Why I write (part one)

Please note: the last link in this post goes to a site that might not be great to look at in a conservative work environment or around kids or your grandma (unless your grandma is a fan of MAXIM magazine-style imagery, in which case: rock on, grandma.)

Hey, all…seriously long time, no post and for that I apologize. Life pulled a Vicky Eddy and your Militia Cheerleader has had a crappy past few weeks, including the discovery that “drowsiness may occur” can also mean “this shit will mess with your brain so badly that you’ll literally be unable to write and will spend large portions of the day staring at things and vaguely remembering what it felt like to be coherent but too bad, you have to stay on it anyway.” I am seriously pissed that this had to occur during this particular time in the IWFL season, since now I have to try to catch up on everything I wanted to post about the Women’s World Championship (ok, not that I didn’t expect us to dominate, but an aggregate score of 201 to 0? Holy crap, USA) and the upcoming epic game against DC this Saturday. (Wait, can you call something epic before it happens? I mean, like, other than another Lord of the Rings movie or something? I totally can’t remember. Goddammit.)

So I am going to try to get to all that over the next few days – as well as sneak in another Meet Your Militia or two if possible – but first, I have to talk about some way less-fun stuff.

I wish I didn’t have to. I wish I could skip right over every hateful bullshit comment made by every asshole that I come across when reading about women playing football – ’cause damn, man, there’s a lot. I save links to almost all the articles I find, positive or negative, and I organize them into categories in the hopes that someday I will have both the time and the ability to actually post and discuss them; there’s a whole horrific section comprised exclusively of articles and comments (lots and lots of comments) so nauseatingly hate-filled and degrading that I remain torn about whether or not to even post links to them.

It sucks either way, you know? I mean, who wants to say to their friend, “Oh, hey – did you see over here where some guy saw a video clip of one of your games and then wrote some shit about you that was so violent and graphic that it literally triggered a PTSD episode for me? Oh, and over here, too. And here. Oh, and here…”

On the other hand, if I don’t link to those…if I decide to ignore them, and write them off as just some jackasses who don’t know enough about football to understand that a 45-yard field goal is friggin’ badass regardless of the kicker’s chromosomes, and I don’t talk about what it means that these things are being written and posted and shared and promoted…what then? Well, for one thing, the Backseat Coach checks to make sure no one performed a surreptitious lobotomy on me while we were sleeping since he is aware that I am apparently physically incapable of NOT starting shit when there’s shit to be started, but more importantly, I lose the potential opportunity to explain all of this to people other than a) those who already agree with me and b) fucked-up jerkoffs who will never agree with me. By this “other” group, of course, I mean the vast majority of America’s sports-watching population.

Here’s where I start pulling generalizations out of my ass, so feel free to tell me if you think I’m off-base on any of this. But I believe that the aforementioned vast majority of America’s sports-watching population would agree with the following statements: one, that women should be allowed to play whatever sports they want but two, no one has any interest in watching them when they do so it doesn’t really matter. And then there’s a third statement, sometimes unspoken and sometimes put right out there, that since women nowadays CAN play sports if they want to, they no longer have any business complaining about gender inequality in the arena of athletics.

The WNBA is the obvious hallmark example of this. I came across an interesting exchange between a guy who’s a vocal supporter of the WNBA and a guy who staunchly believes that the only reason the WNBA has vocal supporters of any gender is because women really dig playing the victim card. Link to full text is here; the basic gist is that Ben the WNBA Supporter Guy says supportive stuff about the WNBA and then Chris the Not-So-Supporter Guy complains that it’s all much ado about whining, and Ben the Supporter Guy says that WNBA fans – and I would extend this to include fans of any women’s professional or semi-professional sports – are in a lose-lose situtation: “If we defend it, we come off as ‘juvenile’ (as you put it). If we ignore it and don’t address the issues, they keep occurring. So…I choose to at least talk about the issues rather than sit idle.”

Chris the Other Guy then responds with this: “I really don’t understand why you think there are ‘issues’ to address. If you ignore ‘what’, then ‘what’ keeps occurring?”

What keeps occurring?

This, motherfucker. People write shit like that and fuckin’ Sam Adams and Jerry Remy’s sports bar fall all over themselves to advertise right next to it. Perhaps it’s my victim card talking, but I’d say that qualifies as “an issue.” And that is why I write.