Misogynistic comments made by radio host Marty Sheargold and others are symptomatic of a lag between legacy media and an increasingly switched-on audience threatening to leave it behind. Zayda Dollie reports.
PODCASTER Samuel Murphy of SaintsTV looked fed up on Tuesday, saying:
“I really thought we were past shit like this.”
Within hours of the news going public that radio host Marty Sheargold had been cut from Triple M after making disparaging comments about the Matildas, every Australian with a voice and a TikTok account seemed to have an opinion on it.
Remarkably though, it felt like we shared the same one.
“I really thought we were past shit like this — degrading women and their achievements in sport,” Murphy said.
Most of the internet was saying the same thing in myriad ways.
The Project’s Georgie Tunny summed it up in six words:
“Get a new sense of humour.”
The TV personality, who worked with Sheargold, sounded well and truly over it on The Project this week, when she expressed how tired she was of women and sport being “the butt of the joke, again and again, and again”.
Said Tunny:
“I would’ve liked to have thought in 2025 we could finally put that to bed.”
Judging by the strong public reaction, most of us have put it to bed.
No one, from swimming legend Leisel Jones to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, is laughing.
“There's something wrong with the Matildas,” Sheargold said live on-air on Monday and that he would “rather hammer a nail through the head of [his] penis” than watch them play in the Asia Cup tournament next year.
Sheargold continued:
You know what they remind me of? Year 10 girls.
All the in-fighting and all the friendship issues, ‘the coach hates me and I hate bloody training and Michelle's being a bitch.’
Now, I'm sorry to undermine the whole sport, but that's what I think of it so you can stick it up your arse.
Asking “Got any men’s sport?” during a women’s sports bulletin isn’t a joke any of us are in on. We don’t want to be in on a joke made at the expense of our nation’s female athletes.
The only person who found it funny was the one making it.
Sheargold has since issued a public apology, stating:
I fully understand the gravity of my comments.
I’d like to sincerely apologise to the Matildas and the broader organisation.
The statement came a day after Sheargold’s initial apology via Instagram did not go down well, attributing the whole thing to ‘missing the mark’ with his humour.
The 53-year-old comedian seems unable to read the room. It’s ironic to think we would put someone so tone-deaf on air. Why would we give someone so out of touch with their audience a microphone, let alone their own radio show and a regular time slot?
Sheargold likening the national women’s soccer team to “Year 10 girls” for in-fighting is a bit like painting the national women’s soccer captain as a racist drunk for saying “stupid and White”.
Matildas captain Sam Kerr has only just come out of the media storm from her February court trial in London, where she faced charges for allegedly racially harassing a police officer in 2023.
Everyone had something to say about Kerr then, too, and very few of them in her defence.
Sports commentator Craig Foster pointed out the conflict in finally seeing a female athlete like Kerr rise to such prominence that she could stir up so many feelings in so many people, yet knowing she was bound for public condemnation precisely for being prominent and for being female.
The curse of the female outlier.
Foster couldn’t even say it — he wrote it instead:
‘High-profile Australian women are routinely flogged publicly when they step out of line or challenge convention and as a super high-achieving Aussie woman and lesbian, Sam is at the epicentre of a movement to crush advances in women’s rights.’
Kerr had a night out two years ago, drank alcohol and called a police officer “stupid and White”. A London jury found her not guilty. She was acquitted of all charges in four hours.
And still, we couldn’t let it go.
Calling someone “stupid and White” brought up all kinds of demons in us.
If there is a difference in impact between using White as a slur and another skin colour as a slur, we are not going to find out through her example.
Foster chided Australia for avoiding a conversation on race it evidently needs to have with itself, and choosing instead to focus on the far worse crime of being famous and female in this country.
Foster wrote:
It concerns me that much of a male-dominated Australian media, politics and culture promotes misogyny on a national scale amid a global push to weaken women’s rights...
And especially that young Australian boys are being misled to believe that women’s rights are a threat to them.
Foster’s unpopular opinion might never get the air-time it deserves, especially if we keep reserving it for men like Kyle Sandilands and sticking to the routine that after laughter comes tears.
It’s a shame considering Foster’s statement concerning Kerr might be the best foreshadowing of the upcoming election so far.
A recent poll from the Australian Financial Review found Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to be far more popular among young men than young women, with 37 per cent of Australian men between 18 and 34 saying they would vote for him.
This speaks to the global trend of young men gravitating toward right-wing rhetoric offering them simple solutions and a way to remedy their economic and social uncertainty.
Young women seem far more sceptical.
After Abbie Chatfield interviewed Anthony Albanese on her podcast this week, she too was widely criticised and commented on for saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong thing, thinking the wrong or maybe just being the wrong thing.
It is hard to know with someone like Chatfield, who has become something of a conduit between politics and young people, making them relevant to each other. As a celebrity and a woman with the audacity to be both, it can be hard to tell.
If there is anything to learn from Sheargold, however, it’s that there is a clear line between criticism and sexism and if that line is blurry for you, read the room before you speak.
Zayda Dollie is a sports journalist who believes in athlete story-telling, the redemptive power of sport and having female voices heard.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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