misogyny – Treehouse Writers

Major sports competitions do not test participants in male events to see if they are “really” men. So why do they do it with women?

I mean, I know why they say they test women. There’s a silly panic that men are disguising themselves as women to win medals. Back in the day this was a dastardly “Communist” plan by the Soviet Union and the East Germans.

In fact, as I just discovered from this book review in The Nation, allegations about men passing as women in sports goes back even farther and has ties to Nazi Germany.

This started way before transphobia became the cause du jour and is rooted in the idea that men are so much more physically able than women that any random guy can beat world-class women athletes. You know, all those guys who are sure they could score a point or two off Serena Williams.

Funny that the women they seem to disqualify in these events are people assigned female at birth and raised as girls. Apparently some women have uncommon chromosome patterns or higher testosterone levels and some self-appointed authorities have decided they can’t possibly be women.

It’s a control mechanism, just like anti-abortion and anti-contraception laws. Or like asking women who have been raped what they were wearing and what they did to provoke the rape.

It’s a rule presented as an effort to “protect” women from men that instead victimizes women. Continue reading “So Who Gets to Be a Woman?”…

There’s this little voice that pipes up when I see certain things, one that tells me some asshole is going to do their best to destroy this lovely thing I’m seeing.

Many years ago I went to an afternoon movie by myself. I even remember the movie: The Ruling Class, a dark comedy starring Peter O’Toole.

But although that movie made a deep impression on me itself, it was the short that preceded it that is important to this story. In it, a woman danced the tango.

The moment the woman appeared on the screen, I knew the men (well, probably boys, given this was next to the University of Texas campus and an afternoon show) were going to laugh.

And laugh they did.

The woman who danced was not skinny. She wasn’t fat, either, but she was buxom and curvy and in no way met the ideal of womanhood in the early 1970s or, in fact, in any part of my lifetime.

I suspect she met the ideal of womanhood in the place where the short was filmed, but since I do not remember anything about the film except a fleeting image of the woman herself, I can’t look that up.

She was a very talented and skilled dancer, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t beautiful enough for the pleasure of the young men in our society.

I’d been around long enough by then to know what they would and wouldn’t find acceptable. It’s one of those things you learn early on if you’re raised female: how to predict what men will find attractive and what they’ll laugh at.

I felt the same thing when I saw the online clips of Lizzo playing the crystal flute from the Library of Congress collection. Continue reading “Lizzo and the Flute”…