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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Congressional committee hearings are usually the domain of dark-suited men speaking in carefully-modulated tones. So Gay Culverhouse,
who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting in an
unapologetically purple suit and spoke with both intelligence and
anger, was startling. Culverhouse, a former president of the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers, wasn’t a breath of fresh air; she was a bracing gust of
wind as she outlined the ways in which (in her view) the NFL abuses and
then abandons its players ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer Greg Beato:
It didn’t take long for the Lingerie Football League to live up to the
low expectations of its critics. All spring long, LFL personnel had
been promising serious hard-hitting action among skilled players who
just happened to be sexy women. But in early September, when the
Chicago Bliss kicked off the season against the Miami Caliente, the
highlight was a new contribution to gridiron strategy: stripping the
passer. “Our QB, Anonka Dixon, had her bra top ripped off,” Caliente
running back Michelle Stevens exclaimed in a postgame interview.
“Three girls from Chicago jumped on her after the play was already over
and shredded her top to pieces. There she sat, topless on the field,
and for no other reason than she is an unbelievable player and a huge
threat to Chicago’s defense, they wanted to take her out of the game” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix makes an interesting connection between ESPN’s prompt response to the creepy nude tape of sportscaster Erin Andrews and its extended silence on the rape allegations against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
If ESPN truly understood from the Andrews case the abusive relationship
between women and the world of pro sports, Reilly argues, it should
have known the importance of covering the rape charges. He writes ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:
The Preakness Stakes is
not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple
Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a
certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women
as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut,
brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the
Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels
approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat,
the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout
demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There's a gender drama of Olympic proportions being staged by the Canadian women's ski jumpers team. (The girls also made headlines earlier this year when
their chairperson Brent Morrice claimed they could all afford to lose
20 pounds. Too much Tim Horton's, maybe?) Since men's ski jumping is
already a recognized Olympic sport, the
ladies are demanding that there's no reason to leave girls out in
the cold and thus the team is suing the host of the 2010 games, the
Vancouver Organizing Committee, to allow them to compete.
In the Beijing Olympics, 42 percent of the competitors were women and 58
percent were men. And that number even included softball, which has now
been dropped from the Olympic line-up, thanks to a fluke vote where
International Olympic Committee members thought they were voting to get
rid of baseball.
Any
thoughts from you XX ladies on whether Olympic policy should require sports be split 50-50
between men or women? Or should other factors come into play, like
history and TV ratings? I certainly don't pretend to understand why
certain things become Olympic sports. I mean, ping-pong? Seriously? My
personal solution in this case would be to balance out the gender line-up and
bring women's ski jumping into the arena as a Olympic sport and trade
out men's figure skating, which (Scott Hamilton aside) seriously should
not be allowed to exist.
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Dayo, you pose a good question about why women don't watch women's hoops. Commenter Tradbert from the Fray had this to say on the matter:
You
might start by asking why anyone watches sports? It's more than a little
bit odd that some people (mostly men) will literally devote the
majority of their free time and mental energy to watching other men
throwing leather balls -- a game for which non-gambling fans have
absolutely no concrete stakes in the outcome. My guess is that this has
something to do with fantasy fulfillment (this is pretty obvious with
"fantasy" leagues, with children who emulate sports starts, and I would
think it applies to other fans as well). Maybe a lot of guys like to
see themselves as quarterback, b-ball star, etc.
Perhaps women don't fantasize as much about contact competition, and
so they don't see a point in watching other people indulge in this
activity. If this is true, there is no point in hand-wringing about
female fans and female sports. Would it really be so awful if women
didn't enjoy this bizarre pastime? By all logic, this would make women
more rational.
This certainly held true for me -- I used to watch the UConn Huskies and Rebecca Lobo as a tween, but once I realized that my full adult height was going to be 5'7'', I gave up my basketball fantasies. I'm not sure that women don't watch sports because they're "more rational," but I don't know many women who enjoy picturing themselves in Sheryl Swoopes' shoes.
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