Men’s Health Magazine is in the doghouse.  After the magazine tweeted on Oct. 6 giving advice on how to talk to women about sports claiming that, “She sees the game different than you,” thousands of men and women fired back.

The author of the article, Men’s Health intern Teresa Sabga — who is also senior magazine journalism major at Syracuse University — said in an interview with The Daily Orange that the article did not comply with her beliefs as a feminist and that she was assigned to write the story. She also said that the article was altered from the original draft that she wrote.

Men’s magazines must stop generalizing that all women don’t care or know about sports. Sabga said the original article was directed only toward women who didn’t care about specific sports being discussed. When Men’s Health Magazine sent out a tweet reading, “She sees the game differently than you. Here’s how, and what to do about it.” with a young blonde woman holding a foam finger and tilting her hips, many were puzzled, including Sabga. The editorial change at the online level in order to reach a broader audience clearly backfired.

This should be taken as a sign that stereotyping women is becoming less acceptable in our society, and it should continue to be discouraged.

Men and women across America tweeted back at the magazine in disapproval.  “Cancel my subscription.” Don Van Natta Jr., an ESPN journalist tweeted back at Men’s Health.  It wasn’t just women that disapproved, showing just how misguided the magazine was.

The executive editor at Vox, Matt Yglesias tweeted, “I normally don’t believe that trolling for hate clicks is a thing, but there’s no other way to explain that Men’s Health thing.”

This magazine did not come up with the idea that women are disinterested in sports out of nowhere; this is a common belief for many.  The media as a whole seem to disassociate women and sports from each other. In a 20-year study published in 2009 by USC and Purdue, men take up 96 percent of the coverage on sports news. In a largely male-dominated athletic reporting world, it’s no wonder people don’t see women as sports experts.

After a few hours of the article being published it was then revoked and Men’s Health Magazine sent out an apology.  “Apologies for our “talk sports with her” story. It missed the mark and the negative feedback is justified. We’ve deleted it,” the account said, “It wasn’t meant to suggest that women are in any way inferior to men, in sports, or anything else. But … we’re sorry that it did.”

If this was not meant to suggest inferiority, it certainly made women seem uneducated and uninterested in the world of sports.  Keeping to the stereotype that women are unintelligent in the sports realm is overdone and untrue.  Men can just as easily not understand the rules to a sport as women. It’s not as if men have a specific sports part of their brain and women have a specific domestic part of their brain.

Media plays an important role in either perpetuating or ending the stereotype of women being uneducated about and uninterested in sports. Generalizing that all women are ignorant about the sports world is unfair and uncalled for. And as Men’s Health found out shortly after its tweet was published, sexism can create major backlash. Other publications should take note before making the same mistake.

Julia Smith is a junior newspaper and online journalism and sociology dual major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @jcsmith711.

Published on October 14, 2014 at 12:01 am