The SF Chronicle recently declared the 2012 Olympics “The Year of the Woman.” The domain registrar GoDaddy appears to agree but seems to have a very different interpretation of women’s most impressive strengths and talents. As Americans tune in to watch and support all the athletes in the 2012 Olympics, they will be also treated to GoDaddy’s sexist advertising. These ads could be worse, though; they could feature Olympians instead of the nameless female bodies they do feature. Wait, that might be better, for then viewers might at least recognize that the women depicted are subjects as well as objects, active as well as passive.
Category: sports
Thanks For the Dadflys
This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of Title IX, which was signed into law by then-President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in.
The law is an astoundingly simple 37 words:
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Note that this says nothing about sports.
And yet the world of sports is the arena in which the Title IX political game has been played – with an overwhelming victory for female athletes. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, about 294,000 girls competed in high school sports the year before Title IX became law. Last year, the number was nearly 3.2 million, an increase of about 980%.
One of the great ironies of the Nixon administration might be the fact that the Watergate week marked a watershed moment for the future of, literally, hundreds of millions of American women.
Things seem to be so solid for women’s sports as Title IX reaches the four decade mark that it is tempting to say the job is done. Every girl who wants to play a sport, or two or five, is playing them. Title IX, schmitle IX, who cares? Let’s say thanks, and move on.
We should say our thank yous, but I don’t think it’s time to move on. In fact, I think the struggle to enforce Title IX is more relevant than ever.
(Again: who ever said it was about SPORTS? Why are we content with giving our daughters balls and bats, without also using looking for ways to use Title IX to wage a political war against the other forms of discrimination that are apparently rampant at U.S. educational institutions – all of which receive Federal financial assistance, through Pell grants, Stafford loans, and so forth?)
But since the 40th anniversary should be a time for celebration, and not for griping, let me say thanks.
Respect and thanks are of course due to the early pioneers: to Bernice Sandler, who used President Johnson’s Executive Order 11375 to wage a legal battle for her job at the University of Maryland in 1969, and then joined Representative Edith Green in the congressional hearings where the idea for Title IX was born; to Representative Patsy Mink, who prepared an early draft of the legislation; to Senator Birch Bayh, who was the author and chief sponsor of Title IX, etc.
But I think thanks are also due to the legions of gadfly fathers – “dadflys” is the term Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff recently coined – who took the legislation to heart and pushed for change in sports programs and stadiums across the country.
One of my favorite dadflys is a retiree named Herb Dempsey, a 75-year-old grandfather from Battle Ground, Washington, who is a self-proclaimed “nasty old man”, and has spent the past 20 years making Title IX enforcement his full-time hobby. He uses Google Earth to identify possible shoddy sports facilities – and, if his investigation turns up an underfunded girls’ program, he uses Title IX to force change.
Dempsey has filed more than 1000 complaints with the Office of Civil Rights challenging inequities in high school athletics. One example was a case in Castle Rock, Washington, where girls’ soccer games had to be shortened to 32 minutes from 80 minutes because there were no lights on the field—even though a football field with lights was available not far away.
“It’s hard to believe how bad it still is,” Dempsey told Sports Illustrated, “because people want to celebrate how good it has become.”
Turkish FA to ban men from stadiums
seriously!
The Turkish football association has come up with a radical solution for tackling hooliganism – by banning men from stadiums. Teams sanctioned for unruly behaviour by fans are instead only allowed to admit women and children aged under 12 to watch games.
…
On Tuesday, more than 41,000 women and children attended Fenerbahce’s match against Manisaspor in Istanbul.
Fenerbahce’s 1-1 draw with Manisapor kicked off after players from both teams hurled flowers at the fans, while the visitors were greeted with applause instead of the more customary loud jeers.
The home side’s captain, Alex de Sousa, said: “This memory will stay with me forever. It’s not always that you see so many women and children in one game.”
Maybe if they hurled flowers at the men, the men would be nice, too. Just a thought…
Read more here. (Thanks RW!)
Three Little Girls You Wouldn’t Want to Mess With
(or, ‘with whom you wouldn’t want to mess’?). From YouTube Trends…
Lately, we’ve seen an interesting “trend” develop with three separate videos drawing blogger attention in the past few weeks that each feature tough young ladies performing some cool — and very unusual — physical feats.
There’s no true link between the videos themselves, the sole connection — aside from the obvious one — seemings to be our own fascination with their unusual, gender-stereotype-defying interests and abilities. Take a look.
Sexism and Sport – UPDATE
We posted earlier this week on two senior football/soccer commentators getting caught making cave-man worthy sexist comments about a female line ref. The situation has caused quite an uproar and after more damaging recordings of the two were posted onto YouTube, one of them was fired and the other has now resigned.
I did not expect this incident to have quite this far-reaching consequences – pretty awesome!!!!
Female refs? You’re having a laugh.
In our confusing, difficult modern world of structural discrimination, implicit bias, and gender identity politics, do you ever find yourself nostalgic for some good old-fashioned blatant sexism to get your teeth into? No, thought not, and there’s plenty of it around anyway. But just in case, here is a recording of some spectacularly unreconstructed sexism from Sky Sports’ main football commentating team, Andy Gray and Richard Keys (and here’s a transcript of that slightly fuzzy recording, along with some context and discussion).
For those too fatigued to follow links, the charming pair discuss the assistant referee Sian Massey, who was on duty for her second Premiership game on Saturday. They conclude that she must be unable to understand the offside rule, owing to her having, y’know, breasts and stuff. Or maybe it’s because she can’t reason spatially? Something like that. As a bonus, there’s a dig at Karren Brady, the West Ham deputy chair, for complaining about (of all things) sexism in football. We even get “the game’s gone mad”! It’s the glory glory days all over again.
Professional football is a reliable bastion of bigotry in all its forms, but in the UK at least, racism is commendably rare, and pundits have been sacked in the past for being daft enough to express racist views into live microphones. Will Sky treat sexism seriously? Don’t hold your breath.
By the way, as Keys predicted, there was a “big one” in the game — a crucial decision for Massey to make, relying on acute awareness, perfect positioning, and knowledge of that pesky offside thing. And guess what? She got it right! Must have been a fluke.
Co-ed team co-ed in name only
An article in the Toronto Star details the struggles of 12 year old Kayla Watkin to play hockey. The only girl on a co-ed team, Watkins was asked to agree to restrictions on her ice time or agree to improve her skills. Instead, she did the only thing she thought she could: She quit.
Notable is the fact that the team, the Toronto Ice Dogs PeeWee “A” club, is the lowest level of competitive play, intended to be inclusive of all levels and abilities. Except for girls, I guess…
That isn’t fair.
Is cheerleading a sport?
US colleges that receive federal funding have to comply with Title IX – legisltation that requires them to ensure equal opportunities for all. This translates into ensuring (amongst other things) that women have the same opportunities to participate in sport as men. Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. has recently come under fire for dismantling its female volley ball team, but introducing a competitive cheerleading squad, which it assumed would count towards its quota of female athletes. The move was designed to save money, since the competitive cheer squad would be cheaper than the volleyball team. However, a judge ruled that competitive cheerleading doesn’t currently count as a sport, because “the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganised to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.” This is despite the fact that it requires a high level of gymnastic ability. What do you think? You can read more here, and also here*.
*It should be noted that the Telegraph’s photo is a bit unfair – it shows cheerleaders shaking pom poms. This photo is a better representation of the activity:
And on a Brighter Note
Former Wales and Lions [that’s rugby–I didn’t know either] captain Gareth Thomas has come out. Big burly manly sport that it is, professional rugby is surely not an obvious pick for gay-friendly profession. And Thomas, from what I hear, is about as big, burly, and manly as they get. He describes a terrible time in life, with his marriage to a woman who he clearly loved very much falling apart for obvious reasons. He was, from the sound of it, forced out of the closet. So what happened when he made his announcement? A heartwarming story perfect for the Christmas season, that’s what:
Cardiff Blues utility back Thomas said he had been through “all sorts of emotions” over the issue, since first knowing he was gay in his late teens.
He revealed that he was “anxious about people’s reactions” to him being gay and that he felt he could not have come out earlier in his rugby career.
…
“Somehow, the coach had guessed,” said Thomas. “He took me out of the team room to the medical room, locked the door and I told him everything.
“After keeping it secret for so long, I felt a huge rush of relief.
“Scott said: ‘Right, I’ve got to speak now to three or four players in the Welsh team because you need the boys to surround you and support you. You can’t cope with this on your own,’ and he was right.
“He told two of my team-mates, Stephen Jones and Martyn Williams, and as I sat in the bar waiting for them, I was absolutely terrified, wondering what they were going to say.
“But they came in, patted me on the back and said: ‘We don’t care. Why didn’t you tell us before?’
“Two of my best mates in rugby didn’t even blink an eyelid.”
You can read the full story on BBC online sport.
A different twist on sex/gender and sports
In the endless discussions of Caster Semenya (for a really excellent one see here), the claim is often made that women would never pose as men for sporting purposes as they’d only lose if they competed against men. There’s nothing like a real-life counterexample fo knock down such a myth. So I give you Rena Kanokogi, who posed as a man 50 years ago to win a judo championship. She was stripped of her medal once her sex was known, and became a campaigner for equality, eventually getting women’s judo added to the Olympics. Her medal has now been restored.
Thanks, CR!
Feminist Philosophers 