She's Got Some Balls
When you're always down at the buzzer, it's time for a different game
I am not an athlete. I’m definitely more Scary Spice than Sporty, if Scary was a middle-aged Feminist with an extensive collection of reading glasses. My hand-eye coordination has always been questionable—even before the reading glasses—and once my husband told me I throw a frisbee like I’m Lynda Carter morphing into Wonder Woman. For a hot girlhood second, I wanted to be the first female pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but that’s a story for another day.1
Despite the unprecedented levels of athletic un-prowess, I’m genuinely thrilled to see women’s sports finally getting the recognition it has long deserved. World Cups and Major Leagues, tournaments, endorsements, merchandise, and expanding fandoms; it’s exciting stuff.
Less exciting? The inevitable comparisons.
Apparently, we can’t have nice things like gold medals, championship trophies, and LGBTQ friendly leagues without comparing women to men.
Whenever there’s a high-stakes women’s sporting event, the trolling starts. The women’s games just aren’t as fast! They’re not as dynamic! Remember that time the USNWT got trounced by a boys’ high school team? Go back to the kitchen and leave the sports balling to the men.
The stuff of fragile egos and bots, it’s easy enough to ignore.
It’s the other stuff that sets my Feminist alarm bells ringing. The comparisons trotted out in good faith, the statistics about ticket sales, advertising revenue, and penalty kick speed, all things that are meant to show the growth of women’s sports.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that women are selling out arenas. It makes my jaded heart grow two sizes when I see those seats filled. Last year, when my husband asked for a football jersey with Chloe Kelly’s name on the back, I might have shed a small tear. We should absolutely celebrate and uplift the success of women’s sports, but hear me out…do we need to justify our presence and measure our success against men in order for them to be valid, valued, and celebrated?
We keep comparing ourselves to a yardstick that was never meant for us.
Men created that yardstick, and women will never measure up.
We’re twenty-five points down at the buzzer. Even if we score, the rules will change before we can catch up. The game, my friends, is rigged. Men have had too long a head start in terms of funding, opportunity, fan base, sponsorship, legitimacy, organizing, and infrastructure. How are women supposed to compete with that?
More importantly…why should we have to?
We should applaud women not because they get close to or even surpass men, but simply for who they are and the laudable things they do.
We’ve been killing ourselves trying to compete on a playing field that men built because that’s what we’ve been told we needed to do. We’ve been helmet-winked into believing that if only we could prove that we’re as fast, as strong, as capable of achieving some arbitrary man-made measurement, then Lucy will hold the ball still and give us a chance to kick it.
Lucy is never going to hold the ball still, and women will forever be Charlie Brown.
The answer is not to keep trying to kick the ball. The answer is not to try to reason with Lucy, or to explain why the right thing to do is to hold the ball still.
The answer is to walk away, buy our own ball, and find better people to play with somewhere else.
Q: When is a sports post not solely about sports?
A: When fields aren’t just green ones with goal posts and nets.
🎵Anything you can do I can do better, anything you can do I can do too.🎵
We’ve spent a lot of time and effort telling girls that they can do anything boys can do, which is great. The problem is that we’ve spent hardly any time or effort telling boys they can do anything girls can do. We encouraged girls to pursue STEM careers, but we didn’t encourage boys to pursue careers in the humanities. We didn’t start valuing the things that girls and women do; we simply allowed more girls access into areas we already valued, areas dominated by men.
If we’re only going to value women in the way they measure up to men, then why bother at all? The field will never be even. We keep tripping on the divots and falling into the sand traps left behind.
You know what will happen as soon as there are more girls than boys in STEM fields? Those careers will no longer occupy the top podium spots.
Someone will call a foul and run the clock down. It happens every time women start to outnumber men.2 It happened with teaching and nursing. It’s happening with college admissions right now. When it comes to success, remuneration, and prestige, anything associated with femininity is toxic.
Yet here we are, still playing the same old game on someone else’s home turf. We’re still convinced that if we can just run as fast as the boys, we’ll finally get a chance to show them how far we can kick the ball.
You can be faster than any man on that field, and it doesn’t matter. Kick the ball harder, and it still won’t matter because the goalposts get moved every time.
Stop trying to be as good as or better than.
I don’t even know what as good as or better than means. Women had zero input in the quantifying criteria. We deserve the same nice things, the same compensation, respect, and value, because we deserve them. That’s it. We’re valuable in our own right.
Do you hear me?
The things that women do are valuable and important, whether or not they’re things that men do. Whether those things are as fast or dynamic or any one of a hundred and seventy-two different made-up marks on a ruler that was never meant to measure us.
Every generation of young girls thinks that they’ll be the ones to get Lucy to hold that damn ball still. And every single time, we end up flat on our asses.
The truth is that we’re not playing the same game, and we never have been. The rules are set, but they’re not made by us, and as soon as we figure them out, they change. That’s the real game, by the way—see Jane run, chasing her own tail.
The irony is that we’ve succeeded in spite of it all. Despite the hurdles and handicaps, despite the delay in the starting gun, despite threats, bans, boos, and chronic underfunding, we succeeded anyway. We are the goddamn champions, my friends.
We don’t need to prove we are as good as men.
We’re good as is.
Whether you’re new or have been around for a while, welcome, and thank you. American Woman is my passion project, and I’m so glad you’re here. Please consider supporting my work by liking, subscribing, or dropping a tip in the jar, which will not be used toward sports equipment but may be used for more reading glasses. xx dmh
But it might be part of my story for Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! in March. See you there.
It’s a Femininomenon known as Occupation Feminization, pinky swear.
Until and unless men can pass a basketball through their urethra there is no comparison. In tennis that’s called game, set, match (h/t to Billie Jean King) 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
We don’t need to prove we’re as good or better than anyone. That particular goal is rooted in one-upManship or dominance, which is a singular value that drives male status, self-respect and power.
Competition for first place is not the sole motivation for achieving excellence in the world of females. We get there by love of the pursuit itself. Love of collaboration. Of beauty. Of discovery. Of the work. Of personal best. Of justice. Of self-expression. Of caring about something greater than ourselves. Competing and winning a contest is fun, but not the end game. Our ultimate rewards are found in places in the psyche beyond “Alpha.” Alysa’s was Joy.