How long should tennis matches be? At the Grand Slam level, five sets. That’s the traditional answer, and all of the best matches I’ve seen have been five sets long. That’s long enough to be challenging, but not so long as to be ridiculous.
[more...]
Articles bewailing “these kids today” (or especially “these girls today”) seem disturbingly frequent at the moment, and it’s not clear to me whether there’s a real problem of some kind or it’s just pundits waxing wroth about the next generation Doing It All Wrong. I suspect it’s both: the sexual culture out there is problematic, although not necessarily for the reasons you hear about, and most of the pundits are really talking not to the next generation but to the next generation’s parents. This article by Rachel Simmons is an earnest but fairly typical example; this response by Kate Harding is worth reading. I don’t think Harding says anything revolutionary—she just says a lot of things that seem like common sense to me but which often get lost in the noise.
Recently Clay Shirky wrote “A Rant About Women”, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. There’s more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.
I might write up a longer response to “A Rant About Women” at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece that’s probably more important than my response.
[more...]
This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, You’re a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that it’s certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:
[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.
—Thomas. “Compulsive Heterosexuality And Rape Culture”. Yes Means Yes!, 13 January 2010.
I don’t think this is all that controversial, but I do think it’s important.
[more...]
Serena Williams was recently fined $82,500 by the International Tennis Federation for the actions leading to her exit from this year’s US Open. The ITF fine is in addition to the $10,500 she was fined by the USTA soon after the incident.
The fine from the ITF is the largest ever in tennis, and there’s significant controversy over the whole affair. I’ve read quite a few claims that racism and sexism are key drivers for the decision to fine her so much. I’m somewhat skeptical of those claims.
[more...]
I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem.
[more...]
The essay “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” examines the now-conventional idea that Western respect for the rights of women and gays drives concern for oppressed groups within other (especially Islamic) cultures, which in turn serves as a justification for imperialist projects.
[more...]
The title is somewhat inflammatory, and look, there’s nothing wrong with someone taking their partner’s name when they get married. There are plenty of practical reasons to do so, and it’s an individual choice in any case and doesn’t require justification.
However, pressuring women to change their last name when they marry is another matter, and I find it both disheartening and surprising that 70% of Americans think that women should take their husband’s last name when they marry. I just don’t think there should be any social pressure to do so. It gets worse, too.
[more...]
I commented on Sunday that I’m not as interested in women’s tennis as in men’s tennis. I’ve been wondering why the disparity is so significant at the moment, as this hasn’t always been the case for me. While that was on my mind, Wimbledon and the BBC decided to throw this into the mix:
A BBC source said: “It’s the Wimbledon play committee, not us who decides on the order of play. But obviously it’s advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court. No one has heard of many of the women now, so if they are pretty it definitely gives them an edge. Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures.”
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez. “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”. Mail Online, 29 Jun 2009.
Huh, well, that’s to be expected from a channel trying to boost ratings, I suppose, but surely the organizers of the most revered tennis tournament in the world would have no truck with such an approach?
[L]ast night, the All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness is taken into consideration.Spokesman Johnny Perkins said: “Good looks are a factor.”
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez. “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”. Mail Online, 29 Jun 2009.
I’ve been reading a lot about this recently. I’m not sure why, although some of it is due to looking around for info around when I was coincidentally writing up my Fantasy World Sketch. Some of it is due to just happening to run into the edges of a larger discussion taking place mostly on LiveJournal.
[more...]
The West is still quite awful about gender equality in many ways, but it seems that post-Soviet Russia is far, far worse. A 22-year-old St. Petersburg executive had her sexual harassment case thrown out because, according to the judge, “[i]f we had no sexual harassment we would have no children”.
[more...]
I just read this article about women cyclists at risk in London, having come across it on a friend’s LiveJournal. The basic gist is that women are more likely to be accident victims because they’re less assertive on the road, and in particular because they don’t run reds and are thus more likely to be in the blind spot of large trucks about to turn at an intersection.
[more...]