season of the bitch

Boxing!!

As in, did anyone watch Pacquiao v. De La Hoya on Saturday night? I am too broke for pay-per-view and didn’t feel like sports-barring it to watch this fight, but now I wish I had.

I watched Pacquiao fight a couple of years ago and he blew me away. The heavyweights get all the cred, but lemme tell you, the lighter guys are way more fun to watch. Fewer knockouts, sure, but the blinding speed is mindblowing.

Not too long ago, when I was living in South Carolina, my social life pretty much revolved around the gym. I took up kickboxing again to get over a messy breakup, met another guy who trained in muay Thai and boxing, and suddenly…yeah.

And there’s something about the purity of a fight. Of two people in a ring wearing as little clothing as possible, not leaving until one of them has admitted defeat. I love muay Thai and MMA probably more than straight boxing, but every now and then I’m intrigued by a fight, and this one had the elements that sucker a lot of people.

Yeah, De La Hoya’s one of the great ones, but damn if it isn’t cool that Pacquiao jumped up two weight classes and still made De La Hoya quit. (Granted, cutting weight was probably harder on De La Hoya than gaining it was on Pacquiao. But still.)

There’s something about making the other guy quit that really says something, too. A knockout can come in a flash, just one good punch. A decision always pisses off some people, who think it was bad. But when the fighter just doesn’t come out of his corner at the bell? Talk about conceding.

Anyone actually watch this?

Regular readers here will know that I love me some Gina Carano, female MMA fighting superstar.

Well, apparently some male sports writers believe Carano needs to be “protected from herself.”

See, cutting weight is part of fighting. It’s one that I’m disgusted by, having lived with a fighter for two years and seen the battles that he–yes, he–went through with the process and the damage it did to his body image. Fighters weigh in a day or two before their fight, and the idea is to take a fight at a low weight, lose some of it off your body and sweat the rest of it out so that when you rehydrate, you weigh more–hopefully more than your  opponent, and you get an advantage. So no one actually fights at their real body weight, except amateur boxers and wrestlers, who weigh in the day of the event, just hours before their bouts. And even they  often sweat out a few pounds and hope to be able to hydrate and eat before their fight.

But thousands of men across the world do this regularly. Boxers, muay thai fighters, and MMA fighters, as well as even high school wrestlers “cut” weight. It’s been dramatized on shows such as The Ultimate Fighter and Fight Girls, which starred Carano.

None of them were called out by name as being in danger of injuring themselves by taking fights at weights too low to make, even though there are many who struggle with the weight-cutting process.

Instead, the writer here chose to make the female MMA star–and there is no argument that Gina Carano is the biggest female mixed martial arts star out there–the subject of his article.

Once again, the female body is there to be policed by men.

If this writer is so concerned with the health of fighters, he should have written an article exposing the entire weight-cutting process for what it is: physical damage done in the attempt to gain a somewhat unfair advantage. He could’ve written about high school coaches encouraging teenagers to go into the ring weakened and dehydrated in order to make a lower weight class.

In other words, he could’ve written this article without making it about a woman.

Instead, Carano needs to be protected from herself. She needs to be stopped from doing damage to her body. He throws in some images of naked Carano being weighed in between two towels, and jokes about internet fans hoping someone would drop the towel.

This is completely unnecessary. If he had a specific point to make about how women are more likely to be encouraged to lose weight, how the thin ideal is encouraged on women more than men, he could’ve done it. He could’ve proposed same-day or even right-before-bout weigh-ins (like jockeys on the racetrack, though they routinely go into races dehydrated and starved as well).

But he didn’t. He chose to sexualize and then scold the woman.

Yeah, catchy title, eh?

I started to think about this stuff the other day when talking with my mother about Michael Phelps. See, I love to see people excel at things. I like athletic competition of many sorts because I like to see what people can do when they really put themselves to it, and yes, I believe that some of that is innate–I don’t think that everyone could be Michael Phelps. Or Georges St. Pierre. Or Serena Williams.

I tend towards socialism in my personal philosophy not because I want to see everyone exactly the same–the “vanilla world” argument or the Harrison Bergeron one, depending on which angle  you come from–but precisely because I think humans are such beautiful, individual things and I think that with the basics provided for, we could all be free to develop in whichever ways we wanted to. I want to see everyone able to reach their potential. And I think that if we didn’t have to worry so much about making a living, we’d be able to.

Octo has an excellent post up at Feministe about being a capitalist. I agree with many of her points, and of course disagree on the basic one–I’m not a capitalist. I’m in graduate school in part because I fled the retail world because I hated working for nothing but money. I made good money for a while. I could be running the entire business by now, and I could own my house and be well on my way to financial security, but I gave it up for a job I love (as a grad assistant) learning about things I love, writing all the time, and living in a city I love (while cheating on my city with THE city, NY).

I beat myself up constantly because I’m 28 and I’m already interviewing people who are younger than I am and already have what I want in life. I wish that I hadn’t made decisions based around money. I wish I’d been able to just hole up somewhere and write until I was good enough at it to make a living at it.

And I’m privileged. Most people wouldn’t have even been able to make the choices I did. Capitalism tends to tell us that if we’re good enough, we’ll get what we deserve. It just takes work, right? Yeah, George W. Bush is a good enough argument for that system being completely broken (though one could say that Barack Obama is a good argument for that system working, but we’ll see how November turns out, eh?).

There’s been plenty of talk about the Chinese athletes and the Chinese system leading up to the Beijing games, and hell, we can even look back at the parable that is the Miracle on Ice (posited of course as the victory of Us over Them in the Cold War, because the Soviet hockey team was supported by the state and the US team was a rag-tag bunch of athletes who hated each other–and a bunch of privileged college kids). Read this mostly-related post about the relative ages of women gymnasts, too.

This post isn’t really anything but me thinking out loud. It doesn’t offer any coherent arguments, so please don’t even try to poke holes in it. I just think…governments would serve us better providing things that we need, rather than trying to control what we do and say, and certainly better than blathering about what other governments shouldn’t do.

Not that I really need an excuse to post man-pretty on my blog–it’s MY blog, and I don’t have a boyfriend to get jealous, so what the heck, right? But there are a few more that I wanted to get on here before this whole shebang ends. Plus a few more thoughts on desires.

See, I think the point to all this (other than gratuitous pretty men) should be thoughts about ‘the gaze,’ as it were, and what it really means. If it is about power, or just about appreciation, and if we can look at someone just purely in a sexual manner (tell me that if you’re attracted to men

at all, that bottom picture here doesn’t get you going) without necessarily taking away their humanity or acting as though we’re entitled to them.

I suppose in one way or another I am acting entitled to these pictures–they’re up on the web and I used them.

At the same time, I’m not treating them as less than human because I’m acknowledging that they are attractive–particularly because these pictures are put out there (particularly, again, the last one) to give a specific impression. I’d hope that if someone posted a picture on their blog of me in a pretty outfit and said I was sexy, I wouldn’t take offense. That doesn’t mean that ALL I am is sexy. (whereas if they said “it’s a good thing she’s hot because she’s so dumb” or suchlike, well, that’s a different ballgame, isn’t it?)

I suppose that at the end of the day, sexuality isn’t going anywhere, no matter how badly the religious right or the radical feminists want it to. And it’s not going to stop playing a large role in our lives unless we deliberately ignore any and all occurrences–and even then, someone’s probably finding you attractive whether you like it or not.

So enjoy, from top to bottom: Adam Foote and Joe Sakic, Robert Downey, Jr., the guys of Lucero, and Josh Hartnett without his shirt on.

Links to what I did this weekend: Garth Ennis Panel, DC Sunday Conversation, Avatar Comics Panel (otherwise known as ‘So You Wanna Know What Warren Ellis Is Up To?’), Vertigo Panel and Dynamite Panel. I was a busy girl, but it was totally worth it. Plus, met some cool people, so look out for me shilling for their books shamelessly. (and look out for a post on why creative people have to help each other out.)

Geekery of a different kind caught up with me today in the form of my absolute favorite political types calling me and meeting me in NYC after I got off work. They live in Chicago, so I haven’t seen them since the PA primary, and it was truly excellent to see them. You know how every once in a while, you met people that you really just get along with and feel like you can be yourself around and they get it and actually like it? Yeah. Love.

Finally, I am a dedicated hockey fan, not so much a Pittsburgh Penguins fan, but a long-standing feud with an ex-boyfriend brought me to deeply hate the Red Wings, plus I want to see someone break Gretzky’s records, so I’m cheering for the Pens. And they won in triple OT tonight–though I missed it, what’s even more fun is my friend who had never watched hockey before I dragged her to a bar to see the Pens beat the Flyers to advance to the finals is texting me about it. I win. And here’s a special Beautiful People post just for that:

Petr Sykora, who scored the OT game-winner to force a Game 6 on home ice for the Pens.

Goalie fights!

Martin Biron (see below) vs. Ray Emery. Mmmmm…

I was reading The New New Journalism, a collection of interviews with famous nonfiction writers. Ron Rosenbaum (author of Explaining Hitler, among other things) mentioned that when he was sent to cover the Super Bowl one year, he arrived early to find a convention of bull semen entrepreneurs. He wrote half his story about the Super Bowl on the bull semen convention, and when his editor questioned him he declared that it was terribly important as a metaphor for the “commodification of masculinity.”
Last night I went to a Flyers game. They played the Tampa Bay Lightning. I have a deep love for professional hockey, and I get particularly attached to players, regardless of team. I hate the way athletes get shipped around without much choice–’traded.’

It seems a bit silly to compare millionaire pop heroes to slaves, but at the same time, something about it makes me deeply uncomfortable. As feminists, we argue against the commodification of women’s bodies. But since this commodification of men’s bodies is so highly paid–and of course, not sexual–it doesn’t garner protest quite so often.

The idea of a team seems at odds with the idea that players can be told to pack their things and move to another state at pretty much any time.

My friend, who attended the game with me, laughed at my abrupt changes from intense fan to lustful girl-child (punctuating shouts of “stay in the net!” with “oh, so pretty,”) and joked that hockey was my porn.

This after a class discussion last week about ‘porn for chicks’ being stories in women’s magazines about rose petals in the bed and romantic dinners and such. Because of course women don’t enjoy sex and don’t think of men as sexual beings.

I objectify the hell out of hockey players and other famous men I find attractive. I like to joke about not wanting to actually talk to men that I think are cute because it’ll ruin the fantasy. I suppose I’m as rotten as any guy who goes to strip clubs, except the guys I’m looking at aren’t selling sex.

In the case of Vincent Lecavalier, center for Tampa Bay, he’s selling a certain vision of masculinity, though. He’s selling his skills at a game, sure, but it’s more than that. It’s an image of Man, young, virile, athletic, and in his case, with a fluid, natural grace on a pair of ice skates that is just, well, sexy. I like the way he moves.

I watch sports for the thrill of the competition, then, but also for the spectacle–the visual pleasures. I would argue, for those of you who know what I’m talking about, that sports inverts the Mulvey paradigm of visual pleasure in cinema–men take pleasure in identification with their sports heroes the way women take pleasure in identifying with the women on the movie screen, whereas men take pleasure in looking-at.  When I watch Lecavalier (or Tom Brady, or any number of other pretties who play a game for a living) I am taking pleasure in looking-at.

For evidence, note that at games, grown men show up wearing a jersey with the name and number of their favorite player on it.

In another class, last semester, we devoted an entire three hour seminar period to discussing the portrayal of women athletes. Most guys in my class had little to no interest in watching women play sports unless they were attractive women. Because women athletes do not allow them the same pleasure in identification while watching. They claim, of course, that women athletes “just aren’t as good.” But of course, I call bullshit on that.

Anyway, I’m sure there’s plenty out there written on these subjects. It’s just been bubbling in my brain lately.  That, and visions of pretty men on skates…

Giants beat Patriots in Super Bowl.

Good week for underdogs, bad week for dynasties (well, unless you count the Mannings). I like that sign.

(Pats fans, forgive me for not really caring that the Pats didn’t win.)