Announcer’s double fault
Published 7:28 am Friday, July 12, 2013
Whether by coincidence or design, Dustin Hoffman’s insights gained from making the movie “Tootsie” that surfaced this week were a refreshing antidote to the cringe-inducing comments by the BBC announcer who mused about Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli’s looks, and how they related to her success.
Specifically, BBC Radio 5 commentator John Inverdale said: “Do you think Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little ‘You’re never going to be a looker? You’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight.’”
(No doubt, somewhere along the way, someone unkindly told Inverdale to give up his dream to be a TV announcer, because he was “born with a face for radio.” That’s an explanation, not an excuse.)
Listeners immediately protested Inverdale’s remark, leading him to “apologize” in the worst way: in the royal “we,” even though it was only he, and without apologizing. Inverdale said: “We poked fun, in a nice way, about how she looks … but Marion Bartoli is an incredible role model.”
Sigh. No, it wasn’t “poking fun” or “nice.” And Bartoli may or may not be a role model. At the time of the remark, however, she had just won Wimbeldon and surely there had be 100 million other observations to make.
(Inverdale’s equal-opportunity sexism also insults Maria Sharapova. Does he believe Sharapova’s looks are responsible for any tennis success she has had?)
In his interview, Hoffman speaks about his “Tootsie” role that transformed him from a man into a woman … who doesn’t meet our standards of beauty.
“I said … make me a beautiful woman because I thought I should be beautiful if I was going to be a woman … And they said to me, ‘That’s as good as it gets. That’s as beautiful as we can get ya, Charlie.’ And it was at that moment that I had an epiphany. I went home and started crying talking to my wife and I said ‘I have to make this picture,’ and she said ‘Why?’
And I said, ‘Because I think I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party I’d never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out … There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed…”
And just think, this revelation comes from someone who is hardly “traditionally” handsome. Men expect women to look past their looks. It’s to everyone’s benefit that they return the favor.
