Title IX

Number Nine. Number Nein,

It is indeed a revolution.

On the heels of the Team USA Women’s Football loss during Quarterfinal competition (or the first Elimination Round, tomato tomato) to Sweden in a Shootout after 30 minutes of Extra Time what can I say?

They lost.

It is the first non-(Gold) Medal effort by the reigning World Champions in Olympic competition ever.

History is no predictor of results (listen to any mutual fund ad) and in this particular game they played well enough, just not well enough to win. Congratulations Sweden, good show.

Now our Women’s Football team is a matter of minor controversy because they have this dispute about how they are vastly more successful than our Men’s Team and yet are paid less (or would be if they didn’t win so damn often because their pay is mostly victory bonuses). This is the result of a pervasive prejudicial mindset that proclaims that Women’s Sports… well, they aren’t real sports are they?

Take for example Corey Cogdell, is she merely Mitch Unrein’s wife? Now admittedly she competes in a reprehensible sport (Trap Shooting, which is no more a sport than Turn Left Racing using guns instead of bumper cars as a mechanical aid) but who is he? An Undrafted Free Agent Defensive End who catches passes on stunt plays for a variety of mediocre teams that have mostly dumped him, not traded him.

Oh, Professional Throwball. That macho sport where it’s just locker room hi-jinks to stick your penis in some guy’s ear and shout, “You know you want that, Bitch.”

You see, this is why we can’t have female reporters because their delicate sensibilities might be offended or worse yet these wife beating, self (and other) shooting, dog killing, steroid monsters could find expressions of their playful and good spirited sense of humor inhibited.

Besides, they’re all Lesbians.

But what about Simone Manuel. Oh, she’s black. That explains everything because everybody knows Black people can’t swim (well, manacled below deck anyway). And Michael Phelps (yawn). You couldn’t spare a line?

I swam competitively for over 6 years and it was brutal. Five miles on a “light” day before a meet (oh, it’s not as much as you think, just to warm up on meet day we did a mile- 4 x 200, 4 x 100, 4 x 50, 200 warm down, 30 second intervals, Starts and Turns, if you don’t know what I’m talking about count yourself lucky). What I want to tell you about though is eating feet.

When you practice you separate by age groups and while it would be better for congestion if you did that by time most coaches can’t be bothered and they are militantly against doing it by swim caps since so many of the female swimmers are faster than their male “competition”. Now normally as a barely surviving Third Seed in whatever scut stroke we had no stars in I had the good sense and courtesy to defer to my betters whom were myriad, but frequently I got lapped and here’s how that goes-

You can feel the water pressure change as someone approaches from behind. Like a Blue Flagged Formula One racer you should pull to the right and allow them to pass (you’re swimming in a circle so it’s a 2 lane road). There’s really no point in blocking, it’s just practice after all, but sometimes people get dumb and then the faster swimmer will tickle your feet from behind. This is equivalent to beeping your horn or more politely flashing your lights at some idiot who’s hogging the left. If you persist they will pass you anyway and devote their thwarted anger to making your life miserable by kicking right in your face and both disturbing the water so it’s difficult and slow to swim thus prolonging your agony AND making it hard to breathe which, while it could potentially drown you, mostly resulted in embarrassing stops clinging the lane line so the coach could yell at you.

This was called (at least on my team) eating feet.

And the same thing applied to races. If your opponent was more than a body length ahead you were eating feet and deserved the appropriate approbation.

The point is I ate a lot of feet and I was good. There were a lot of women who were waaay better than I was. Who says they can’t compete? Not me.

The reason I swam is that I wasn’t good at Basketball (or any other sport for that matter, though I can play a lot of them due to desperation to be accepted).

US women’s basketball coach: ‘We’re in a Trumpian era where it’s OK to be sexist’
The Guardian
Thursday 11 August 2016 15.26 EDT

Geno Auriemma, the US women’s basketball coach who has led his team to a perfect start in Rio, has said he and his team will never apologize for their excellence, even though “we live in that Trumpian era where it’s OK to be sexist and degrade people”.

The US team has endured some criticism for being too dominant after heavy wins against Senegal, Spain and Serbia, with some suggesting such one-sided contests are bad for the women’s game. But Auriemma, the UConn head coach who has led USA since 2009, rejected that argument, and suggested that the lack of discussion about the dominance of the US men’s team revealed a double standard.

Auriemma said: “We live in that Trumpian era where it’s OK to be sexist and degrade people that are good, just because they’re the opposite sex.

“We are what we are,” he said. “We’re never going to apologize for being that good. We’re never going to apologize for setting a standard that other people aspire to achieve. We got a guy in the pool with a USA swim cap on who nobody can beat. And if he wasn’t in swimming, there would be a lot of other guys with gold medals.

He said of his team: “These are Olympians. They’re supposed to play at a high level. They’re professionals, they’re supposed to put on a show, they’re supposed to entertain. So, what are we supposed to do? Just go out there and win by a little? We’re not bad for women’s basketball, just like I say at UConn, we’re not bad for women’s basketball. What’s bad for women’s basketball is when nobody’s great, because then you could say, “You know what? I don’t think anybody really knows how to play this game.”
…
“I think people will say that there are some really good teams out here and when you see them play each other, they’re great games,” Auriemma said. “Serbia was up 20 the other day and lost to Canada. These are great games. We just happen to be somewhere else right now. That’s OK. I don’t mind.”

While I am both a gracious winner and loser (not often) you should look on those victories as triumphs. I was playing Crazy-8s with my cousin’s husband and his kids during a recent family visit and when he won (hey, you play the hand you’ve got) he exclaimed, “Wow! I can’t remember when I’ve ever beaten you.”

I didn’t lose per se, I was a close second in a four player game (ok, maybe I’m not that good a loser).

The point is that in competition I never give it less than my best. If you beat me, you do. Nothing infuriates me more than people like my former brother-in-law who will milk a crushing lead for every ounce of humiliation rather than mercifully ending it so we can start from scratch (oh, I copped lots of money from him at Poker because he’s a drunk and aggressively stupid, so we’re even).

Why do you expect Women’s sports to be any different? Because Women are different? How sexist of you. That’s not my experience at all. They are conditioned to certain responses by society which should be reformed to eliminate that, just as it should be changed for racial, male, and hetero-normative expectations.

But I don’t think that’s the ball game, or even a game. It is a cynical ploy by Neoliberals to tribalize people so the not-so-failed Plutocratic agenda of stealing every penny they can from common citizens will proceed in an environment of divided loyalties and distractions with shiny objects.