"A source told the Times that the idea had come from deputy director Dan Bongino, a cop-turned-right-wing-podcast-yapper, whose justification for the decision was as follows: "Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she's out of shape or overweight, that's going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they'd look good on a doorbell camera. He said it's the way these times are.""
"How it looks for a woman to solve one of the FBI's biggest cases was the subtext of The Silence of the Lambs when it came out 35 years ago today, or at least it was as subtextual as you can get in a movie where a serial killer hucks his own semen at the heroine (happy Valentine's Day). But at a time when all the world's subtext has been transformed into screaming bold print,"
FBI leadership replaced sit-ups with pull-ups in the fitness test, a change that makes passing more difficult for many women and is likely to reduce female recruitment. The swap lacks clear evidence of necessity and appears driven by concerns about agents' appearances on doorbell or Ring camera footage, according to a cited justification focused on how women would look if captured on camera. The decision reflects a wider cultural impulse to prioritize performative visuals over capability. The Silence of the Lambs example illustrates longstanding anxieties about women performing traditionally male law-enforcement work and the persistent emphasis on female appearance.
Read at Inverse
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