Secondhand Sun

I've been visiting family; it's good. But this morning, when I was sitting on the couch bouncing with excitement over the news of John Edwards' announcement of his presidential candidacy, my brother and my cousins started discussing Hillary Clinton. "Is Hillary running?" A. (female) asked. "She hasn't officially announced yet, but she's raised a ton of money," I answered. "She's running, all right," one of the guys said, making it sound almost as ominous as, "It looks like cancer."

"Good," said A., causing general surprise - she's not a Democrat, at least not publicly.

"Why do you want her to run?" asked C., her sister's boyfriend.

"Because!" A. answered. "We need a woman in charge of things."

"Not /that/ woman," came the immediate response from another of the guys, but C. was eyeing A. with a poisonous look. "Are you a lesbian or something?" he demanded.

A. was offended. "No. Why?" she shot back.

C. shrugged. "I'm just wondering what your big attraction is to women."

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This is the problem I have, and probably will continue to have, with this upcoming presidential primary season. So much of the opposition to Hillary Clinton is rooted in outright hatred of women that I feel dirty just thinking about supporting someone else. (And I think about it a lot. I like John Edwards.) A lot of feminist bloggers oppose Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't help me out, because when their commenters agree, it's always with the same misogynist undertones.

Posted by Joanna at 2:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Why, yes, yes he did.

He's slamming Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, long a favorite bloggers' punching bag, for her recent column in which she runs down the numbers of male vs. female columnists, as well as whites vs. people of color, and finds that the Post comes up wanting in the diversity department.

So how could The Post increase diversity as the staff and space for stories got smaller? It wouldn't be easy, but here are some thoughts. On the op-ed pages, don't run all the columnists all the time. Create some space for new voices. In Close to Home, make a point of seeking out more women and minorities. Outlook can also bring in more such voices.

The Metro section needs a female columnist, and it also needs a columnist attuned to the region's burgeoning Latino communities. A Latino columnist could appear in the Extras since they are oriented toward counties and neighborhoods. Not all new voices have to be on the staff; they could be regular contributors. Metro's new Page Three could be used to bring in more female and minority voices.

The point is not to toss excellent white male columnists; the point is to add more and lively voices to The Post.

Kos quite rightly points out that adding women writers and writers of color, but banishing them to the "fluff" section(s) of the paper, is bullshit. I am confident that Howell means to say the Extras are "oriented toward counties and neighborhoods," and not that Latinos are. Still, it's a pretty insulting remark: it amounts to saying that gee, maybe we should add a Latino columnist to talk about stuff that goes on around here because a lot of Latinos live around here now. The unspoken assumption is that Latinos (and whites) won't be interested in reading a Latino person's take on national issues.

What's really interesting here is that Howell does seem to understand that the numbers point to a need for change - but she's extraordinarily unambitious, even defensive, in her prescription for change. Some of her caveats remind me of begging my mom to let me stay up past bedtime: "C'mon, mom, just ten more minutes? Five minutes? Pleeeease?" When Howell points out that NO MEN'S POSITIONS WILL BE THREATENED, and really we don't even have to officially hire these women and non-whites as actual staff members - they can just be guest writers or something! (Maybe they'll even be so grateful for the opportunity that we won't have to pay them!) ...it bears asking, who is she talking to here? Who is the audience? Is she really that worried that Joe PostReader will give two hoots and a holler whether the new female columnist is on staff or not? No. Remember the role of an ombudsman, abominable as Howell has been at the job. She's talking to the paper's management - and begging them to throw her, and us, a bone.

So it's the management who really has the problem - not that we didn't know that already. I have a proposition for these guys. The Style section is the only section of the paper where female columnists outnumber male columnists (seven women to three men). These include a TV column, a fashion column, several advice columns... you know, women's shit. So they should change the name from "Style" to "Women's Shit" - put it right up there in the masthead. That will dramatically reduce the likelihood that any man will accidentally pick up, read, or otherwise come into contact with the "Women's Shit" section and suffer the penis shrinkage that surely results. Then they won't have to expense any more male enlargement pills to reverse the damage - and with the money saved, they can hire another woman to write on national issues for the op-ed pages. That will make it 17 men to 4 women, instead of 17 to 3, and those darn women will stop complaining - and the real readers (the male ones) will never notice.

Oh, and as for kos - for all his protestations that diversity is not a consideration when he chooses his front-page writers, he seems to be doing a pretty decent job of achieving it anyway. Last year, two of four new co-bloggers were women. This year, it's two or three of four (I'm not sure if Devilstower is a man or a woman,) and two of his three blogging "fellows" are women as well. Kos can be an ass, but maybe he did learn something from the infamous Pie Wars after all.

Posted by Joanna at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

World Cup 1990 fuelled my growing fascination with soccer and over the course of that summer, it became an obsession. I watched as many games as I could, and taped more, because some were on at odd hours, or when we were out of the house. They were shown on the Turner Broadcast Network, and those little advertising graphics in the corner of the screen hadn't yet been invented - we had to endure actual commercial breaks in the middle of play, during at least one of which the beleaguered US viewing audience actually missed a goal. And the commentary was horrible! "A penalty kick is sort of like a free throw in basketball..."

The 1990 World Cup was supposed to have been the most boring yet, with the lowest ever number of goals scored, but I never noticed. I devoured each game I could get hold of, and ignored my father's growing irritation with the number of blank VHS tapes I was using up - I couldn't bear to erase any of the games even after watching them. "Are you really going to watch these again?" he'd grouse; "Yes," I'd snap back, and the argument would be suspended til the next day when I discovered he'd taped over Ireland-Romania or something.

I remember Tony Meola and his ponytail - he was my favorite player for the US team, and ever since I've always had a thing for goalkeepers. I remember Cameroon and all the talk about how they were controversial and played so much more brutally than the European and South American teams (like animals, you might say?) and how surprising it was when they did well because African teams never do well in the World Cup; the racism of all this escaped me utterly, because I was twelve years old and white and sheltered and I knew nothing of such things. I remember learning about offsides traps and running into space and, well, much more strategy than I'd ever been exposed to in my youth league (none). I remember Diego Maradona, and the "Keys to the Game" that were flashed up on the screen before the final in which Argentina played West Germany: for Argentina, the "Keys" were "Back" "Knee" and "Foot" - the places where Maradona was having steroid injections, already battling against his body's betrayal. I felt sick inside when Argentina lost 0-1 on a penalty kick by Brehme in the last minutes. I felt empty when the World Cup went away and there were no more games with which to fill my hours. I consoled myself by using heat transfer paper and special markers to make myself a Maradona t-shirt with a number 10 on the back.

And I made a decision. I wanted to be a soccer player when I grew up, and play in the World Cup.

Continue reading "Soccer and Me, Part II: What She Wanted To Be When She Grew Up" »

Posted by Joanna at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was in elementary school I wanted to play in Little League. Other children in my class played. My best friend played. I played baseball, too, but only in my backyard, when we could get three or four or more kids together; the batting team supplemented their ranks with "ghost runners" who could never be thrown or tagged out due to their lack of corporeal existence. But I wanted to play for real, with uniforms and full teams, so I went to my dad and expressed to him my longing to participate fully in the great American pastime of baseball.

He said no.

He had his reasons, good ones - the local baseball league was populated with those Horrible Sports Parents that you read about in magazines. Coaches screamed at the kids, parents cursed at the umpires, and kids who weren't particularly skilled or athletically talented were benchwarmers, nothing more. My dad wanted something better for me, and so he told me that if I really wanted to play a sport, he'd sign me up for the fledgling local soccer league. Sulkily, I agreed, and so that fall, my brother and I played soccer.

Continue reading "Soccer and Me, Part I: Girl vs. Boys" »

Posted by Joanna at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

Here is a must-read from Echidne at Echidne of the Snakes, who kept a notebook to track how women and girls were covered in the news.

When I leafed through the diary a year later I was shocked by what I found, and especially shocked because I only really followed the fairly liberal or neutral sources of news. I expected the news coverage to be neutral, on average. Instead, everything, every single thing about women was negative. Women or working women or mothers or girls had problems, were a problem, and even good news were presented as "good news but..."

Read the whole thing here.

Sad, but not surprising - it's always us women who are The Problem. Always.

Posted by Joanna at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gene Weingarten, for the uninitiated, is a humor writer for the Washington Post. All the cool people in Washington, DC read his online chat at washingtonpost.com. One of the many things I've always liked about Gene is that he's always been respectful of women - no, respectful isn't the word, because he's not terribly respectful generally speaking. But he doesn't respect women less than men: there's equal opportunity irreverence in his work, and it's really quite delightful.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that, in yesterday's chat, he reveals a belief that abominable beer commercial about the "Man Law" of "You poke it, you own it" is funny.

The idea of men owning women, either because they stuck their penises into them or for any other reason, just isn't funny. And not even Gene Weingarten can make it funny.

Posted by Joanna at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)