; de-personalization of accountability to the inclusive “we;” admission of, and plea for all-forgiving tolerance of, wishful thinking while suggesting sublimely, manipulatively, that said things can be “un-said;” a finishing flourish of false humility via admitted determination “to learn” (most likely, to learn how to become an even more harmful jerk and get away with it), and…mistake? MISTAKE?! NEVER even THINK of using THAT word.
Now: Can I have that job in T. Regina’s White House communications staff? (They need an old, white male in there, to preserve diversity – and to give Bill easy access to a bubba more like himself for having beer with. Of course, my hidden motive is to be positioned to score lots of chicks.)
Not a chance. The eyes go where the eyes go, and I bet if you were locking up your store for the evening and some ordinary looking guy approached asking you to help him out because his wife used the last of the milk in the mac-n-cheese and he doesn’t want to chase milk for the kids’ breakfast in the morning you might well tell him “sorry, the computer’s down now.” But if it were some hottie in tank top and flip-flops asking if she could just grab some bottled water, you would probably open right up.
Steve-O, you’re right, about dyslooksia being eternal, and about its repression, even to a noticeable degree, being a lost cause.
I have helped a lot of people in a wide variety of distress situations, as a result of their luck in having me purely as a coincidental bystander at, or having just arriving at, their scenes of distress. (That frequency of my Good Samaritan opportunities, I consider part of MY luck, a blessing not a curse.) I don’t recall helping even one memorably good-looking person in those situations. In fact, I don’t even remember their faces, let alone any other attribute, not even any of what they were wearing – or not wearing.
You expect that if I ran a store, at closing-time I’d brush off an ordinary looking guy, but in the same kind of situation as the guy, I’d do a favor for a hot chick? Honestly, I don’t know – maybe I’d act as you expect. But, hotties had best not bank on my favoritism resulting purely from their hottie-ness, no matter how much I talk here of being some easy sucker for hotties. I don’t size-up women in distress who are lucky enough to have me on the scene, with secret thoughts of, “Ooo…maybe later, some ass.” I guess I’m just a real loser-drone of a Sir Gallahad or Batman…
Anyway, what I am getting at is, there is a big difference between my self-limiting kindness to strangers asking favors, and just sucking it up like a punching bag when some hottie decides to self-entitle at heaping abuse, scorn, ridicule or other cruelty on me, whether I deserve it or not. My passivity in responding to that mix of beauty and beastly-ness is another highly unpredictable thing. I just hope the world is well-warned about me.
Good distinction, although as I move into middle age I find myself having less and less patience with entitled young people.
Jack – please check for a text message.
As to whether ESPN viewers should care. Probably, but her function there is to be pretty while reading. She isn’t there to cause people to think about her character.
Exactly. And if her conduct make it impossible for people not to think about her character, then her beauty isn’t enough. Why did Winona Ryder’s shop-lifting wreck her career? Why did bigoted statements from Michale Richards and Mel Gibson make them unwatchable? Why does Bill Cosby’s raping women he drugged make him less funny?
See…. I don’t know that I like this.
Our perceptions of beauty and our tendencies to raise them on a pedestal or excuse behaviors is actually biologically ingrained. They did a study… This was a while back… Where they gave a monkey coins, and if they put the coins in one slot, they’d get food, and if they put the coin in the other slot, a video screen would show images of healthy looking monkeys. There were monkeys that went completely hungry, and there were some that went moderately hungry, but every single one of them put money down for the pictures. Sometimes, I think that we really aren’t as far from the caves as people would like to think.
McHenry knows that, and yes, takes advantage of it. And we need to be cognizant of it, recognize it and try our damndest to mitigate it. But caution needs to be exercised. There’s a tendency to over-compensate on things like this. Fat shaming is a great example: There’s a lot of stigma attached to being heavy, and while that’s getting better, as that shift has happened, you start to see skinny-shaming: People calling girls anorexic sticks, their anacondas don’t want none of that so “fuck you, if you skinny bitches”, and “You don’t want your steaks to be all bone, why would you want your women that way.” Or we could insult not only the women, but the men who like them with “Only dogs prefer bones”.
My question is: Is a suspension really appropriate? Should something that happens completely separate to your work life bleed over? Was this completely separate? Are we willing to suspend everyone who says mean things to the person towing their car? Is this a matter of putting higher standards on public figures? Are we OK with that? I’m struggling, but I think I’m going to settle on: horrible people should be able to work too.
It’s a PR move that ESPN is justified in making and has to make. She is a public figure and an ESPN face—she embarrassed the brand. It’s no different, is it, than that executive who was fired for abusing the Chick-Fil-A clerk, or Alec Baldwin being canned by ESPN for getting into another public pissing match.
She might have avoided the suspension if she hadn’t referenced her TV gig in the rant. She also undermined her value as an employee. It’s a warning.
I’m kinda glad you brought up the Chik-Fil-A guy, because that was the scenario that I was thinking about when I got hung-up. Aside from the outcome, what was the difference between the two? And that outcome shook me. People are being eradicated because of that one time they did something stupid on camera. A suspension is probably appropriate, but If this had gotten different traction McHenry could have been fired, tarred, feathered and relegated to a trailer park. And the difference between the suspension and eradication seems so…. arbitrary.
A lot of stuff separate to work bleeds over there, starting of course with criminal activity, but, putting that aside because it’s obvious, there’s a reason HR departments comb through your social media before they hire you and you shouldn’t add your boss on FB. Anything you say can and will become a problem.
Your “Fox bevy of Blondes” have some cred Jack. Megyn has a law degree as does Shannon Bream, Kim Guilfoyle, & Martha Mc callum is a former teacher, beauty & brains are not mutually exclusive. As far as the ESPN low life I think you summed her up pretty well along with everything she is obviously dumb as a rock if she thinks berating the collector would accomplish anything. Just 1 stupid dame.
I have no problem with Megyn. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is an idiot, and there is no excuse for her having a forum for her half-baked, ignorant utterances. There are other dumb blondes on Fox, but one is too many.
A law degree isn’t decisive evidence of intelligence. Unfortunately.
no kidding a law degree doesnt reflect intelligence however having gone through the educational process one would assume the person has accomplished *something*
It’s decisive evidence of not being an utter moron. A partial moron is still an all too real possibility though…
BTW with any skill at reading body language you can see that the mean
*itch has a *fake smile* in that pic….
And for the record: I don’t think the direct connection can be made between her beauty and her actions. She’s a horrible person because she was abusing a power disparity. She used her beauty because that’s what she had going for her. I think that if she were less beautiful, but still a wealthy celebrity, she would have attacked him differently, but still been more than willing to go there. The indirect connection is that she probably wouldn’t have that power if not for her looks, but that’s thinking kind of meta.
i never mentioned hasselback & why should YOUR opinion of her TAINT the others
She is a classic pro-wrestling villain. That should be her next job.
“I see a lot of inbred, toothless yokels in the audience tonight here in Birmingham…people who will never be as pretty, as athletic, or as smart as me…” (Boooooooooo!)
I just came across an interesting item regarding this story: Jonathan Last: Lay off Britt McHenry ( I apologize for not knowing how to imbed the link)
It and the attached comments make fascinating reading in regard to the alleged predatory nature of towing companies in Virginia. If it applied to this particular incident it might at least partially exonerate her. However I doubt this applies because she never made any claim that the towing company was in the wrong.
Richard: I can tell you that Houston based wreckers have one of the biggest rackets going in the country… from personal experience! If she got shafted by those lowlifes (and they are) I don’t blame her for being angry. It’s what she said in her anger that’s at issue here. It might be that she was just doing her best to humiliate the fee collecting girl and came up with that, but that still doesn’t speak well of her, does it? This is accentuated by the fact that she’s a television personality with a following. Believe me, I entertained pleasant fantasies about using a car bomb on that fortress-like compound where the city licensed tow trucks in Houston keep the vehicles they’ve grabbed at the slightest excuse for the revenue they share with the city. And I was pretty angry on the two times I had to go there to pick up my car. (The cashiers aren’t standing in a bullet retardant glass booth for nothing!) But I wasn’t a celebrity. I was just a guy doing odd jobs at a difficult time in my life, like most of the victims of this form of extortion. Besides, Little Miss Britt needs to realize that, without her hairdresser, dietician and cosmetologist, she’d probably be just another face on the streets herself.
Even if they were in the wrong, the unfortunate lady behind the glass isn’t the mastermind behind it all. And insulting her personally, in every demeaning way imaginable, just makes you the same kind of jerk as a guy who gets fired and takes it out on his wife.
Steven Mark Pillling: Point taken.