Women on the sidelines -- Troubling ideas about female coaches

Last summer I wrote a post about some of my mom's troubling ideas about how to be a good (read: tough) soccer player, said player must play "like a boy". Well, the same Challenger British Soccer camp, coordinated by my mom, that sparked that post was back in my hometown this past June, and my mom had more ideas about gender and soccer to share.

It's not often that my mom and I fundamentally disagree about something, but apparently when it comes to sports we don't quite see eye to eye.

This year my mom was discussing her contract with Challenger Sports, which she had recently renewed, and she mentioned that one of her only stipulations was that she did not want female coaches because she "doesn't like them". She was adamant about this and I asked her why. Her reasons broke down as follows:

1) Female coaches don't have the same commanding presence on the field as male coaches.
2) On a related note, children respond better to men than they do to women.

Overall, she believes that female coaches aren't as loud or forceful as male coaches and they will, therefore, not be able to coach as effectively.

Ok. The first thing that really bothered me about my mom saying this is that she has been coaching youth soccer for years. When I was in high school I used to help her coach young players in our home town. The idea that she truly believed that she and I, as women, could not be effective coaches due to our femaleness baffled me. In fact, I knew it could not be how she honestly felt because she has said on several ocassions that people have approached her indicating that she was considered one of the top coaches in our small town because of her experience as a soccer player and coach, which none of the other coaches possessed even a fraction of.

That recognition must have felt great for her, except that by her logic about what makes an effective coach, there is no reason that she should be a good coach. She is a woman, after all.

I asked my mom about her refusal to allow female coaches at the soccer camp. Had she seen any of the female coaches employed by Challenger do their job? No. Then how could she be so sure that these female coaches wouldn't be as good at doing the same job done by the male coaches? She just knew. Did she understand that all coaches employed by Challenger had to have the same minimum level of coaching training? Yes.

I tried to get her to understand that her intentional exclusion of women coaches was based entirely on her gendered assumptions about the capabilities of men and women. She assumes that female coaches will be quiet and perhaps even timid on the field and will not demand the attention of the children they are coaching. While those are atrributes that are generally perscribed to females in our society of the gender binary, it is unfair to use only those stereotypes of what women are when considering which coaches to bring to a camp in our town.

It makes little sense for a shy, quiet, timid woman to want to coach a sport, let alone get the training required for getting into a program like Challenger that requires going abroad to coach kids in another country. The women in these situations have to be good coaches, otherwise they wouldn't have their jobs.

My mom automatically codes certain attributes as either feminine or masculine and assumes that only women can possess the feminine traits and men the masculine. She doesn't always do this, but she defaults to this when she discusses things like sports and athletes. She gives little room for the variety of human behavior that accepts that men can sometimes be quiet and women can be forceful. That kind of narrow-mindedness means that the kids in my small community may never experience positive examples of female soccer coaches because for some of them, this soccer camp is their only experience with playing the sport. It's not fair, especially to young female players who are being denied a role model they can better identify with, considering that the possible female coaches that could be brought to town are being turned away for nothing more than the fact that they are women.

My mom seemed unmoved by my attempts to get her to see things from my point of view on this issue, so I decided not to pursue it further with her. But it's a topic that I feel is important and needs to be addressed. Hence this post.

Female journalist struck by Algerian player after World Cup loss

As you may have noticed from my string of recent posts about the World Cup, soccer has been on my mind lately.

Yesterday morning I watched the USA's rather dramatic 1-0 defeat of Algeria, a win that came in stoppage time and was a necessary outcome if the USA was to advance to the next round of play.

Today I read that after the game, Algerian player Rafik Saifi slapped a female Algerian journalist, Asma Halimi, without provocation. Halimi struck him back.

I understand that losing a World Cup game must be an emotional experience, but that is no excuse for striking a woman, or anyone else. Sadly, violence against women on soccer game days is not unheard of.

Women's bodies, commercials, and the men's World Cup (part 3)

One thing about World Cup season is that it means I end up watching a lot more TV than I'm used to. The commercials tend not to be a good thing for my feminist conscience. Women's bodies are used to sell all sorts of things, such as Budweiser beer in the following commercial that was prepared to be played during the World Cup.

While a woman's body is not the main focus of this commercial, the female form is still objectified and portrayed as nothing but a distraction to the men playing soccer. I find it interesting how the beer is portrayed in a similar way: as a distraction to the men on the field. However, the difference lies in the fact that beer is not representative of human beings, and when you're comparing women to beer, what is that saying about women?

A close up of a soccer ball on a field where one field player faces off with a goal keeper for a penalty kick that will determine the outcome of the game in question. The goal keeper and the player preparing to take the kick exchange looks. Over the shoulder of the field player, fans cheering against the goal keeper hold up individual signs that together create an image of a hula girl, which distracts the goal keeper. The field player smirks and winds up to take the kick. Just then, fans sitting behind the goal also hold up individual signs that create the image of a Budweiser beer can and glass filled with beer. The field player is so distracted by this image that his kick goes wide to the right of the goal, losing the game.

Part one and two in my World Cup series.

Women's bodies and the men's World Cup - Pretty women help lose games

I was watching ESPN 2 this morning, waiting for the next match in the World Cup (France v. Mexico) to start, when I heard commentators briefly discussing how Spain's shocking defeat by Switzerland was being blamed by some on a female journalist for a Spanish TV station.

Isn't that nice.

Apparently, Sara Carbonero is dating the Spanish goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, who gave up the match's only goal in the game against Switzerland. The win by Switzerland was a huge upset, and Casillas' mistake is being blamed, by some fans, on Carbonero whose presence was known to her boyfriend and may have potentially been a distraction.

This kind of reaction is ridiculous. Making a conventionally attractive woman a scapegoat for the loss of a game that was played by men not only provides reason for undue scorn against a woman who was doing her job, but it also perpetuates the stereotype that when men see a pretty woman, they lose all self-control and can't help but, you know, lose a World Cup match.

I would also like to add that if you watch the replay of the goal scored by Switzerland, it is clear (to me at least) that it was not a matter of Casillas being distracted by his girlfriend, during which time a goal slipped by. He made a bad decision which had bad consequences.

Part one in my World Cup series.

Women's bodies and the men's World Cup

The World Cup games start tomorrow (Friday, June 11), and I'll be watching as many of the games as possible. I was on Facebook earlier this week, reading some of my friends' discussions about the World Cup, when I found the "FIFA 2010 World Cup - United States Fan Page" and was not pleased with the picture on the page*.

Image: A screen shot of part of the Facebook fan page mentions above, with an profile image on the left featuring the torso and arm of a dirt-splattered woman in a sports bra who is bending backward and balancing a soccer ball on her chest.

Objectifying women to advertise and sell everything from hamburgers to cars is commonplace. However, this particular image bothers me because of the numerous barriers women face when it comes to being accepted as true athletes. This sort of image, which associates women with the sport not as competitors but as objects for consumption of real people (read men) who can enjoy and even participate in the sport, is troublesome because it relegates women's bodies to the realm of fantasy and may help keep them off the field.

UPDATE: Reader rwatuny alerted me to the fact that the picture in question on this Facebook page is a modified one that is part of a larger photoshoot, apparently for the Chinese version of GQ magazine.

*This image is no longer the profile image on the fan page but can still be found in the page's photo collection. I was unable to determine if this was a picture that had been created specifically by the page's administrator(s) or if it had been taken from another source.

I <3 Roller Girls

It's no secret - I flippin' love roller girls. LOVE them. My secret desire is to be a roller girl someday - I say someday because I'd have to practice a ton, spend money on equipment and I'm more than a little broke right now, and I know that lots of the roller girls are in their mid-30's. It's not a sport that considers you ineligible to play once you're past your mid-20's. So I've got some time. In Minnesota, we've got two leagues - Minnesota Roller Girls and North Star Roller Girls. If you're in the area and love roller girls as much as I do, be sure to check out a match.

I think this quote from Minneapolis-based City Pages sums up why I love roller girls so much:

These women are hardcore, and not just because they beat each other up on roller skates. From their ramshackle beginning in 2005 to the professional athletes they are today, people have always found the Roller Girls appealing for the same reason: They make no apologies for being themselves.

"If you think about it, all women have a little Roller Girl in them, but oftentimes they aren't allowed to show it," says Kelley. "That's all this is. Roller derby isn't about ink or being tough or whatever, it's about being empowered. Just look at veterans. There are girls with dreads and tattoos, and then there are ones who are in makeup looking absolutely nine-to-five. It just reinforces that this is about you doing what you want to do and being the person you want to be."

"In what could be interpreted as sexist bullshit..."

So, during my daily perusal of the BBC News website, I came across this screen and had to get a screen shot of one of the pictures featured on it, since I'm sure it won't be up long. Above a link to this article ("Argghougooou!") on the front page were two pictures: The face of a female tennis player that I could not recognize...and a hippo with its mouth wide open. The caption read, "Does the grunting really help tennis stars?" If you click on the picture above, you will see the screen shot I took. I put a little red box around the picture in the lower left corner.

Awesome, I thought. Equating women athletes with hippos. Not like girls who want to be athletes have enough to deal with already. Let's just add to the mix the fear of being associated with an animal that has been used as a comparison to degrade large women.

When I finally got to the article, I could already imagine some of what I was in store for. I'm not an avid tennis fan, but I do find it interesting the way the topic of grunting tends to be covered so frequently (as I wrote about here).

I'll admit that when I first read this piece, I was really skeptical about it. A lot of what I have read about tennis players and the noise they make has portrayed women in very unfavorable terms that sometimes seem to have little to do with the topic at hand - the noise they make. This piece was especially upsetting.

First of all, the picture at the top of the article is a rectangle composed of four smaller pictures, three female tennis players and one male. Two of the women are shown hitting a tennis ball, as is the lone male player. The third woman is shown with her mouth open, in an expression that looks like one of joy. She is not hitting the ball. Her inclusion in an illustration about the noises made by tennis players hitting tennis balls is confusing. Perhaps it is to remind the reader of the hippo with its mouth open?

Once I finally made my way into the piece itself, I was struck by the terms used to describe the sounds at some women's tennis matches. In the second paragraph, the author, Tom Geoghegan, describes a fear that some women's matches "now bear more of an aural resemblance to a torture chamber." Not far down the page, the author tells how Portuguese player Michelle Larcher de Brito's "grunt has all the aural elements of a wounded fox."

Grunting isn't a new phenomenon in tennis, the author assures the reader. In the 1970s, Jimmy Connors was known for his "noisy game" and in 1988 Andre Agassi had a complaint lodged against him for his "expressive exertions."

Before diving into the perceived drawbacks and benefits of grunting during matches, and an overview of the rules of the sport regarding it, the author had this to say:

But, in what could be interpreted as a sexist backlash, it is only since women took up the habit that it has become much of an issue.

Interesting that you would say that, Tom Geoghegan. I was definitely getting the sense that you were being sexist in your choice of descriptions of female and male players. I understand that these players may very well make different sounds during their games, but the huge discrepancy between descriptions relating women's sounds to "torture chambers" and "wounded foxes" and men's sounds as "noisy" and "expressive exertions" is inexcusable and sexist. There are ways to describe differences in sounds that do not rely on such degrading images, especially when such images are only applied to one group of athletes, and not another.

This piece was so full of sexist fail that I'm not even going to talk about its other content.

Encouraging girls to participate and remain in after school sports programs

After my last post, I found this New York Times article interesting.

MetroLacrosse, which serves 600 children, is one of several Boston sports groups that are aggressively trying to increase girls’ participation. The city is at the vanguard of a movement to close the gender gap in urban areas by rethinking traditional activities and looking for new ways to encourage girls to play.

This is being done by trying to include a broader range of programs that would more likely appeal to girls, such as dance and yoga, instead of focusing so closely on traditional team sports.

A 2002 Harvard School of Public Health study found that girls made up 49 percent of Boston’s youth but made up only 33 percent of those participating in sports programs after school. These results led to the formation of the Boston Girls’ Sports and Physical Activity Project which was tasked with evaluating opportunities for girls in Boston's sports programs.

The effort has reached as far as the elementary school playground. Employees at Sports4Kids, a nonprofit group that oversees recess at public schools, have been devising ways to shake up gender roles and increase options for girls. Tes Siarnacki, a recess coordinator at a school in East Boston, regularly encourages older girls to referee boy-dominated soccer games, and assigns older boys to monitor double Dutch
jump rope, which is played mostly by girls.

There's more at the link. I think the idea of mixing up the genders at different recess activities as described above may be a good idea. I am unsure, however, about the idea of tailoring programs to fit more stereotypically feminine ideas of what kinds of physical activity would be done by girls. If girls really aren't participating in sports programs like boys are, maybe we should be more concerned with treating the cause and not merely the symptoms of this fact. Why aren't girls as interested in traditional team sports and boys? Is there a gendered reason for this?

What do you think?

She's good at soccer. She plays like a boy.

This week I’ve been helping my mom with a soccer camp for kids in our town. It’s a Challenger British Soccer Camp, where British coaches come to the United States to teach soccer and British culture. In addition to teaching skills of the sport, there is also a World Cup tournament in which the kids are put into teams and they pick a country to represent as they play the other teams.

Yesterday, my mom and I were watching the kids play one of their World Cup matches, and I remarked that two of the teams seemed to be rather unevenly matched. My mom replied that the team that was winning by a large margin seemed to have all the good players – several boys who were very talented at handling the ball, and a girl, who my mom said was good because “she plays like a boy.”

The comment caught me off guard, but I quickly tried to get my mom to realize what she had said by asking, “So you have to play like a boy to be good at soccer?” My mom answered, “Well, she’s tough.” I thought to myself how absurd of an idea that toughness was somehow inherently absent in girls unless they behaved like boys, but the conversation stopped there.

This one comment by my mother, a woman who was a dedicated athlete, playing soccer as the only woman on a men’s team when she was younger, completely blew my mind. I plan on having her read this post when I am finished with it so maybe she can see more closely the problems with comments like this.

First of all, it buys into the idea that being tough is the opposite of what is expected of a girl. The idea that girls are supposed to be passive, gentle, and nurturing has been used to shame girls into restrictive gender roles for years, keeping them from being able to accomplish all they are capable of, simply because society can’t seem to handle having too many “tough girls.”

When I was younger, playing in a youth league on a co-ed team, I remember my father, an avid soccer fan and coach, telling me to stop saying I was sorry whenever I ran into someone, stepped on them, or hit them with a ball. He used to say this to me so often that even eleven, twelve years later, I still can hear him telling me, “Stop saying you’re sorry! You shouldn’t be sorry! This is soccer!” Looking back on his words, I can see that he was trying to get me to focus on the game, be unashamedly tough, just as a boy would be. The boys never said they were sorry, my father would tell me. When I didn’t show the proper signs of toughness, I was told off by my own father.

I played varsity soccer for three years in high school, and during one match my senior year, I was hip checked by an opposing player. The hit was hard and I fell to the ground. I got up and was in pain, and as I tried to walk it off, I was limping a bit. The father of one of my team mates noticed that I was limping and he yelled at me from the sidelines to stop limping and just shake it off. The comment angered me because I was legitimately hurt. In fact, the same injury still bothers me from time to time two years later. But how dare I show pain. Pain is for sissies. For girls.

The second issue with associating being a “good” athlete with “playing like a boy” is that it plays into a huge problem when it comes to sports (and other aspects of life) – using the female as an insult. “You play like a girl!” and “Sissy!” are some of the biggest insults that one can throw at a young athlete, and both of them are so insulting merely because they equate said athlete with a female.

Females have the added struggle in this country (and most countries, I would think) of having to carve out a space for themselves in a sphere of life that had been, for ages, dominated by men. I will say here that I acknowledge that perhaps women and men have different physical abilities, but I would like to point out that just because men were allowed to participate in sports before women doesn’t mean that it is right to say that playing like a man is the only way a woman can be considered good at her sport. People of all genders could easily emphasize different aspects of the same game and all be good at it for different reasons. And who decided that being tough is a strictly male characteristic, anyway?

But until these problematic attitudes disappear forever, the girls and women who go out and play sports will be the real winners for taking on such ideas without even knowing it.

"Shrieking" teen actually 16-year-old tennis player at French Open

The Shrieks of a Teen Are All the Rage at the Open.

It was definitely the title of this New York Times article that caught my attention at first. Sixteen-year-old Portuguese qualifier Michelle Larcher de Brito recently lost a third-round match against Aravane Rezai in the French Open.

Two hours later, tennis’s latest precocious teen walked off the Philippe Chatrier court a loser amid a disapproving chorus of boos and whistles. She was soon in tears in the players lounge.

It was a poignant, unsettling and thoroughly predictable finish to a French Open match in which Larcher de Brito’s competitive fire, scrappy defense and remarkable ball-striking were overshadowed by her shrieks and bellicose body language.

Emphasis mine.

After reading that, I was expecting her hear of some very poor sportsmanship on the part of Larcher de Brito. All that the article mentioned was a "cursory handshake afterward in which De Brito tapped Rezai’s extended palm rather than shake it," which, granted, is poor sportsmanship, but not what I was expecting to "overshadow" her skills for an athlete of her age. I thought the description was unfair, especially after reading the entire article.

The piece then goes into Rezai complaining to the chair umpire at the match about the noise that Larcher de Brito was making. The article goes on to describe Larcher de Brito's noise:

Grunting is an inadequate term to describe the extended, high-pitched wails that the Portuguese teen produces during and after most strokes. But they have been a feature of her game since she was a junior and a frequent talking point among players and spectators who have crossed De Brito’s career path.

About Rezai's complaints about the noise:

“I guess that was a bit of her tactic to throw me off a little bit,” Larcher de Brito said of Rezai.

But Rezai said that other players had expressed their support for her taking a stand after Friday’s match. “I reacted the way I did, because I felt it was bothering me,” Rezai said. “Perhaps in the next matches she’ll play, other players will do the same. I perhaps started something.”

I learned that in tennis there is the "hindrance rule", which allows the chair umpire to give a point to a player if they are "hindered in playing the point by a deliberate act of the opponent". Apparently grunting while striking the ball is considered a deliberate act. In Larcher de Brito’s case, was not the volume of the noise but the length that posed the problem.

The rule, to me, sounds like something that would be difficult (in some cases) for both umpires and players to make sense of. Maybe Larcher de Brito needs to work on this aspect of her game, but is that really something to base an entire article on?

Oh wait, apparently it is.

Any tennis players or tennis fans out there? What do you think?

Women's Professional Soccer League Game Today, March 29, 6pm ET

Women's Professional Soccer League Inaugural Match
Today, Sunday, March 29, 6pm ET
Los Angeles Sol v. Washington Freedom
Watch on Fox Soccer Channel or Fox Sports Net

Players will be on Twitter giving updates during the game!

I am very excited about this. I am a huge soccer fan in a country that is generally not as excited about the game as many parts of the world. As a soccer player myself, I have always enjoyed being able to look up to women players, but unfortunately, professional women's soccer in America has not been very successful in the past.

The precursor to Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) was the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA). WUSA was the first professional women's soccer league in the United States, but after only three seasons (2001 to 2003), the league was forced to cease its operations after substantial financial loss, largely attributed to lack of interest.

Out of the failure of WUSA eventually emerged WPS which consists of seven teams across the country (to learn more about the teams, visit this page).

Today marks the inaugural match of the WPS league, and I hope anyone who enjoys soccer, or sports in general, will tune in if possible and support these women athletes.

Transgendered hate on talk radio

Chris Baker, a conservative talk radio host on KTLK 100.3 out of Minneapolis, has repeatedly said hateful things including, but not limited to:

• That the WNBA is "a place for lesbians to make out when they score"
• "I'm not that excited about women voting" as well as doesn't think homeless people should be able to vote
• Had a lot to say regarding Gov. Sarah Palin's looks and her debate attire (specifically on her "panty line")
• Called President-Elect Obama "a little bitch" and Palin "smoking hot chick"
• Described Thomas Beattie, a transgendered pregnant man, as a "mutilated lesbian"
  
• Alleged that Magic Johnson "faked AIDS'
• Suggested police at the RNC use machine guns
• Said that Rep. Nancy Pelosi's response to the financial crisis was "another reason why it's rare to find a woman worthy of serving in political office"
• Referred to President-Elect Obama by the name of the Antichrist in the Left Behind series and "Barack Obammy"
  

Regarding the recent murder of Latiesha Green, a trans woman, on his November 18 show, Baker said:

Second of all, I believe that the fault, and I know, 'cause already I'm seeing quotes and comments and, "Oh, it's hate. It's a hate crime. It's a horrible hate crime." Doesn't some of the blame lie with the American media who enables this fraud? Doesn't some of the blame -- I would say a majority of the blame does not lie with the nitwit that shot him, other than the fact that he's a nitwit and a guy who should have been in prison in my opinion, who shot him. But to me, this is the -- this is an example of how, by enabling people and trying to push this false reality, leads to horrible crimes like this, by -- by telling people, "Oh, well, you know, he -- did he [Thomas Beattie] get pregnant?"

...

So annoying for me, but there's a story today, it's a very -- it's a horrible story from Syracuse, New York. A guy's been charged with murder after he shot two people last week. One of them was a transgender person. So, now, they're talking about hate crime charges, things like that. Look, this guy is a murderer and should go to jail. This guy should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

But I personally believe that by the media and all these other people out there enabling these people that they put people like this at risk, because they give them the boldness, the confidence, the -- to decide, "Well, you know what? I'm a girl. Even though I'm not a girl, I'm a girl. And the media will call me a girl, so, therefore, I can walk into any party I want. I can go anywhere I want. I can demand whatever I want and no one can stop me because the media is going to call me a girl."

Well, guess what? In my opinion, other than the fact that the guy that allegedly murdered this guy -- and this guy I'm talking about would be the transgender guy. I promise I'm just getting this off my chest. This is just driving me nuts.

I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy's blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling. I mean, what guy in his right mind would have his stuff cut off? Now, there's a lot of women in their right mind that would like to do that to a guy, but what guy in his right mind wants to have his stuff cut off? What woman in her right mind wants to have her breasts removed? I mean, do they notice the millions of dollars women spend every year in this country to get bigger ones?

This whole thing is -- it's just infuriating to me. You know why? Because I gotta explain this to my kids.

You know what's infuriating to me? I'm going to have to explain people like you to my kids one day. I'm going to have to explain why some people are so hateful to people they don't even know just because of who they are.

Because people like Thomas Beattie and Lateisha Green were trying to find some happiness in their lives.

Because Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi had the audacity to be women in political office.

Because WNBA players want the same respect as male professional baseketball players.

Because citizens of this country wanted to show their dissent for an ideology of fear and restricting rights.

I'm going to have to tell my kids that it doesn't matter what they do in life, people are going to judge them simply on who they love or if they play basketball or if they have the ambition to serve our country in political office or if they just show up to voice their dissent.

And that's infuriating to me.



If you'd like to share some of your thoughts with Chris Baker or any of the other people at 100.3 KTLK, feel free here or at chrisbaker@ktlkfm.com.

h/t to Minnesota Independent and Media Matters for links

Strong bodies, strong sexualization

Other people have already said a lot about the sexualization of women's bodies during the Olympics - in magazines, in uniforms, in commentating and by the absence of discussion of men's attractiveness, and in expectations of what a female body should look like. They're all great discussions and raise questions about the public display of women's bodies, both in athletic settings and just in general.

I don't want to repeat too much of what has already been said, but I began thinking about the display of strong female bodies while watching American Gladiators a few weeks ago. Much like the Olympics, the women's uniforms were a lot "sexier" than the men's; for example, women are often in bikinis (or things similiar). One women's outfit consists of a black leather corset while another wears a skirt. Not only do their outfits reflect this, the pictures and poses often try to make the women look as sexy as possible while the men's photos mostly work to show their physical strength (or potential for physical strength).

Is it possible to show a women's body in public that displays strength but without sexualizing it?

In an athletic setting, I think soccer does a pretty good job on the uniform end. I'm just not sure if we can escape the curse of the bikini, especially in cases like the Olympics where it's required for beach volleyball. Superhero movies don't help either, when Catwoman and Wonder Woman even have to deal with it.

When thinking about it, I was reminded of this picture that does a pretty good job, in my opinion.

I am a little bias, though. That's my great grandma Fern, one of the coolest ladies I know. Not an athletic uniform, but still, the photo displays a sense of strength.

Female Athletes and Injuries

I finally got around to reading the NYT story on high injury rates in young women's sports (its long, but I highly recommend reading it).

The article outlines the much higher rate of injury for female athletes than male athletes. And attempts to explain why, biologically:

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger.

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes.

And why, politically:

Advocates for women’s sports have had to keep a
laser focus on one thing: making sure they have equal access to high-school and
college sports. It’s hard to fight for equal rights while also broadcasting
alarm about injuries that might suggest women are too delicate to play certain
games or to play them at a high level of intensity.

I found this article very interesting because I actually have a sports injury from high school cross-country. I ran my freshman and sophomore years of school in a fairly intensive program. The beginning of my sophomore year, after running all summer, I began to have a constant dull aching in my knee. I told my coach, but he didn't take me seriously, so I continued to run, trying to ignore the worsening pain. I told him again, and he told me, in fewer words, that I was to stop complaining like a girl, suck it up, and keep running, like a man. And I did, finishing out the season, only to have a specialist explain to me later that year that I had pulled the muscle in my knee, which is supposed to lie over the knee, far sideways. He explained that I could have surgery, or go to physical therapy. I went for to therapy for about six months, but the pain never subsided. It still hasn't. I have continuous pain and throbbing in my knee, the level of which varies day to day. I can't squat without being in intense pain, and my knee cracks about five times every time I bend it.

This is just my experience, but, hell, the personal is political, and maybe I wouldn't be injured if I had been taken seriously and my legitimate pain hadn't be chalked up to girlish whining.

Oh, and to the second commentor, Noah from DC, on the NYT article who said:

Until they are propagandized and browbeaten by
ideologically-driven feminists, girls are naturally less interested in most
sports than boys are.Why not let girls be girls instead of trying to force them
to be bad imitations of boys?

Fuck you.

Female highschooler wins Texas 1A track title by herself

Found on Feministe. I had to give this girl some attention for her accomplishment, especially since our last discussion on women athletes.

Bonnie Richardson was the only athlete from Rochelle, Texas who qualified for the state meet. The junior ended up winning the team title all by herself.

University Interscholastic League officials said it was the first time they can remember a single athlete winning a girls' team title.
Richardson's title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0).

On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).

Link to the story.

Women in Sports and the Lack of Media Attention

After reading about this via feministing the other day, some of my friends and I got to talking about female athletes and their lack of media attention. We decided to try to name 10 famous female and male athletes. The only rule was that all four of us had to have heard of them. Two of us were Americans and the other two were international (from Jamica and Spain), so, basically, the women had to be internationally known.
Here's what we came up with:

For the women:
1. Venus Williams
2. Serena Williams
3. Michelle Kwan
4. Mia Hamm
5. Lisa Leslie
6. Michelle Wie
And that was it.

For the men:
1. Michael Jordan
2. David Beckham
3. Magic Johnson
4. Tiger Woods
5. Dennis Rodhman
6. Andre Agassi
7. Muhammad Ali
8. Shaquille O'Neal
9. Pele
10. Babe Ruth

Now, the women's list took about 7 minutes before we gave up, while we had the men's list finished within two minutes. Why haven't we heard of more women athletes? My other American friend and I were able to come up with ten women that both of us knew, but that my international friends didn't, meaning that this is an international media problem. Why aren't women's sports being more recongized in the international media? Women's sports are just as exciting as men's, but they get far less attention. Why?

(Here's an awesome women's sports story, at least.)