No Girls Allowed! Female Reporters as Threats to the Male Domain of Sports

Let Them Wear Towels serves as a public piece of critical rhetoric in exposing the harassment, discrimination, and domination that female sportswriters faced when attempting to enter professional sports locker rooms in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. In offering a critique of locker-room bans and the ultimate mistreatment of female reporters, the film encourages the audience to view the boys-will-be-boys culture more negatively as it served to undermine and delegitimize the women. But in providing a rosy outlook for current female sportswriters, the film misses an opportunity to encourage more structural and cultural changes within the sports-media industry.