Women Excel At Sport, Journalists Talk About Manicures

I play roller derby. Wait- let me say that properly: I skate motherfuckin’ ROLLER DERBY, beaaaatches. That’s more like it. Y’see, roller derby isn’t something I can talk about neutrally. This is a game where “derby saved my (metaphorical) soul” has gone from a common statement to a boring-ass cliché. Practically everyone I know who plays this game says it’s changed her life. It’s helped her find her confidence and her grit. It’s shown her how to love the body she has and appreciate it for what it can do, not how conventionally attractive it is. It’s given her a community, friends and role models. It’s taught her how to (literally) get beaten down and (literally) get back up again. In this game I’ve gotten bruises and sprains. I’ve seen people break bones more times than I care to remember. Far more important than that, though? They get those bones healed and put their skates back on. I see us getting knocked over and getting up again and knocked down again until our muscles will barely obey us when we stand again, and I see us doing it again and again until finally, somehow, we break through. And in between all of that, I see the hours we put in, every single week. Spending our evenings and weekends, every week, training in any hall that’ll take us. Spending their days off organising, promoting, planning, coaching and paperwork. And more training. Always, more training. And what do people say about us? Catfights and punches- both of which will, by the way, get you expelled, and have never happened at any game I’ve been to or played in. Booty shorts. Girls in fishnets hitting each other. Short skirts and tight tops.

But this isn’t about roller derby. This is about rugby.

Continue reading “Women Excel At Sport, Journalists Talk About Manicures”

Women Excel At Sport, Journalists Talk About Manicures
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The little things: Sleazy?

Overheard at work, in a conversation between a couple of people about an email one of them was writing:

“”Looking for the girl in the office”? That sounds sleazy. Very, very sleazy”

…Why? What is ‘sleazy’ about saying that you’re looking for a particular person, whose name you don’t know and whose (assumed!) gender you remember, in an office? Why is that sleazy? What are the assumptions that make it so? What does it say about us, that we consider an entire gender of people intrinsically sexualised by their very existence?

I am a woman. I regularly sit in an office. What is sleazy about that?

The little things: Sleazy?