May 16--For a town that eats, sleeps and breathes Hollywood glamour, Los Angeles sure is fussy about bare shoulders.
KLTA meteorologist Liberte Chan dared to show hers on air Saturday morning, prompting a male colleague to dangle a gray cardigan for her to put on mid-segment.
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"What's going on?" she asks. "You want me to put this on?"
"We're getting a lot of emails," the sweater dangler tells Chan, as he helps her into the sweater. "There you go. There you go. That's nice."
(Maybe she should have worn a tux!)
Social media lit up over #sweatergate, prompting Chan to address the event on her personal blog, where she defended her station and her colleagues.
"For the record, I was not ordered by KTLA to put on the sweater," she wrote. "I was simply playing along with my co-anchor's joke, and if you've ever watched the morning show, you know we poke fun at each other all the time."
The station was truly receiving angry emails about her wardrobe, she maintained, but she and her morning show team were attempting to make light of them.
The sparkly black dress was a backup, she wrote, because a black-and-white patterned dress she wore earlier that morning wasn't working with the green screen that meteorologists stand in front of.
You know, to talk about the weather. Which, unlike, a stranger's shoulders, has actual bearing on people's day.
In a later video, Chan's colleagues read aloud emails they received about her dress.
"Liberte Chan's dress is totally inappropriate for a Saturday morning newscast," reads one. "It looks like she didn't make it home from her cocktail party last night."
I dream of a day when we stop policing the clothing choices of girls and women.
No more sending girls home from school for distracting boys with their yoga pants. No more banning girls from the prom for wearing tuxes. No more harassing television journalists for failing to achieve that elusive, perfect ratio of skin-to-clothing -- not too sexy, not too frumpy.
Can you imagine?
It would require us to consider the words coming out of a woman's mouth without first considering how she looks as she utters them.
It would require us to acknowledge that we tell girls and women every day of their lives that they owe us beauty, and then we shame them when they offer it up.
It would require us to admit that when they (shudder) fail to be beautiful, we'd rather not see them at all -- not on TV, not in magazines, not on the Internet.
It's a big ask.
And while we're asking things: How in the world does weather delivered in a gray cardigan differ from weather delivered in a black, sleeveless dress?
It doesn't, except that both of them are living under a cloud of misogyny.
hstevens@tribpub.com
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