But Enough About Me!

Dear Doctor,
No, I don't feel inclined to continue seeing you when, after I have told you I am an athlete, and while you are asking me to do range of motion exercises to pinpoint where the pain may be lying, you tell me to do a forward bend and then when I do one (and, yes, I am flexible because I am, yes, an athlete) you say, "don't hurt yourself."
Signed,
Transferring to a different doctor.


When I led a discussion group for teens on Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Trilogy last weekend, at one point I was trying to get them talking about image and expectation. I mentioned (taking as my prompt a comment Westerfeld had made in an interview) that in earlier times, girls who were thought to be growing "too tall" would on occasion be given hormones to stop their growth. This so shocked these sweet teens (mostly girls) that I plunged rashly onward, explaining that when I was in school girls often "pretended not to be smart" because they were afraid being smart would make them less popular. Now I grant you that Hawaii may be an outlier even today in this regard, where performing well in school is valued for girls and boys alike. But they were hornswoggled to hear it, so I went one step further.

Yes, I opined, we were even told that girls ought not to want to play sports . . . and looking at their faces, I felt that maybe there is, in some ways, at some times, progress. Because they were utterly confounded by this statement. Of course girls would want to play sports. How could it be otherwise?

But the strictures and assumptions and obstacles continue, they just creep out into other places. For instance, age.

Last year when two crews of Golden Masters Women (60 +) asked the race committee to allow a Golden Masters division for the cross channel Molokai-Oahu women's team (OC-6) race, the committee refused because they felt it would not be safe (this was the same reason given 30 years ago when women wanted to have a Molokai-Oahu race at all). So those two crews, made up of very experienced paddlers, simply entered the Senior Masters division (50+) and raced anyway.

Which leads me to this story in the Honolulu Advertiser about the recent solo world paddling championship from Moloka'i to Oahu (that's 41 miles, people).

Won by Danny Ching in the open men's division and (for the 7th time) the phenomenal Lauren Bartlett in the open women's division, I was just utterly thrilled by this paragraph at the bottom of the article:

Jane McKee of Kailua placed third in the women's division in 4:34:24. Her finish was impressive for two reasons. One, it was her first attempt at the solo world championship race. Second, McKee is 52 and actually beat all the men in the 50-older division.

So for all those who clutch tight to their stereotypes about women, athletics, and aging, I say:

Don't hurt yourself.

Over on Babel Clash (where I'm doing most of my posting these two weeks), I've followed up on Ken's post On Writing the Series, Part 1, with my own answer, called (shockingly), On Writing the Series, Part 2.


Also, being a jock at heart as well as a person whose high school life was impacted positively by the implementation of Title IX, I love this post by Justine Larbalestier on YA & Girls Playing Sports.

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows I am skeptical about our ability to get past our cultural constructs to figure out what if any gender essentialism lives beyond certain obvious physiological and potentially a few neurological but hard to quantify differences. By this I am not saying that males and females are exactly alike.** But we tend to be so embedded in our cultural assumptions about Male and Female that I think it is difficult for us to get past those as we try to figure out if there are any meaningful *human* differences (beyond, yes, the obvious physical ones) between men and women, and why on earth we keep thinking that as human beings we need there to be some essentialist difference that creates an unbridgeable abyss between the sexes (yes, I'm exaggerating).


I'll never forget the time a relative of mine described his young son (then in early elementary school) as "All Boy."

Curious (see above), I asked, "Huh. What do you mean by that?"

After a moment's thought (I think maybe he hadn't ever been asked what he meant by that; he was just using the appellation reflexively), he replied, "he's really into playing sports."

Now as it happens, of the two of us adults in this conversation, I--the female--was the one who is really into playing sports, but I manfully forbore to mention that, and said, instead, "Huh. Interesting you should say that. Down our street there's a dad who is always out front playing catch with his athletic daughter."

Anyway, I digress. Go read Justine's fabulous interview with a bookseller in which they talk about sports books, girls, and sports (and TItle IX).


** and if anyone posts a comment suggesting that I think men and women are exactly alike and how misguided I am because, you know, All those Feminists Believe that Nurture is all that matters but there are Nature differences and their daughter wanted a pink dress and their son wanted trucks to play with, I will smash them with my mighty guns gained from very many hours of long distance canoe paddling. There is an interesting conversation to be had about sex and gender, nature and nurture, and how much we don't know and what we do know, but in my lj, anyway, that particular line of argument is Not It.