Women's Sports Blog

New Blog To Check Out

Via Pat Griffin, I learn that a young FTM trans athlete is now blogging.  Fascinating and important stuff.

Join The 60th Disability Blog Carnival

Hosted this time around by FWD.  Entries are sought on one of our own favorite themes, intersectionality.  In this case that means the ways in which disability may intersect with social locations like race, class, and gender to create complex lived realities.  The carnival will take place on November 19th, with entries due no later than November 17th. 

The Head Cheerleader Paradox

Sorry about the lack of posting recently.  It has been a weird week, complete with a bizarre sleep schedule, which means I've had no time to keep up with sports.  You could tell me that Margaret Court won the WTA championship and I'd believe you.  So here are some things I've been musing about that aren't timely per se. 

This particular thought occurred to me when I was stuck in traffic with the radio tuned to the hits station that has inexplicably replaced San Francisco's dance channel (both have rotations that only contain about twenty songs, but at least the latter happily billed itself as music for the gay man).  For approximately the four hundredth time that day, Taylor Swift's latest single came on.  My brain must have been particularly empty of stimulation at this point, because it caused me to have an actual thought.  Yes, a Taylor Swift song.  Why is the head cheerleader so frequently the villain in these little dramas, be they on the radio, TV, or in the movies?  Cheerleaders are clearly the lazy writer's shorthand for cliquish popular girls, in which popularity is used as a proxy for mean behavior.  Yet why is there always also some innocent, good-hearted popular boy who is being corrupted by this heinous woman?  In other words, popularity is bad in these female-driven narratives only when it's an attribute of other women, not men. 

No surprise, I have a couple of theories.  The more benign one is that we're displacing our societal discomfort with cheerleading onto the participants. In the early days of college sports, cheerleaders were men, which makes a certain amount of sense.  They generally have louder voices and the goal of the cheerleader was to lead the crowd in cheers.  At some point, the decision was made that there should be young women involved.  Over the years the short skirt and tight top have accrued to the position, and also the weird corollary that cheers must take place in very thin, shrill voices, which may protect the vocal cords but also makes the sound fail to carry.  It's often unclear how a couple of enthusiastic students from the crowd couldn't do better than any but the most elite squads.  In the post Title IX atmosphere, there has been a certain amount of embarrassment about high school cheerleading.  Many teams have worked harder on competitive routines or morphed into dance teams, which contain the same amount of T&A but at least have a recognizable aerobic activity attached.  But watching the cheerleaders for professional sports brings the idea to its bare essentials, that breasts are provided as a sideshow for the straight male fans in case they get bored by the actual game.  How can we countenance such a thing for our teenage daughters, especially in an age when they could choose to play sports instead?  Thus it must be the fault of the participants.  The only people who rise to the top of high school cheerleading ranks must be beautiful but stupid, or deeply cruel to their fellows, or both. 

This leads to point number two: if that last sentence seems to tar with a pretty wide brush, why do cheerleaders keep getting represented this way while the most popular boy, the head cheerleader's erstwhile boyfriend, gets a free pass?  The narrative is always that this boy is a sensitive, kind soul trapped in a superficial world and must be stolen by our unglamorous but talented heroine.  Yet the high school sports culture for boys is just as likely to produce unpleasant products as the cheerleading culture.  What we're dealing with here is the classic problem of female solidarity.  As in, we're encouraged not to have any because we're supposedly in competition for the scarce resource of male attention.  It couldn't be that this boy is with the cheerleader because he shares the general view that only girls who look like models are desirable, or because he's equally stupid, or because she's the one who's aiming low.  Nope, the boy is the prize and she's standing in the way.  It's probably true that lots of cheerleaders are cliquish, shallow, and mean, because that's how they believe they can succeed.  Some of them aren't any of those things.  Likewise, plenty of male high school athletes are utter jerks and have no interest in having intelligent, talented girlfriends.  Plenty aren't.  But the other woman will always be the villain because that's exactly where she needs to be to prevent women from realizing that if they don't compete, they can turn their energies on the system and actually change things.  This is not a new insight.  It's fairly common, in fact.  But it's surprising to me how much the competition narrative persists long past the point when we should have abandoned it, and often from sources who, being perceptive, should know better. 

Forward!- An Expansion

Based on yesterday's post, readers may have taken away the following: a) since the group blog was created, WSB doesn't actually have to write about any other disabled feminist bloggers or b) WSB can discuss it for a paragraph and then move on to complaining about jerks in hockey.  The question may also have been raised 'why does a women's sports blog have to talk about disability at all?' 

Neither a or b are true despite the impression the post may have created.  There are lots of bloggers still to highlight and issues still to investigate at length.  Why?  Because, most simply, disabled women are women and their sporting endeavors count in the title.  Less apparent but no less true, sports are centered around the body: our aesthetics of the body, our hopes and fears about the body, our bodily aspirations, etc.  Yet too often we assume that they are about the best a temporarily-abled body can achieve.  Look at the controversy it creates when the 'wrong' sorts of additions are made to that body.  When that body is not, then, what is stereotypically defined as normal or ideal, it further upsets our notions of what sports do or are.  Remember the case of the disabled golfer, Casey Martin, who earned a tour card because he could play fine, but needed a cart to get around the courses?  The result was the revelation of the absolute non-comprehension of his fellows and the PGA, who whined that it wasn't fair, that walking was an integral part of golf and they might as well allow him to swing with mechanical arms, and forced him to go all the way to the Supreme Court to plead for his job.  By the time he won, the stress had ruined his game.  This is the kind of issue that is only illuminated by a radical disability perspective, and these issues crop up again and again in our contemporary sports landscape.  It's the kind of issue WSB and the rest of the women's sports blogosphere, we who are all too often guilty of plucking the latest 'inspiring' 'disabled athlete overcomes blah blah blah' narrative off the wire, should pay more attention to.

Forward!

Update- please also see the companion post. 

I had been planning a post about the score of awesome disabled feminist bloggers out there, but several of them beat me to the punch and established a group blog: FWD/Forward.  Whether you are temporarily able-bodied (think about that one for a minute) or currently disabled, you will find something thought-provoking on this site, something to challenge your preconceptions.  Contributors include the ever-awesome Amanda of Three Rivers Fog, who occasionally comments on the world of sports from a feminist perspective: she is a serious Penguins fan and can't stand Steelers culture. 

Viz. the Pens, it continues to strike me how incredibly soft-spoken Sidney Crosby is for a pro athlete (some other blog once wrote about how he also refused to play the 'I get lots of chicks' game), and of course if I had a dime for every time a hockey fan said he was a pussy, I would be able to retire to Bermuda.  The most shocking thing about hockey for me as an adult is how incredibly boorish the male fans are, especially given that hockey attracts more female fans at the games than any other Big Four sport.  It's sad how oblivious* many people, including many professional commentators, are to the fact that hockey fights are incredibly stupid-looking and unproductive, that they have nothing to do with the skills of the game and don't prevent more dirty play as their proponents claim.  The dirty play argument is a total canard: if anyone inveighs against headshots or tries to clean up the use of sticks, one of the few good things Bettman has done for the league, the cries of 'go play women's hockey' get even louder.  Yes, that specific 'insult.'  The league then abets this attitude by including fights in its highlight reels.  I had to lean on the fast-forward button to get through the Oilers-Flames last night.  First solution would be to have refs step in right away rather than waiting until the players fall to the ice, when the fight is effectively over.  Second is to stop putting fights in the highlights and also cut away from coverage on TV.  Would it outrage the jerks?  Sure it would, but let them leave the game to its actual fans. 

*I wrote "blind" and almost called the fight fans "idiots," and then my consciousness-raising from FWD kicked in.  Thanks, y'all. 

Kids Should Exercise For Fun, Not Fears

Yesterday I was confronted with a re-tweet on my WTS feed by a woman from the New York Road Runners' Club and her supposed "answer" to parents' fears about the obesity epidemic booga booga booga.  She doesn't assuage the fears, but rather stokes them.  You can solve the terrible problem by getting the kids to run (with her club, of course)!  It's great and important for kids to be physically active.  It can cause lifelong damage to make the activity focused on their body size.  Body size, say it with the researchers from Oxford, is mostly genetic.  Childhood worry about weight causes not just serious psychological damage but physical damage, because rapid weight loss and gain from dieting is much more harmful to the body in the long run than natural size variance.  If children learn at an early age that exercise ought to lead to potentially unattainable physical goals, that it's a way to force your body into submission, they are being set up to hate it and misuse it in later years.*  Some people lose weight with a sensible exercise program and some do not.  Being in shape is a matter of being joyfully physically active and setting goals that are about growing achievement rather than lessening size.   The Health At Every Size philosophy is not just for grown-ups who have come to it after years of self-loathing.  It's a way to break the cycle and teach your kids about having a positive relationship with their bodies and with food.

*I am not saying this is the rhetoric of the NYRR Club when it comes to kids.  But it's fairly common with any exercise program that emphasizes obesity rather than overall health. 

Right On, Dave Zirin

Despite sharing political views, Zirin and I rarely see eye-to-eye on sports issues.  This piece, in which he compares reactions to the Semenya outrage in the U.S. and South Africa, where a leading sports minister actually resigned in protest of her gender testing, is fabulous.  Semenya might be less than thrilled to have possible felon Winnie Mandela in her corner, though (Nelson is another story). 

A Self-Identified Woman Is A Woman. Period.

Is anyone really stupid enough to think that a cis-gendered male is going to brave the unbelievable amount of social stigma still attached to womankind just to win an athletic event?   Apparently so.  News flash: intersex and trans women are women, according to most international athletic rules and according to basic standards of human decency regardless of what rules are in place at a given time.  Transgriot talks about the ridiculous burden placed on black female athletes viz. silly notions of femininity. 

Photo of The Week: Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Via.

 

Fiolek's Ride For Gold

Here's the vid from Ashley Fiolek's gold medal performance in Super X.  As a young, deaf athlete she's been getting a gratifying amount of sports press this week.  My own aesthetics are not really geared toward motocross, especially at the expense of the non-motorized events that seem to be in shorter supply every year, but it's really great to see Fiolek succeed and be noticed.