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Hope Solo Shot First
Aug. 6th, 2012 10:02 pmU.S. Women's soccer is in the gold medal round of the Olympics, and it occurred to me that perhaps the reason women's pro-sports have never taken off from a spectator point of view is less about the sportspeople than the narrative we tell girls who play sports. It's a positive narrative. It's: You can do anything.
This is encouraging, and it is something we only say to people who have been systematically oppressed. If you said "you can do anything" to somebody with a huge amount of money, power, and access, they'd look at you like you were an alien. It would be like saying "I notice you have nostrils. Come over to my house later; you have permission to breathe while you are visiting." Instead, you have to say it to people when the odds are completely against them, to remind them there is a possibility in there, however farfetched, that they will succeed, and that they should give it a shot anyway.
In the case of girls' sports, I think we have been successful beyond our wildest dreams. I think as women, when we watch other women playing team sports, in the back of our head we now think "I can do that." We see women playing team sports, and we do not want to sit and watch. We want to go play team sports.
This is ludicrous. There is no way I could play soccer at an Olympic level. I have never played soccer in my life. I'm not particularly coordinated.
I nevertheless feel that I could be on the U.S. Women's Olympic Soccer Team.
I think I have hit upon the spectator problem.
Guys do not watch pro football or baseball or basketball and think "I could do that." They think "here is the pinnacle of what a human can do, and I am excited that I got to see it, and they deserve to be remembered forever and wildly well-compensated in the near term."
Maybe, perversely, we need to walk back on telling girls they can play sports. Maybe then we'll watch team sports with the awe we feel for gymnastics and ballet.
[Note: I am speaking specifically of women's viewership of women's sports; I am not interested in what makes them appealing or unappealing to a male audience. By the same token, men's sports franchises assume a primarily male audience, although many women (such as myself) watch them; witness not only the advertising, but the fact that it took until this year for the NFL store to offer women's-sized fan jerseys. You may have something fascinating to say about the importance of male sports fans, but this is not the venue.]
Unrelatedly, the Toasted Cake podcast's current episode is a reading of my story "The Hungry Child," which is about cannibalism, sort of. It's read by Tina Connolly, and she is very good.
This is encouraging, and it is something we only say to people who have been systematically oppressed. If you said "you can do anything" to somebody with a huge amount of money, power, and access, they'd look at you like you were an alien. It would be like saying "I notice you have nostrils. Come over to my house later; you have permission to breathe while you are visiting." Instead, you have to say it to people when the odds are completely against them, to remind them there is a possibility in there, however farfetched, that they will succeed, and that they should give it a shot anyway.
In the case of girls' sports, I think we have been successful beyond our wildest dreams. I think as women, when we watch other women playing team sports, in the back of our head we now think "I can do that." We see women playing team sports, and we do not want to sit and watch. We want to go play team sports.
This is ludicrous. There is no way I could play soccer at an Olympic level. I have never played soccer in my life. I'm not particularly coordinated.
I nevertheless feel that I could be on the U.S. Women's Olympic Soccer Team.
I think I have hit upon the spectator problem.
Guys do not watch pro football or baseball or basketball and think "I could do that." They think "here is the pinnacle of what a human can do, and I am excited that I got to see it, and they deserve to be remembered forever and wildly well-compensated in the near term."
Maybe, perversely, we need to walk back on telling girls they can play sports. Maybe then we'll watch team sports with the awe we feel for gymnastics and ballet.
[Note: I am speaking specifically of women's viewership of women's sports; I am not interested in what makes them appealing or unappealing to a male audience. By the same token, men's sports franchises assume a primarily male audience, although many women (such as myself) watch them; witness not only the advertising, but the fact that it took until this year for the NFL store to offer women's-sized fan jerseys. You may have something fascinating to say about the importance of male sports fans, but this is not the venue.]
Unrelatedly, the Toasted Cake podcast's current episode is a reading of my story "The Hungry Child," which is about cannibalism, sort of. It's read by Tina Connolly, and she is very good.
