Every year when I teach social media in my sports writing class, I have the students watch the #MoreThanMean video from several years ago.

It’s always an eye-opening experience for the young men in my class. It’s always telling how much it is not eye-opening for the young women, who have faced their share of harassment and dumbassery online from dudes who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a woman likes and knows sports.

For years, my students pointed out the reactions of the men in the video as they read the worst tweets to Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. I pointed it out myself.

But my perspective on that changed just recently, when I read Julie DiCaro’s book. She writes, in a gut-punching paragraph that made me realize how wrong I’ve been:

Sarah and I were asked frequently why we thought the video struck such a chord with people. Unfortunately, we’d both come to the same conclusion: it was the discomfort of the men in the video that made it stand out and resonate with people.
“I can’t tell you how often, in the days following #MoreThanMean, I was asked if the guys in the video were okay, or if we’d apologized to them for … I’m unsure what. Including them in a viral video they volunteered for?
It was a stark reminder to Sarah and me that people might shake their heads and click their tongues when women show despair or sadness, but it’s an upset man that people really can’t take. If the mean tweets had been read to us by an off-screen voice, if you couldn’t see how hard it was for the men to get through reading the tweets, if it had been women reading the tweets to us, would the video have had the same impact? I don’t believe it would.