QUICKIES 07/09/2012
By Common Gender a new Bollywood movie about a love affair between a transwoman and a Hindu cisman, received such positive reviews that it is being released for a wider, general release in Bangladesh.
Louisiana Republican Representative Valarie Hodges was utterly gobsmacked to discover that “religious” was not code for “Christian.” “Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion,” Hodges said. “I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.” We tried to warn her!
Sociological images has an awesome discussion of the fact that sex-segregated sports exist not because women are flimsy creatures with gossamer wings who don’t stand a chance against men, but because sex-segregated sports serve to protect and perpetuate the myth that men are always better at sports. To do this, Lisa Wade points out several women at the top of their sport, including Sarah Robles, the 23 year old weight lifting champ who can out-lift any women or man in the country.
Bonus lulz: The Romney Campaign does not understand Venn Diagrams.
Featured image is of deep-thinker and celebrated hypocrite Rep. Hodges
“sex-segregated sports exist not because women are flimsy creatures with gossamer wins who don’t stand a chance against men, but because sex-segregated sports serve to protect and perpetuate the myth that men are always better at sports.”
I don’t know how to sum up my response to this beyond <33333333333
I am/was/will be again in the fall an archer, and my coach loved to segregate the sexes. He was all over convincing us that the women simply couldn't measure up to the guys.
Best part is that even if women were always by definition weaker, target archery relies on accuracy and precision, not strength. Even when strength doesn't matter, it's the strength of the bow, not your muscles.
Didn't stop my coach from making sure that if we ever did a shoot to see who could go the farthest, the women were up about 20 feet. Even after telling him that I shot as far as the men did and that going up 20 feet would endanger the parking lot on the other side of the campus he insisted that I stay in my place with the rest of the wimminfolk.
Until one of the guys that I had been shooting with told him the same exact damn thing and he suddenly was willing to oblige my request to shoot with the men. I'm still pissed over that.
/rant
So… yeah. All of that in mind, I think I absolutely love Sarah Robles. She is the living epitome of all of the things I want to prove and say about women and strength, especially when even the best feminists stop at "Well yeah women are weaker, it just shouldn't matter."
I really wish someone would endorse her already. She might not count as pretty, but despite my disagreeing with that that seriously shouldn't even matter. She is everything that needs to be said about feminism, body image, and society's perception of health rolled into one person. Surely that counts for something.
And if not, she should really sell merchandise or something. I, for one, can't help but think of how awesome it'd be to have a shirt with something along the lines of "The strongest man in the world is a woman" on it.
Or just a picture of her holding an adult male lion.
Seriously, she is marketable as fuck.
“Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion”
sorry, Rep. Hodges, it’s just really really hard to find Deistic schools these days!
also, much <3 for Sarah Robles!
also, there’s a cap on how muscular female bodybuilders can be? WTF??? i wish the article had given a link 🙁
Unfortunately, the sports segregation articles seems to have a few factual errors with regards to Sarah Robles. this comment explains it well, but to sum it up, the article conflated her ranking with how much she could lift. Robles outranked her male teammates, but she didn’t outlift them (not by a huge margin, even). If she’d competed on the men’s team, she probably wouldn’t have even made the cut to go to the championships at all.
Aside from that, I completely agree with Grimalkin on the subject of archery. That’s a perfect example of a sport where gender segregation has absolutely nothing to do with biological tendencies (at least, using modern bows).