It's a Me Thing # 6: The Tao of the Female Jock

Now, technically this is a post from my other blog "maintainingmasculinity.blogspot.com" (a group project for a gender studies course), but I think it's applicable here as well (and it also explains the small number of blogs posted this past month -- writing a full essay, with pictures, each week for class is a lot harder than I thought it would be!). Anyways, here's the result (and I think most of my readers can relate, or at least laugh a little).

I have decided that there is no perfect way to open this blog, than with a childhood photo of my first and only mullet in 1992.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: unfortunate though it is to admit, this particular picture is in fact of yours truly. I was half way through third grade at this point -- my hair had already grown out a considerable amount from its initial so-short-it-stands-straight-up-off-of-my-head buzz cut -- but my pink Tamagotchi t-shirt and ruddy-faced smile say it all: I am clearly very proud of myself. Honestly, long ago though it may have been, I remember the sequence of events quite clearly: I woke up one morning, lustrous strawberry-blonde locks (this photo does not do the colour justice -- I am in fact naturally straw-coloured-blonde) down to the middle of my back, and decided, hey; anything boys can do, girls can do too. And so I informed my mother that I needed a hair cut. And then I forced the (clearly distraught) hairdresser to shave my childish head. I walked out of that hair salon happy as a clam, red lollipop clamped firmly in my mouth, with a new breeze blowing against the freshly-shorn back of my neck.

This was how cool I felt. My look did not match that level in the slightest. 

I remember this haircut specifically, not only because of the standard "Are you a boy or a girl?" comments I got from my classmates (and what I consider, for a 3rd grader, to be a snappy response: "I was a girl yesterday, what the heck do you think?"), but because around that time was the real moment I became my "über-jock" self. Or, perhaps, I just like to think this is so -- maybe I'm unfairly paralleling the physical androgyny with the stereotypical "butch" culture of female jock-ism.

I was the ten-sport athlete in high school: basketball (which was and has been my primary sport); volleyball; European handball; shotput; javelin; discus; wrestling; swimming; cross country; water polo. Throughout junior high, I played volleyball, soccer and basketball at a competitive level (I was on all three provincial teams at one point) and I also did Olympic weightlifting (although not competitively) through my teen years and through university. Junior high was only eight sports -- basketball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, shot put, javelin, discus, badminton -- but at one point I was balancing three different basketball teams, one soccer team and two volleyball teams at once (I still have no idea how my parents got me from place to place). My mom says when I was three years old, she already had me in four dance troupes at once: jazz, tap, ballet and contemporary. Even that, she says, was rarely enough to keep me "busy", so through the summers (and the majority of the preschool years) I was enrolled in children's gymnastics, "activity" camps, and swimming lessons.

It was only as I passed further through, and eventually past, my pubescent years that I really started to notice the stereotype of "jockette" culture from other people. In fact, that word itself makes me irate: there is no such thing as "jockette". A jock is a person, of any gender or creed, who centralizes their lifestyle around their sport(s). A jock is someone who wakes up at 4:45 AM five days a week to get their ass handed to them on a basketball court; a jock spends at least an hour a day in the physio room nursing various injuries (and I mean REAL injuries, not just "Oops, I fell over... that scratch must mean it's broken."); a jock lives in that "fresh out of the shower because if I didn't shower before I came to see you, you would be able to smell me from across the street" look. Actually, take a look at me right now: I will bet money (and no I did not dress this way on purpose) that I am wearing a ponytail and yoga pants. And no, it is not just because I'm lazy and I like the forgiving nature of elastic waistbands (although that is a  lovely bonus) -- in all likelihood, I sprinted straight here from a 6:30AM workout and only had 15 minutes to shower before I had to leave. And guess what? I'm not even eligible for varsity anymore. The jock instinct is so strong in me, the masochism has stuck with me even in my old age. And THAT, my friends, is what we call true commitment to a cause.

But off of my soapbox (for the moment at least). Female jock culture has long been affiliated with butch lesbian culture, and unfairly so. That's not to say that there aren't butch lesbian jocks -- hell, there are tons of them! In my illustrious career alone, I have played basketball (or another sport) with: butch lesbians; lipstick lesbians; bisexuals; straight women; straight men; gay men; FTM trans people (who had to wait until her varsity eligibility ran out before he could start getting surgery and hormone treatments); and a whole host of others. My point? The same people that you see around you in this classroom, in this school, in this city: they all played sports with me. Or they all didn't. The point is, the sport didn't change them in any way. But try to tell that to the close-minded masses? Yeah, right, they tell me. They laugh; they scoff. And then they say, "Look: if you're not a total out-of-the-closet raging bull-dyke, then you're in a relationship of convenience. I mean, you can't possibly tell me that you're straight. Come on, girl; just look at you."

Okay, then: let's look at me. Let's look at all the stereotypical jock "features" that indicate that I am in love with women.

Exhibit A: Me in high school.

Point one: I have a ponytail. Point two: I am naked from the waist up and you cannot see the hint of my boobs from the back. Point three: I am palming leather balls (that's what she said). Point four: I am imitating the Michael Jordan "Wings" poster (see here). Clearly, this makes me a budding lesbian.

Exhibit B: Me in university; or, "The Homo Takes Hold".

Note the significantly increased musculature. Note the unchanged ponytail. Note the more masculine grip of the basketballs: clearly this indicates dominance. According to Freud, I am holding the balls away from myself in a display of disgust for all things masculine. ...or something. Also, there are once again no boobs. All obvious indications of queerness! Quick, hide your children and small pets before the raging bull dyke attacks! No one is safe from its anti-estrogenic powers!

My eyeliner says femininity but my moustache says Ron Jeremy.

Of course, as we can clearly tell, lesbianism (and transgenderism, and homosexuality, and the massive list of other 'isms') bothers me not in the slightest. In fact, being called a raging bull dyke doesn't bother me either (I repeat the term because apparently it is the sole label people know how to use. Honestly, if you're going to gay-bash me, at least pick up a thesaurus first). I'm comfortable with my sexuality as a hetero female and to be perfectly honest, no one would say this to my face anyways because I'm big enough to draw and quarter them with my own bare hands. What does irk me, though, is that just because I play basketball -- and just because I am the quintessential jock, who didn't own an underwire bra or a woman's undergarment of any kind until first year university, and didn't wear my hair out of a slicked-back ponytail from fifth grade until age 19, and didn't wear a dress from grade 2 until high school grad -- I am a lesbian. And all others like me are therefore lesbians. In fact, while I was playing with SFU, a friend of mine on a local Christian university team once shamefacedly admitted that her team fully believed that all but two of us were either lesbians or in relationships of convenience. The one girl they thought was straight had a 26-inch waist and natural DDs; the other had been (unfairly) rumoured to have slept with half of the men's basketball team and was now (supposedly) slowly making her way through the ranks of football.

This was my uniform. You think I'm joking, but I literally owned (and wore) no
other clothes than those given to me by sports teams (and that included
sports bras and spandex for underwear).

What I find a particularly interesting part of this whole stereotyping process, too -- and I have heard it time and time again from lesbian companions of mine -- is that I had a stereotypically "lesbian" childhood: exploring masculine appearances, styles, self-perceptions, attitudes, and activities. I was the girl that "never really fit in" with the rest of the girls, and I often felt like my weirdness was "giving me away", leaking through to the surface when I didn't even realize it: climbing monkey bars upside down; disliking pink; refusing to wear dresses (or, eventually, anything other than sports gear) or take my hair out of a tight ponytail; cutting all of my Barbie's hair off at 4 years old and dying it various colours with drug store lipstick samples pilfered from my mother's bathroom cupboards. And yet, I'm straight -- so what the hell happened? You mean to tell me that, despite all of these obvious signs of budding homosexuality, I was in fact just being... well, me? It's fascinating just how much fear this seems to put in people's hearts: that they can no longer determine gay and lesbian adults from childhood. Whatever shall they do? I mean, when stereotyping fails, then what the hell has the world come to? Lesbian-seeming straight girls; sports for women; unlimited gender expression. Next thing you know, we won't even be able to tell terrorists just by their turbans anymore -- and that, ladies and gentlemen, will be a tragic day for humanity.

...ahem. Sorry. Tangent finished, I promise. (Well, for now.)

A big part of it, though (the lesbian stereotype, I mean) is, I'm quite sure, based in my physique. Me, I'm of the "statuesque" variety: muscular, thick-waisted, tree-legged, long-limbed, ape-handed, and obscenely tall. Far from androgyny, this physique makes me appear more masculine, plain and simple: I carry traits that most women would stereotypically attribute to men. My voice is a deep, throaty baritone; my posture, when seated, can be stretch-legged to obscenity (which is why I wear clothing with closed crotches, like pants); and the way I walk has been unflatteringly dubbed "dominant" on more than one occasion. If I were to enter roller derby, my nickname would be Glamazon. As it is, given my last name (and my affinity for picking up missed shots around the basket and plugging them home for extra points), numerous sports columnists have affectionately nicknamed me "the Black Hole". They mean it as a compliment to my apparent talent. It does, however, nothing to help prove my stereotype wrong.

This is from the SFU website. I don't think they could have used less attractive pictures for the background. Thanks, internet!

In fact, physical features have come into play a great deal with female athletes, and not just to do with their sexual preference. Different sports, of course, have different body types: speed skaters have enormous quads; volleyball players are lean and magnificently tall; wrestlers are short, stocky, and incredibly well-muscled in their upper bodies; swimmers have a distinct v-taper that no other sport can match. All of this has to do with the type of training these athletes do in order to excel at their sport: gymnasts need to be as strong and aerodynamic as possible, so they mould their bodies into two-by-fours; ballet dancers need to be lifted high in the air and be as bendy and willowy as weeds, so they stretch and dance their way into stick insects; speed skaters and bobsledders need thick, powerful quads to push off of start lines and cut through ice, so they do squats and dead lifts and box jumps until they can't help but buy gappy-waisted jeans. And yet, outside of a token few sports -- beach volleyball being the most prominent of these -- the physiques of female athletes are not generally considered sexually attractive to men. Their musculature, their androgyny, their supposed testosterone -- all of it contributes to this sort of ball-shrinking perception that female athletes are like female body builders, hopped up on steroids and ready to pound any errant penis into oblivion should it come anywhere within scenting distance.

Don't do drugs, kids. Just don't. ...please.

Yes, there are the Anna Kournikovas and Maria Shaparovas of the world -- but outside of blonde European tennis stars, what successful female athletes do we really have as sex symbols? People like Kim Kardashian are heralded for loving their curves -- and their enormous asses -- but where is the love for Serena Williams? Girl's got a booty on her! And not just genetics (although GOD DAMN is she blessed in that department), but actual hard physical labour. This woman trained her ass off (on?) to be successful at tennis. And yet when pictures of her surface in all of her natural glory -- such as the one seen below -- she gets called a man, or an errant-lesbian-gone wild, and the gates to keep fans back from the tennis courts suddenly seem more necessary to keep the beasts within down and away from human flesh.

GRRRRRRAWWWWRRRRR.

And so, what does Serena Williams do? Well, first she does the respectful thing: she comments publicly in the media that she is comfortable with her body and people should respect her for it.

BOMB DIGGITY.

But, of course, as tends to be the unfortunate (fortunate for some) act of many of these scrutinized female athletes, they decide that they must prove their sexuality -- and by this I mean sexual attractiveness -- in order to prove their worth. If a male athlete is called fat or ugly -- hell, he just continues playing the game and lets it go (has anyone looked at Shaq lately?) because it holds no bearing on the quality of his athletic performance. In theory, the same is true for female athletes -- doesn't matter if you got a few extra whacks with the ugly stick (heck, doesn't matter if you got beat over the head with it!), your talent is your talent, pure and simple. Until you're a famous female athlete. And you are told you are unattractive. And then you have to go and do this.

Ah, yes: the infamous naked photos. Didn't Sports Illustrated, or GQ, or Hustler or Playboy or something have a "hottest female athletes" article recently? Don't they have it every year? Didn't Anna Kournikova top it for a handful of years, despite never winning a major and eventually dropping out of tennis altogether? Isn't she still a household name? I bring this back, then, to my previous point about how every one of the Christian basketball team players thought my team was wholly gay, except for the slut and the hot one. You know, because she's hot, and she's open for business, so that means she's not gay. But since I'm not Playboy material, and I keep my legs squarely placed inside of my pants (for the most part) then I am clearly gay as Christmas. And not in the fun way, either -- in the "Oh, it's all that weightlifting, I bet bulking up jumped her testosterone too much and her body couldn't handle it. Too bad, she could have been good as a skinny-housewife-type." 

So either I get naked to prove my heterosexuality -- which I did, or at least half-did, but apparently in the completely wrong MAN-ner (sorry, couldn't help myself) because no T & A was involved -- or I get married and pop out a brood of happy little ducklings. You know, follow in Hayley Wickenheiser's footsteps: win multiple gold medals (including the Olympics), prove my insane talent as a women's hockey player, remain without human credibility (probably due to my propensity to short Mom haircuts) until I push my toddlers around the ice on mini-skates and prove that I am actually of procreate-able benefit to hetero society. I'm not saying that's why she got married and had kids -- clearly not -- but it seems to be the only way she can prove herself as a woman. Hey, look guys, her ovaries are still intact! She can get pregnant! DEAR GOD, ALL IS NOT YET LOST!

It seems, at its most basic, that heterosexual female athletes -- or female athletes of any sexual denomination -- have to in a broad sense OVERCOMPENSATE on femininity; that is, they have to RE-PROVE that they are in fact women, as their athleticism seems to have done the opposite. When we go out day to day, we of the Nike Creed have to wear more makeup, have nicer hair, smell better (for god's sakes!), and overall act more feminine than our non-athlete counterparts in order to be considered as "female" as they are. And even then, we're still seen differently: according to the (infuriating!) masses, we do things that women shouldn't really do (and we can get away with it, which is apparently the worst part). And so what do I have to do? Put on my hooker hoops, a pair of stilettos, and a Snooki-sized dress and go out dancing and bellini-drinking with my girls to remind everyone that I do, as a matter of fact, have a functioning vagina. Actually, scratch that -- I can't wear stilettos, because I'm already eight feet tall. So I have to wear flats. To look less like a man. Or a butch lesbian, for that matter. Because I play basketball. And other sports. Otherwise, because I'm an athlete, people will either think I'm gay or I'm smuggling bananas.

Seriously? No one sees the flaw in this logic? No wonder people voted for Bush.

I've probably ranted enough by now (although my rising bile tells me I am not yet finished) and I suppose I can bring it down to this: the stereotype of the female jock is one of a very butch lesbian (or pseudo-man) who has happened to find a semi-productive outlet for all that testosterone she shouldn't really have. The only way for said stereotypical dyke to prove herself of hetero benefit to misogynistic society is to either strip and show the goods (and they better be good) or to start working that uterus like a Ford factory assembly line. Why is this so? Perhaps because people are scared of women who are physically dominant -- women who appear that they can hold their own in a bar fight, or toss a bale of hay into the back of a truck bed, or show a hint of a six pack without massive fake boobs to offset the cut lines. Will it ever really change? I don't know; honestly, I don't think so. I mean, let's be honest: people were worried women were going to "turn into men" if they played sports as late as the early 1900s. And this was when girls were still supposed to ride sidesaddle... and women's basketball teams dressed like this.

It's a Me Thing # 5: Spring Has Sprung

******************************

****************************

****************************

**************************

*************************

************************

***********************

**********************

*********************

********************

*******************

******************

*****************

****************

***************

**************

*************

************

***********

**********

*********

********

*******

******

*****

****

***

**

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

The Perils of Cohabitation #1: Boyfriend is Stronger than Me

Boyfriend is stronger than me. Despite having stopped playing competitive football a couple of years back, and having very little time to work out lately due to the amount of work he has been putting in to his teaching practicum, boyfriend is still stronger than me. MUCH stronger.

I work out at least three to four times a week. Boyfriend does not. He is still stronger than me.

My arms and legs are longer than boyfriend's. I can reach more things than he does, and physics-wise should thus have more "leverage". I, however, do not. Boyfriend is still stronger than me.

Boyfriend complains that he is out of shape constantly. He tells me that he is weak and he cannot wait to get back into "fighting form". By comparison, however, this matters naught. Boyfriend is still much stronger than me.

This is boyfriend.

In real life, boyfriend looks less like a juiced guido gorilla in a skintight t-shirt. It's been a long day, don't hate on the crappy artwork.

I often call on boyfriend to lift heavy things around the house (partly because he is better at it than me, and partly because I just enjoy watching him do it). He performs these tasks with far more ease than myself. 

On occasion, boyfriend and I also go to the gym together. We don't work out "together", just near each other. I do my own thing, and he does his; it is impossible not to notice, however, the strong discrepancy in our workout styles.

This is me:

This is boyfriend:

It is a highly embarrassing process for me to endure. To this day, I often wonder why I continue to do it.

Perhaps the best representation of boyfriend at his strongest is when he gets angry. It is at these times -- and boyfriend does, on occasion, have a rather imposing temper -- as he flings large objects yards away from him, or kicks irritating household clutter into shattered oblivion, that you can truly see the extent of his brute strength.

Okay, so maybe he does look a TINY bit like a gorilla...

All in all, boyfriend has got muscle to spare. He knows this -- it has been proven on numerous occasions (and through numerous playfight losses on my part). And so, when presented with the following situation day after day, I truly have to wonder if there is some alternate-kitchen-universe-conundrum boyfriend deals with, that makes such a simple task for me by comparison so devastatingly difficult and heavy to lift that he simply cannot perform it without my assistance.

You see, this is our dishwasher.

Good boy.

It does a great job washing our dishes; in fact, it cleans them with the greatest of ease. 

This is our sink.

Twice the fun!

It is a double sink in the middle of the kitchen, and it is lovely. It has a garburator on one side, and a regular soaking sink on the other. It can grind up stinky scraps of inedible food just as easily as it can wash my hands, fill a water bottle, or generally look shiny.

This is the proximity of our sink to our dishwasher.

There are a lot of scars on that hand that I did not previously notice.

It is perhaps five inches, at the absolute most, between the left-most edge of the dishwasher and the right-most edge of the sink. They are practically touching. It's like the Shakespearean romance of kitchen placement: so close, one can nearly feel the other... they are practically Siamese twin kitchen appliances.

And it is this proximity -- this harrowing, puzzling, clearly-boyfriend-frustrating proximity, that continues to confuse me. After all:

This blender must weigh a ton, and the switch to put these strawberry tops down the garburator must be as heavy as an elephant, because why else would the distance between the dishwasher and the sink be so clearly insurmountable?

Curses! Foiled again! I'll get you next time, boyfriend... 

Epic Childhood # 1: The Facts of Life

Let's just say that, from a very young age, I was a precocious child. I was curious about everything (which, in some cases, got me in trouble); to this day, in fact, my mom likes to say to me, "If you were in the other room and things were quiet for two minutes, then I needed to be worried because you had gotten your way into something." In fact, in one instance, she found me making stairs out of a chest of drawers -- pulling them out at smaller and smaller intervals and using them to climb to the top -- blissfully unaware that this was the perfect prescription for it to tumble down on top of me. Thankfully, she caught me before the crash, reprimanded me, and sent me on my merry way. She tells me that I was a toddler at this point. Things only got more interesting from there.

One of the many conversations my mother had to deal with over this exciting childhood period of mine was, of course, a description of the birds and the bees. According to my mother, when you're raising children and they start asking where babies come from -- and they will do this at a surprisingly young age -- you must answer their questions as broadly as possible. In other words, you never go any deeper (no pun intended) than you have to: if they ask where a baby comes from, you say it grows in the mother's stomach. Simple as that. No more, no less. If they keep asking questions, you keep answering; until that point, you keep as mute as possible while still feeding their inquisitiveness. And, in most instances, when you answer in the simplest manner you can, your kid finds he or she is quite satisfied with the response and then drops the whole matter entirely (for the moment).

Now, in some cases -- ahem, mine -- this lack of deeper information causes children to formulate their own back stories to make up for the ... ahem, HOLES... in the story. I, for example, didn't get past the "when two people love each other very much, they decide to have a baby and the woman gets pregnant" part of the story. For the longest time, I remember thinking there was some strange biological, chemical reaction that happened when two people loved each other and wanted to have a child. I remember being so confused: how did the world know when people wanted to have a baby? Did they have to both sit down and just think really, really hard about it together? Was it just, like, an instant snap and suddenly you had children? How did this magical universe-baby-making-power decide how many you got? It all seemed so strange. In my theory, it looked something like this:

By extension, of course -- at least in my form of childhood logic -- this also meant that, if two people that both really wanted a baby (or happened to be thinking really hard about it), got too close to each other in the exact moment that they were both contemplating children, then the woman could accidentally get pregnant as a result. I spent many a night wondering just how many pregnancies occurred as a result of an accidental, brief encounter between two people who had never met. (I know look back on that sentence and realize the irony of my young intuition. Oh, the glories of alcohol.)

Now, when I was young, one of my favourite nighttime past times was having my mom come in and read my book to me. She would come in, lay next to me on the bed, and read a chapter to me (which usually ended up turning into at least two or three, since I always begged for more and never wanted to let her stop reading). She tells me that, on this particular night, I was maybe six or seven at the time. Somehow or another we got to talking about the facts of life -- she doesn't exactly remember how -- and once again I started asking her questions she didn't really want to have to answer.

My mom says that, after close to half an hour of her dancing around the truth, I finally asked an inescapable question and she was forced to tell me "the gritty details". I'd like to think I made it sufficiently awkward for her up to this point, and forced her to use the most clinical terminology throughout.

She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and "explained". She says she used maybe three or four sentences at most, but that it was more than sufficient to explain the basic mechanics of what apparatus was used, in what manner, and for what purpose.

There was a long pause after her response. She said I sat in silence for several seconds, digesting the information. My face flickered from expression to expression, trying to determine my opinion on the matter.

Even my mother, though -- with her wealth of experience as to my strange, and often exceedingly mature responses, was not prepared for what came next.

She says I made a shuddering noise like I was retching, and flapping my hands in the air, exclaimed:

All credit to my mom, she kept her composure. There was a moment of silence before she responded.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of many reasons why I love my mother.