Somehow I have been tagged as the resident sports expert. I will dub Agincourt as my partner in crime with this endeavor. As such, for the duration of this project, kindly refer to us as Solo and Mia.
The book Playing With The Boys:Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports by Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano was called to my attention so I ran right out and bought it. My hope is to create a little blog mini-series as I read through this book. When a point strikes a cord, I want to dissect it and share with our ever growing group.
So far I have only finished the preface. It is the holiday season after all. However, take heart as I already have a few thoughts. The first few paragraphs address the now infamous Imus "nappy-headed ho" comment. Agincourt and I went off on that at the time. And now, here is a book echoing our initial sentiments. As the book said, "somewhere in the background, with a little less fervor, we heard about gender." How true!
It amazed us how gender was truly left out of the equation. Of course it was a racist comment. However, it was primarily denigrating to women. Oh, how we wished Hillary on her campaign trail or Condoleezza in her power suit or *someone* other than those girls who were lambasted for being excellent athletes, or C. Vivian Stringer who brings out not only the athlete but also the woman in these individuals had stepped up and pointed out the obvious gender outrage.
Who's with us? Who also felt the outrage?
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3 comments:
Yeah sports feminists!
I love your idea to blog through the book. I also agree that it is strange that we so often divorce the interrelated issues of sexism and racism. I blame the media for not discussing the issues the comment brought up, like why this man felt that this was appropriate to say, who he was mainly targeting, what our tolerance of him says about the prevalence of similar attitudes in our culture.
As a professional athlete, I have to say that there is definitely alot of sexism in sports. I'm a fighter, so it works a little bit different for us, but the idea of a woman competing in mens MMA is something that has come up before and always seems to degenerate into comedy and "I couldn't hit a girl" comments.
The fact is, women can compete with men athletically, it's just an issue of having a group of them who really want to. I have female sparring partners and have worked with female coaches, skill has nothing to do with gender and in a weight class sport, size isn't a big factor.
Still, I think that it's really an issue, at least in my sport, of women who really want to fight with serious credibility.
If you want to check out a woman serious about sports, I did a piece on Gina Carano, someone I have respect for as a fighter and a crush on as a teenage guy. Below is the link to my blog and below that is the link to the piece on Carano:
http://www.ironsportmma.blogspot.com/
http://ironsportmma.blogspot.com/2007/09/gina-carano-kicking-ass-and-taking.html
Thanks for the introduction (here) to Gina Carano!
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