We’ve heard of fat-shaming, but pregnancy-shaming? Seriously?
Yep, it has come to this: Kristi Gordon, a
meteorologist for Canada’s Global News channel, is six months pregnant
with her second child, and she’s been getting hate mail from viewers about her appearance.
Hurtful? Crazy? Absolutely. But Gordon recently got the upper hand by reading some of the deplorable messages on the air during a special segment. A sampling:
“Nowhere on North America TV have we seen a weather reader so gross as you.”
“Your front end looks like the Hindenburg and your rear-end looks like a brick [expletive] house. We now turn off Globel [sic]. Cover up or take time off.”
“Buy some decent clothes and have more respect for your unborn child.”
“Looser tops would look much more professional.”
In a blog post she wrote after the segment was filmed, she shared that one e-mail went as far as calling her a “Hussy!”
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Gordon said that she was actually expecting some of the negativity because she had gotten a similar response when pregnant with her first child. “You can’t completely hide something like this,” she said on-air. (The question being, as anchor Robin Stickley noted: Why would you want to?)
But then came a moment of remarkable candor: “I feel like I’m a pretty confident person—I wouldn’t be in the this industry if I wasn’t. I don’t feel that this is really affecting me,” Gordon said. “I thought about some of the things I did last night. I checked myself out in the mirror a couple times just to see how big I’m getting. I asked my husband, ‘Am I not seeing it? Am I getting really big?’”
“It wasn’t until I went to bed that I realized, despite me thinking that these guys are crazy…it’s amazing that when you say something mean about someone it still affects them.”
In just a few short minutes, Gordon managed to make the haters look pretty small and insignificant—while, unwittingly, becoming a heroine for working women everywhere. In fact since it aired, the station was reportedly flooded with emails and notes of support—including tweets from other pregnant women, sharing photos of their own baby bumps.
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