Elle Duncan Uses 'I'm A Girl' Card In Defense Of 'D' Joke During WNBA All-Star Game

To explain herself, ESPN anchor Elle Duncan joined the "Dan Le Batard Show" this week, defending how she made a "dick joke" on-air during the WNBA All-Star Game.

"My thing with the Cancun joke is, I feel like whenever I say something, it’s like sometimes a reintroduction for some people who clearly don’t know me or my work over the last 10 years. "I’m like, ‘bro, I said on air one time that if you celebrate too early, it’s called premature I’m-Jacked-Elation.’ Like I can’t actually imagine this is worse than that,"  Duncan said.

"I feel like I constantly have to remind people, I have been saying things like this for the 10 years I have been at ESPN."

Exactly. That's the point. She has been doing it for more than a decade — and getting away with it.

Duncan tried claiming that people were only bothered by her joke because she is a woman. "Yes, girls say crude jokes too," she told Le Batard. Not quite.

Patricia Babcock McGraw is an editor at OutKick and played college basketball at Northwestern University. When asked about Duncan's comment and defense, she provided the following insight:

"I think people would be bothered by this joke no matter who said it - man or woman, and not because people can't take a joke or are prudes," Babcock McGraw said. "First, this ‘joke’ is not even funny, just kind of cringe. Second, this ‘joke’ is a weird thing to say in this context. You just don't hear sports announcers say things like this on broadcast TV during an event. Can you imagine a male sports announcer saying the equivalent during the Super Bowl or the Pro Bowl? No. Because it doesn't happen. There's a standard there. There's a classiness quotient there that announcers typically adhere to. 

"And third, I think many WNBA TV announcers, and I used to be one of them, are very conscious of the fact that young girls are a big part of the WNBA fanbase and viewership. You don't say things that are inappropriate for children to hear or that would put parents in an awkward position. ESPN might not be irritated by Duncan, but I bet, just like some fans, the WNBA is."  

Moreover, most of the criticism, specifically ours, was aimed at Duncan's employer. While Duncan has – as she admits — been making sex jokes on ESPN for 10 years, violating the company's "ban on politics" policy for three years, and causing internal drama for five years, her colleagues have to walk on eggshells.

Duncan made the joke because she knew she could. In the interview, she made clear that her bosses didn't mind. Imagine the response from Disney-owned ESPN had a white woman or a man made the same joke. Prediction: they wouldn't have had a chance to downplay the joke on a show with Le Batard.

The point is, Duncan feels empowered to disobey company standards while the likes of Sam Ponder, Ashley Brewer, and Sage Steele were routinely scolded for offenses half as egregious as Duncan's.

Ponder says management scolded her for favoring a post on social media saying "men don't need gynecologists." Brewer said her bosses "chewed [her] out" for posting a photo of a Republican congressman, despite several of her former co-workers posing with members of the Democrat Party. ESPN suspended Steele for violating the same "ban on politics" that Duncan makes a mockery of on television.

Put simply, either everyone should be able to talk politics or joke about sex or no one should. However, at ESPN, only people like Duncan can because they have the race and gender card firmly in their back pocket.

As for the gender card, there's an argument that society actually finds it funnier when women make crude jokes than men. There's a reason that "Call Her Daddy" is the second most popular podcast in the country and "Sex and the City" was the most popular HBO drama for a decade.

Admittedly, it would've been more cringe if, say, Stephen A. Smith or Scott Van Pelt joked about "no D" on television.

Kay Smythe is a former writer for the Daily Caller who agreed that the setting, not Duncan's gender, was the issue with the joke.

"Men love girls who make dirty or crude jokes … but [at the WNBA All-Star Game], if a white American woman made these jokes on the same stage as Duncan, they’d likely lose their job," Smythe commented. "But that’s the double standard we live in right now."

Indeed.

Duncan's response is similar to Mina Kimes' criticism of OutKick last August. Kimes accused us of "spreading horrible lies" about her and "inciting racist harassment" of her after we questioned why she was allowed to endorse Democrats Karen Bass and Tim Walz for office. Likewise, our criticism was of ESPN for its selective endorsement of its policies. Not Kimes, herself.

Duncan and Kimes so badly want to be seen as victims. They aren't. 

In actuality, they are two of the most privileged employees at the company. The fact that Elle can make a "dick" joke on ESPN, during what is considered a marquee event, without a single word from management underscores that.