Pink Sportswear

So, I'm watching the UConn Women's Game on CPTV, and they're doing a pledge drive, due to the loss of several corporate sponsors due to the economic downturn. And what do mine eyes see?

These lovelies:


What is wrong with this picture?

Could it be that UConn's colors are not, in point of fact, pink and white but blue and white:


Now, you could ask, "Why is this a problem?"

And the answer would be, because this isn't a UConn only issue. Almost every team I can think of offers their team merchandise in pink. And the problem with that, from a pragmatic perspective, is that it totally eliminates the whole "wearing your colors" aspect of buying your team's merch.

But then there is this other issue of making sports feminized. Especially, like in the case of UConn Women's Basketball, sports women are playing. Maya Moore and Tina Charles and the rest of the UConn Women's team aren't out there in pink jerseys, maintaining their femininity as they throw down on the basketball court. They are women, and they play basketball. They are women, and they give up none of their femaleness by wearing the blue and white jersey. And yet, in order to make liking sports and expressing a love of a sport or a specific team acceptable to some women, the very distinguishing characteristic has to be pink-washed.

I'm not against women liking pink. I'm just not a fan of pink-washing. I'm not a fan of signifying "women fans" from just fan-fans.

Who's Number 1?!

UCONN!

"We are not Guantanamo"

I've been busy watching my men's team getting their asses handed to them, my women's team making it to the National Championship game undefeated (We're #1!), and the team that took down my men's team being decimated. Though to be fair, that last one hasn't really concluded yet. Let's just say that it isn't looking good for Michigan. In the course of all that, though, is this incredible take down by Rachel Maddow from friday:

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This is righteous anger at its finest. Maddow manages to come off as both hopping mad and coolly analytical. Emotional, yet logical. And the points she makes are the points that should be drilled home in regard to national security and international policy for years to come. The Dick Cheneys of the world only make it harder for the United States to not only be the great nation we can be - one that actually abides by its own rule of law - but they also make it harder for us as a nation to protect our own citizens. They make it harder for us to truly make a difference in the world.

An Example of Sexism

My sister studies basketball. She watches every game possible; she goes over the film; she watches old games and new ones, NBA games and NCAA games, and she plays the game every chance she gets. There isn't a rule she doesn't know, or a call she can't make. She eats, breathes, and lives basketball. She isn't a natural player; she's intuitive, but not gifted. Her real strength comes from her obsessive nature, and also her inability to accept her own limitations. It makes this time of the year an absolute hell, because it is March Madness time, and because I live in UConn Country. Watching games with her is agonizing, because she is not only a basketball aficionado but because she's a talkative know-it-all who has to provide her own running commentary throughout the games. It makes actually enjoying my UConn Huskies games more than a little difficult. At the same time, it does mean that if you want to know some obscure or semi-obscure rule of the game, or just something that makes little sense, she's the one to ask. 

At dinner tonight, she came home with this:

These morons at school were wondering why UConn is playing in the West Region of the Bracket. Saying, like, 'What, they aren't anywhere near the West'. And of course, they wouldn't even let me start to explain it to them, because they were guys.

This is what sexism is. It is not recognizing that the girl next to you, the one who has been on basketball leagues since elementary school, might have some knowledge to impart on a subject. It is dividing centers of expertise down gender lines. Now, knowing that my sister is, in fact, a know it all asshole, it is more than likely that she started her opening sentence with something like, "You morons"; but still, she looked defeated in a way she very rarely does, because it is very hard to actually defeat a know-it-all asshole (I should know, since I share that familial trait). She knew the answer, and was denied imparting that wisdom to less crazed basketball fans. And the guys? Well, they missed out on an explanation for how NCAA brackets are formed.

There's another part of this, and that is my own sexist moment. When my sister started going on about the 'morons' in her school pondering the philosophy of the NCAA bracket, I did immediately cast the primary players as girls. There was no gendered language to alert me either way. Because of that, I immediately assumed ignorant about sports=female. With the basketball nut sitting across from me, the soccer nut sitting next to her, and the baseball nut on the other side of me. Three people, all carrying that XX gene, all carrying encyclopedic knowledge about their respective sports (and, for two out of the three, an encyclopedic knowledge on cars as well). I could dismiss this as being just a symptom of my own non-sport mindedness, but I don't think that is the case. It is because even with Title IX and the Women Huskies, even with all the returning college kids (girls and boys) meeting at the girls' high school basketball games in my town, even with my feminism, there's still this idea floating around the ether that boys know sports and girls don't. It is why those boys refused to listen to my sister; it is why I didn't entertain the thought that the so-called morons could be anything other than girls. And my sister, both of them actually, get lost in that shuffle.

If she were a different kid, I'd worry that the next time some boys were sitting around talking sports and being 'morons' about it, my sister wouldn't even try to step in to correct them. Luckily, that isn't who she is. She may be many things, but meek generally isn't one of them. And yet, I do worry about it; mostly, I worry that one day I'm going to get a call to bail her out of jail because she snapped when someone questioned her understanding of the game. Really, though, I worry that one day, she will stop being the know-it-all nudge she is. I worry that this kind of gender essentialism will slowly cut into her. I worry that she will not just feel defeated for the moment, but that it will be a low-grade cloud hanging over her, distracting her from her deep and passionate love for this game. Sure, it would make my life better if I didn't have to hear her screaming at the coaches, refs, and players who can't hear her anyway. For starters, I'd actually be able to hear the people who were paid to talk about the game. Still, I don't want that happening to her. I don't want her to feel like a part of her is being ignored because it doesn't fit with the boy-girl dynamic.

Yes, sexism hurts boys too. Those boys probably didn't want to get corrected by a girl sophomore. It would have possibly been considered embarrassing. To tell you the truth, I'm concerned about that as well. But I'm not related to them. I'm related to a quirky, crazy, intelligent, passionate, obsessive kid who loves sports more than almost anything else. And I don't want her to ever feel like that love is something that doesn't jive with the rest of her. Because it does; and I want to see her continue to glow in the wonderment of it all. Even when she's being a pain in the neck.

Look Who's The Big East Champs

That's right, the UConn Women Huskies. They beat Louisville, secured their #1 seed in the NCAA tournament, and they are the remaining undefeated Division 1 team. In other words, a good night.

Final Fours and "Women's" Final Fours

On Saturday, I went to a UConn Women's Basketball game, because I love college basketball and I love women's college basketball more than men's, and because I love UConn's women's team probably more than any other team. It was a blow out, as can happen when one women's team is ranked #1 and the other team is unranked. But that gave me time to look at the banners adorning the XL Center. 
Pretty, aren't they? What struck me, though, was the difference in the emblems of the Men's winning banners and the Women's winning banners. Here are the two competing emblems from 2004, the year both the UConn Men's basketball team and Women's basketball team won the NCAA National Championship:

The Men's banner just says "NCAA Final Four"; the Women's banner explicitly says "NCAA Women's Final Four". This goes directly to what Habladora was saying in her Gender and Profession: Lady Doctors and Male Nurses post. Men are considered the norm when it comes to basketball players. Therefore, the banner doesn't have to explicitly say "Men", because when someone says "basketball player", we generally think of a man. In certain cases, like lady doctors and male nurses, I generally think we should leave gender out of the discussion, because it is a signifier of something out of the ordinary. It doesn't help change who we picture as doctors or nurses; it just modifies the automatic picture that appears at the mention of "doctor" or "nurse". For something like a Final Four appearance, though, I think we should take a different tactic. 

It is a competition, and two separate ones. For that reason, I would like for both the men's Final Four emblem and the women's Final Four emblem to indicate gender. Because right now, it seems as though the ungendered Final Four is the "real" Final Four, and the women's Final Four is an afterthought or less of a concern. And that is true; outside of Connecticut and Tennessee, many women's college basketball teams struggle to gain an audience; and women's teams in general can still suffer at schools like UConn and Tennessee, schools that have one outstanding women's program but whose other programs don't obtain that excellence year after year. Although I'm into language and words and how language and words shape our world and our lives, I wouldn't go so far as to say that making the gendered distinctions among Final Fours will suddenly revolutionize women's sports and make them as recognized and popular and respected as men's sports. But I do think it will help, even just a little bit, even just mostly subconsciously. Because even though it is a little thing, the little things add up; and although the wording on a sports championship banner is a very little thing, it is a representation of the gendered aspect in sports and other professions.