Okay Olympics,

Dear Olympics,

I have been a dear fan of yours for some time now, and with this year’s world-record-breaking record, wow has it been exciting! But seriously–WHY are all the ladies wearing extremely TIGHT PANTY athletic underwear while they perform?

Seriously, the volley ball ladies, the hurtling track ladies, the gymnasts, the swimmers, all of them picking wedges out of not only their asses but also their hootinanies. WHY? Why, when a diver is standing on the boards, should she have to be yanking at her crotch worried that the world can see her areas? Why are the men trackstars and volleyballstars wearing knee-length shorts if it’s so much more “comfortable because of the heat” to wear PANTIES?

I’m sure some ladies like it, support it, are just plain used to it, whatever. But i don’t care what the argument for wearing these clothes, nothing is going to amount to an argument in support of wedgies. No one likes that shit. Especially in the Vagine!

I understand that some sports are going to require the bare minimum in dress–surely swimming and gymnastics are two big ones. Olympics, I don’t want clothing to get in the way of performance. I just want a girl to have some self respect and have the choice to not be flashing the world her vagine when she falls over a hurtle, or when she falls off a balance beam.

Surely the reason for the tightness is BECAUSE of the skimpiness–when you wear PANTIES to gymnastics, they sort of have to be super tight in order not to fall off or away from your body. But, I mean…we’re talking about expectations here. The mens are oftentimes wearing shorts if not pants to perform the same sports that the women are wearing their PANTIES to. Why?

Oh Olympics, if only you could talk back to me and tell me this isn’t just world-wide sexist expectations that women display their bodies for other people, I could sleep at night.

Becca
PS–Fuck, I was going to post some contrasting photos of men in pants to women in their skivs. But as for the ladies, all I could find was website after website featuring the “Hottest” female Olympic athletes with links to photos of them POSING like fucking porn stars. What is the percentage of Olympic ladies who pose, spread eagle, in thier bikinis to the ones who don’t? I don’t know, and don’t have time to research it right now. But it’s disturbing that only a fraction of the photos I could find were about these women’s atheticism (those were on the Olympics website) instead of thier sexual worth.

Of course sex sells, but…

Uuuuhhgg.

Sometimes I feel so helpless, women in the world are just shit on, all the time, and shit on each other. I was having a conversation at breakfast this morning with D about the WNBA ’s  latest move to give their players makeup and fashion training in order to market them better. Being the practical dude D is, he says “Yeah, no one watches women’s sports, they can’t make enough money.”

AGH! Why that response? Why is that the practical response, and not the absurd one?! I mean, it’s true–professional women’s sports  can’t make enough money. But it just kills me that it seems like the practical next step for the world is for them to get sexier. And to seal it off, D offered the perfect example, women’s tennis–really fit women running around in really short skirts, it’s a good business model.

Which brings me to my point. The only way a sexier sports player is going to start bringing in the same kind of money as massive male athletes is if a majority of her fans are men. Making women’s sports into such a ridiculous sex show IS NOT going to create more female women’s sports fans, in fact it’ll likely turn off those who are already watching.

The problem is that there just aren’t enough female sports fans who like WOMEN’S SPORTS! Sure there are plenty of women sports fans who like male sports, but just like with the femjock situation, these women have conformed their tastes to what the majority taste is in order to succeed in sports-fandom, which is to like aggressive, beefed-up men’s sports.

So where are the female women’s sports fans? Even in writing this I realize that I don’t watch much professional sports because I’m not interested in how violent hockey, football, and even men’s basketball is. And when I think about the women’s sports I’ve watched, I remember that I enjoy them: women’s tennis (NOT because of the skirts), women’s soccer, women’s Ultimate Frisbee.

What we’ve got on our hands here with women in professional sports is that we just need to make women’s sports more about women, with female fans who will provide ratings and money, and less about getting male sports fans into it. 

Woman as product

Hello friendly readers, I just wanted to let you know that my delinquency here this last week or so has been becasue life and travel have gotten the better of me. I’m delighted to say, though, that Herspective is soon to become a more collective voice with the addition of other contributors. Introductions to come!

In the meanwhile, here’s something to keep you letter writers and women sports fans fueled up in just the right kind of irritated and pissed off way to take more action against the objectification of women:

Little Ultimate World

While I sat on the sidelines of todays co-ed ultimate games, Dan’s team in particular, I realized that a co-ed ultimate game is actually a good microcosm for how our world works.

Each team plays with seven players on the field, and at least two have to be female. And 99 percent of the time it is exactly that number, because there are less women playing co-ed than men. The women also tend to be shorter and not as strong physically than the men.

But the women are just as competitive, and the ratio of good skills players is about the same for men and women. So you’ve got these people running around, and the women aren’t thrown to as much, but they’re trying just as hard if not harder to receive and pass and score, and yet they still don’t control the game or the flow nearly as much as the men do. . . they are reduced to second-class players in a lot of ways because the men are dominating the field.

Just some observations..

Femjocks vs. competitve female athletes

This spring season I’ve had the opportunity to join my first ever all-women’s sports league–PADA (Philadlephia Area Disc Alliance) Spring Women’s Ultimate. And I have to give it to my team in particular. These women are impressive athletes, they’re competitive, they bring white boards to the field in order to set up plays and to teach new people what stacks are and how to mark force. Our team captain wears a full-face mask to protect the bones in her face which have been broken too many times for her to worry about what kind of scary movie serial killer she must look like to the opposing teams. Many of them have been playing with each other for upwards of eight years, and they know many of our opponents, having played on the same teams as them in past seasons. On our first day our captain called us in from the drills we were doing so that we could all introduce ourselves, tell each other what our goals were for the season and to genuinely get to know each other. I couldn’t ask for more, seriously!

Before this season started I was having a lot of anxiety about playing, as a relatively new player, and having finished my last season of (co-ed) Ultimate a year earlier as the woman no one threw to, including my boyfriend. Ultimate Frisbee is supposed to be a kind of friendly adult sport, in that the focus should be on spirit of play while kicking ass, not being an asshole while kicking ass. So everyone I talked to before trying Ultimate for the first time two years ago was very encouraging that it was a teaching game, that new people were welcomed and given a shot at developing skill.

But then I came up against the truth, if I may make some generalizations: most men didn’t want to befriend me and help me to build skill, probably because they couldn’t remember who I was since I had no defining characteristics (”The fast one,” “The tall one that can D anything,” etc) and because I, the new player, made mistakes here and there; and the women wouldn’t befriend me because…well some of them felt the same way as the men–I guess they didn’t subscribe to the whole spirit thing either–and some of them simply were so anxious about keeping what reputation they had with the guys intact that they didn’t have any room in their warm up for as much as a “Hey Becca, you want to toss around?” These ladies I call femjocks. They aren’t necessarily good at much, although many are. They simply have an attitude of conceit, as though the only chance for worth on the field is a person’s skill. Which is too bad if you are new, because that would mean you are worthy of being ignored and smirked at when you drop the disc the first time–and hopefully the last, some of them think–you receive it. Most importantly is possibly that the femjock’s conceit eerily seems to resemble the male jock’s version of conceit–as seen in the femjock’s concent to unwarranted meanness and criticism towards people who are not just like them. I’m sure this could be argued, but meanness in men and women present in different ways a lot of the time, and the meanness I’ve seen in femjocks mimics their male counterparts.

My only guess as to why so many women end up as femjocks is that they are constantly bombarded in co-ed sports by the same attitude from men as they (and the men) gave me. Like Hillary Clinton’s abrasive declarations of national security, these women have had to take up masculine athletic roles, instead of plain athletic roles, in order to “play the game,” as it is defined–by men.

So going into Women’s Ultimate was kind of like my last-ditch effort to ever enter into team sports, with hopes that it would be different without men around. And while my own self-judgments and frustrations are still present when I act clumsily or mishandle a play, or just simply wish I was better at it already, the women are instructional and exude the spirit of ultimate that I was told so much about in the beginning. In fact, there is a women on my my team now who ignored me during my first co-ed season, and I’m pretty sure she’s not a femjock outside of co-ed sports! I’m overjoyed this season to have found out that there is a space for women to be competitive athletes as women, and not femjocks.

To all of you with a lot more experience playing in co-ed leagues, I am sure you could offer a lot more than just generalized analysis and I hope you will share some of your insight here!