I FORGOT to mention that Olympic athletes are walking advertisements. Here we see a lovely young woman, Alissa Johnson from the women’s ski jumping team, advertising a credit card company. The Olympic message of “you can be whatever you want to be” melds with the message “you can spend as much as you want to spend.”

By the way, isn’t it wonderful that women can now fly 60 miles per hour through the air — and risk falling to the ground in front of large crowds of people, who find nothing wrong with the possibility of watching a young woman injure herself for life? The “agony of exclusion” for women ski jumpers has finally ended. That’s right — agony. It was agony for women to be excluded from ski jumping teams.

— Comments —

Eric writes:

Have you noticed the rise of synthetic women’s sports, like women’s ice hockey, women’s kick boxing, and so on?

Women’s ice hockey in particular irritates me. I have never attended a women’s hockey game; nobody I know has ever attended one, nor played in one, nor even watched a whole game on television; not a single woman or girl of my acquaintance has ever expressed a desire to play ice hockey; there are no professional women’s hockey leagues in the United States (Canada has a five-year-old league boasting four teams, one of which is in Massachusetts); several leagues have been founded, and folded for lack of interest, usually after only a few short years. The only organized women’s hockey that I can see anywhere in the U.S. is at the collegiate level, but in that case, Title IX forces colleges to sponsor women’s sports as a condition of financing men’s sports – so the colleges must field women’s teams if they want to keep the men’s teams.

Even so, most colleges do not have teams, even the larger schools. The local college is the University of Washington, a sports powerhouse in northern latitudes. They do not have a women’s hockey team, alas, and the benighted Seattle sports fans seem not to know what they are missing. So, for that matter, do most of their potential players. Perhaps they are discouraged by hockey’s well-deserved reputation for putting scars on the faces of it’s players, which is a show-stopper for most women, and with good reason.

So when I see women’s ice hockey suddenly rise to Olympic levels, it is clear that something is being sold to us…

Laura writes:

These new women’s Olympic sports have arisen with the aid of the Title IX infrastructure. In other words, they are the product of reducing, and in some cases, closing down men’s athletics. It’s athletic affirmative action.

Mary writes:

It’s probably too obvious to say that according to the premise of the New York Times article linked above we could all claim to live with the “agony of exclusion.” Anything worth committing oneself to involves a certain level of exclusivity, which occurs everywhere, even in family life. Older kids can stay up later than younger ones; not everyone gets into the college or club of their choice for various reasons, etc., etc. Exclusion is a not tragedy but a natural function of human interaction; in fact the girls that just missed making the Olympic ski jumping team have themselves experienced exclusion. At some point a decision has to be made. Men are excluded all the time in order to fill female quotas in all walks of life even if based on merit alone they are the better candidate; no such reverse quota exists to help men in fields dominated by wome. Why no articles in the NYT for them?

The writer of this article states that upon seeing the women ski jumping she got goose bumps: she had never “seen a woman fly” before. I wonder has she seen a woman flop and does that give her goosebumps? Sarka Pancochova of the Czech Republic slammed her head on the ground after a snowboarding jump and flopped like a rag doll down the rest of the course. She was clearly out cold. It was shocking and brought tears to my eyes. So totally unnatural.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Eric wrote:  So when I see women’s ice hockey suddenly rise to Olympic levels, it is clear that something is being sold to us…

How very true!  My eyes glaze over when women’s hockey appears at the Olympics or anywhere else, and I dare say that I speak for 99% of hockey fans. It’s not the real thing and it will never be.  Hockey is inherently male.

About the damaging effects of the newly approved women’s ski jumping, I would have to say that it is likely no more damaging to the body than women’s high level figure skating.  That is not putting a good word in for ski jumping, but rather an acknowledgment that even long time “feminine” sports such as skating can be dangerous, also.

To put it plainly, to get to the highest levels of competition, you have to harm yourself, whether you are male or female.  All elite athletes are bundles of pain, surgery, debility, etc.  Look at poor Evgeni Plushenko. Age 31 and 12 operations, a fake disc in this back, 4 screws.   And he still is being primed to try, try, try again.  Pure jingoism.   There is nothing mentally or physically health-promoting about competitive sportss at this level.  Yet I watch.  But I prefer watching the men.

Caroline writes:

On hockey: My 15-year-old son played for a while. I found myself shocked continually: first by the fact that boys and girls play on the same teams (private hockey club, not school team); also I think parents push their daughters to play hockey and other sports because of Title IX. They know girls can more easily get a sports scholarship for college. Most parents have no idea how Title IX has corrupted college sports; when I mention it, their eyes glaze over. Evil and corruption has become banal and unremarkable in America. Last, but not least, the mothers–yes, the mothers–would walk into the boys changing rooms without warning or any consideration for the boys’ privacy. Just disgusting and barbarian.

Laura writes:

Absolutely. There’s a Title IX gravy train. Parents want to get their daughters on it. They also appear to be convinced that demanding and aggressive competition is good for  their daughters. And because people have so few children, fathers often treat their daughters as surrogate sons.

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