Rant. You've been warned.

[astra_nomer]

I found myself offended by this story I heard on Morning Edition today.

Basically, Frank Deford argues that Michelle Wie's playing against male golfers is bad for women's sports as a whole. By playing against and beating men, she draws attention to herself perhaps, but also draws attention away from women's sports, which already suffer from lack of audiences. And he trotted out the usual arguments about smaller muscle mass and physical differences leading to women being unable to compete fairly with men.

Of course, being a woman who competes with men on a daily basis (careerwise anyway), I felt like he might as well have said that since women's brains are smaller, they can't fairly compete again men intellectually, so why not set up a parallel women's career ladder in the sciences. Then you can systematically marginalize women scientists the way women athletes have been.

Okay, so maybe it's not a fair comparison. But the attitude about the inferiority of women's bodies is all too similar to attitudes about the inferiority of women's brains.

Grrr.

Comments

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

Almost entirely off-topic, but... Frank Deford lost a little girl to cystic fibrosis when she was 8 or 9. His book about Alex goes into some discussion of kids, gender and athleticism: how once kids with CF survive past early childhood, boys typically live a few years longer (he was writing in the early 80s, I don't know if this is still the case). Doctors don't know why this is but he suspects it's because little boys with CF are still encouraged to play outside, and so they still develop lung capacity, etc, and this doesn't happen so much with girls. Alex was a very feminine little girl, but he wished she were more interested in sports - in the end it wouldn't have mattered, but maybe it would have kept her alive a little bit longer...

[narya.livejournal.com]

Well, it's nice to know that because it makes me more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that the comments had good intentions and weren't intended purely as abstract social opinions. And if what he wants is more girls to be involved in sports and to have that be a normal part of girls' lives, I could get behind that as a goal. Unfortunately, he didn't really seem to articulate that and what he did say just came across as really patronizing.