Tag: Women in Sports

Women in Sports Week: ‘Sports Night’: That ’90s Show

The cast of Sports Night

This is a guest post by Artemis Linhart.

“If you haven’t binge-watched Sports Night within one weekend, then you haven’t seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played.”*

This nuanced end-of-90s sitcom offers a peek behind the scenes of a cable sports news show, all the while mixing genuinely serious story arcs with brilliantly written characters and conversations. Captivating on many levels, the series experienced an untimely cancellation after just two seasons, which, for the most part, when it comes to television, is a sign of high yet underappreciated quality.
Taking a closer look at the female characters of the show, it is palpable that, while Sorkin views women as crazy, neurotic and flawed individuals, he sees all people as such.
This is precisely the reason why the show, not unlike his other shows, is said to be exceptionally well-written. While Sorkin is known to write most of his material himself (though it has been said that he is stingy when it comes to the sharing of writing credit), it is unsurprising that he has achieved just about cult status amongst fans for recycling whatever works. And work they do, the female characters of Sports Night–as women, as professionals, but most of all as believable human beings.

Felicity Huffman as Dana Whitaker and Sabrina Lloyd as Natalie Hurley in Sports Night

Like A Boss

On this show, it is the women who are in charge. The main characters besides the two male news anchors are Dana, the producer of Sports Night, and Natalie, her second-in-command and associate producer. They literally run the show, and not just on their network. From time to time, this is noted on a meta-level. At one point, after there has been a bomb threat to their office building, it is the guys who are freaking out, whereas the women remain calm.

As Dana tells them to pull themselves together, she concludes, “We’re in charge. We’re women in charge. And we’re keeping it together. That’s what we do.” Casey replies, sullenly, “Well, we’re men, and we’re petrified. That’s what we do.”

Dana meets with Casey (Peter Krause) and Isaac (Robert Guillaume)
Similarly, Natalie holds an important position and is well aware of it. She never seems hesitant with regard to decision making or apologetic about being in a position of control. As they are already dating, Jeremy playfully notes, “You’ve taken to bossing me around a lot, you know that?”

The following conversation ensues:
Natalie: Yes. You know why?

Jeremy: ‘Cause you’re my boss?

Natalie: Bull’s-eye, Jerome.

There is a mutual understanding about who’s boss, and there isn’t a moment in the series’ two seasons where women’s authority is questioned or dishonored.

Dana and Natalie are a team both on and off the air. They are not just coworkers but also very close friends and have a very strong bond akin to sisterhood. Team spirit is big on Sports Night as it is but, what is more, there is a very tangible solidarity amongst women. Not once do we see a cat fight, a trope so frequently employed in realms of television where women are involved. Arguments overflow with emotions at best, but never do they result in pettiness. They are invariably based at the very least on mutual respect and dignity.
Even Dana’s interactions with her coworker Sally Sasser, who turns out to be “the other woman” for both Dana’s long-time friend (with coveted benefits) Casey and her fiancé Gordon, are not spiteful but professional. The one time Dana attempts to confront Sally in rage results in the realization that it is not her place to reproach her. Halfway through her tirade, she ends up apologizing and they reconcile.

Natalie and Dana
Another particularly remarkable aspect is that these women are in no way portrayed as “butch,” highlighting the (seemingly little-known) fact that characteristics typically associated with femininity (physical and otherwise) and a genuine passion for sports are, in fact, not contradictory.

Between garbage can basketball and obsessing over stats, there is no way they could be mistaken for anything but authentic sports geeks. This is especially accentuated by the recurring role of Jenny, an adult film actress with a keen interest in sports and a solid command of baseball trivia.

While being the boss and being a woman do not pose a discrepancy on the level of the show itself, funnily enough, it is Dana, who, at one point, says:
“You know, you’re the boss all day long, and you’re barking out these orders and you just want… I don’t know. A check on your femininity, when you’re done.”

Coming from Dana, this is somewhat surprising, as it has never seemed to bother her in this particular way. She has always been the epitome of the gorgeous, desirable woman who just happens to be a sports nut (a type of person Sports Night is heavily populated with). As a matter of fact, just a few episodes prior, Dana appears in a revealing leather outfit, as she is on her way to a “biker chick” themed bachelorette party. While putting on her high heel boots, she asks Natalie:
“Tell me something. Why would the nickelback have set up five yards off the line on third-and-one inside the 50 and they’ve been going off-tackle all day?”

Clearly, this is a reference that only outright American Football enthusiasts would get. Her cascade of a monologue in sports jargon illustrates that her in-depth knowledge of sports goes hand in hand with her femininity, despite popular belief on and off television.

The cast of Sports Night (Joshua Malina as Jeremy Goodwin on the left)

Dana doesn’t just run the show that she produces, she actually runs the show everywhere else, as well. You might call her a bit of a control freak that, in all her neurotic ways, evokes comparison to Monica Geller on Friends. Dana is the center of the group who often speaks up for or makes decisions for others. Of all the women in charge in her group of friends and coworkers, she is without a doubt the leader. Just as she calls the shots on Sports Night, Dana does so in her private life. This is especially the case with her best friend Natalie, who looks up to her, and her long time love interest Casey. During the budding of Dana and Casey’s flawed romance there is barely a moment where Casey asserts himself. As he finally asks her out after 90 days of pondering, he receives a slight scolding for having waited too long.

Neil Finn’s song, “She Will Have Her Way,” is used in the Season 2 premiere as well as multiple times throughout the season. And, as is always the case with Dana, she will have her way. Right up until she doesn’t. On the night of what should be their first date, Dana claims to have had an epiphany and presents her new “dating plan”: instead of the two of them going out on a date as planned, they will postpone it, while Casey has to date other women for 6 months. The logic of this eludes everyone but Dana herself, yet she will not let go of the idea until it blows up in her face, as Casey finally decides to move on with one of the women he went on a mandatory date with.

Natalie in Sports Night
With regard to Natalie, one might point out that she has certain qualities of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. On looking more closely, however, it becomes clear that her character can rather be seen as a deconstruction of the trope. Bearing in mind that Sports Night premiered in 1998, a full seven years before the term was coined, Sorkin seems to have unwittingly been very much ahead of his time.

Besides being a stunningly beautiful and intelligent woman, she is portrayed as slightly quirky (though hardly any crazier than the rest of Sports Night‘s main characters). She often resorts to bizarre, impulsive behavior and clearly serves a purpose for Dan’s troubled character on several occasions. However, she is very well aware of her captivating charm and peculiarity and alludes to it every now and then. As for her relationship with Jeremy, she does partly hold the position of the vivacious, upbeat character that struggles to grab Jeremy by the hand, teach him to embrace life and, essentially, “live a little.” Yet, instead of reducing her to this function, Sorkin depicts her as an independent woman. It becomes clear that she is mainly looking out for her own interests. On an equally important note, Natalie doesn’t succeed in her efforts to get Jeremy to savor life and step out of his comfort zone until ultimately this is the reason they break up.

A Big Thing Badly

Sports Night experiences a crisis in one of the first few episodes, as Natalie is sexually assaulted by an athlete. In general, not a lot of backstory on Natalie is revealed in the course of the series, whereas we learn quite a bit about the family members of the rest of the ensemble cast. Consequently, this episode highlights her character in quite a meta way. It is established early on that Natalie prefers not to talk about private matters. She tries to dismiss the incident and only mentions it to her staff as they find out elsewhere. 
The cast of Sports Night watches a game
The incident poses a conflict on many levels. It is Dana who sends Natalie to do a pre-interview with a football player who happens to be a convicted felon. The objective is to question him about the off-limits topic of domestic violence against his girlfriend. Instead of sending Jeremy, Dana uses Natalie to “provoke a better response to the questions.”

As the assault is revealed, Dana exploits this to get an exclusive story. Realizing the highly problematic nature of her decision, she nonetheless makes a deal with the athlete’s representatives, having the ratings of her television show in mind:
Dana: “Despite a mountain of fairly immutable evidence, I am prepared to believe that what happened to Natalie didn’t happen to Natalie. And I’m confident I can persuade Natalie to see it the same way.”

In exchange for their discretion they would get 5 minutes of air time touching on the topic that would otherwise have been off limits.
Eventually, Dana calls off the interview altogether only three minutes before the show in an effort to do the right thing after all. Ultimately, the prospect of an exclusive news story makes way for decency regarding this sensitive subject. 
Natalie and Dana hug it out
Interestingly, the incident provokes a particularly adverse reaction in Jeremy, who at that time already carries a torch for Natalie. While the knight in shining armour attire certainly isn’t tailor-made for a type like Jeremy, he nonetheless feels compelled to take the athlete aside and warn him: “You touch her again, I’m gonna have you killed.” In a comment evidencing the show’s capacity to treat serious subjects with sharp and subtle humor, he goes on to say, “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m gonna pay someone $50 to have you killed.”

Following the assault, Natalie gets death threats of her own. She literally gets slut shamed in the subsequent episode when a hateful message reaches her via email, saying “Dear slut, You should never have been in that locker room where men have just played the game of football.”
Felicity Huffman as Dana Whitaker in Sports Night
In the mean time, she receives special treatment from her co-workers. Initially, the crew wants to shelter her by giving her the rest of the night off. “Am I being fired?” she asks, assuming the position of being doubly victimized. As Natalie is distracted and makes mistakes later on, her staff is very understanding and refrains from calling her on it – very much to her distaste:
“Why not? Why aren’t you laughing at me? Why aren’t you mad at me? (…) Look, all I want is to get it right, and when I don’t, I expect to be treated like a professional. I expect to be yelled at. I want to be treated like the show is still important. I want to be treated like my job is still important!”

She sees her career in jeopardy, which she later explains to be the reason why she’d rather not have the public know about the incident. Natalie refers to a Boston Globe reporter whose story of sexual assault by an athlete was exposed, and asserts: “There isn’t a female sports journalist that didn’t learn their lesson from it.” 
Josh Charles as Dan Rydell and Peter Krause as Casey McCall in Sports Night
Clearly, being a female sports reporter bears certain considerations that being a male sports journalist generally doesn’t.

From parents’ disapproval (as Dana quotes her mother: “sports is no place for an educated woman”) to more serious issues as the one mentioned above, there are a myriad of reasons to become a woman working in the field of sports, to prove them all wrong, step by step, and take on this patriarchal society of ours.
* For those unfamiliar with the series: One of Aaron Sorkin’s many clever one-liners that keep resurfacing in his shows and are referred to as “Sorkinisms.”
 

Artemis Linhart is a freelance writer and film curator with a weakness for escapism.


Women in Sports Week: The Political Gets Personal for ‘Friday Night Lights’ Jess Merriweather

This is a guest post by Sarah Stringer.
(Spoilers ahead for the last couple of seasons of the Friday Night Lights TV show – if you haven’t seen it already, I’ll wait while you watch all five seasons of the show, then watch the movie and read the book. Trust me; it’s worth your time. Also, warning: links to TV Tropes. Do not click if you have anything else to do for the next 24 hours.)

Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Jess Merriweather in Friday Night Lights
A long time ago, movies, books and TV shows figured out how much emotion there is to harness in stories about sports. Sports are driven by dreams, hope, love, hate, anger, exhilaration and devastation. There’s power in that kind of passion – power that leads Rocky Balboa to knock out the mighty Ivan Drago, and Friday Night Lights’ Vince Howard to throw 60-yard bombs. Portraying them this way is truth in television; heart and love of the game really are major factors in athletic achievements, and it makes for some incredible narratives.

This says something about the fact that so many sports stories (fictional ones, and coverage of real-life ones) are male-dominated. It tells us what depths of emotions society ascribes exclusively to androgens. There are some exceptions to this rule – movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Baby, and A League of Their Own come immediately to mind. 
Jess, equipment manager, stands on the field with the football team
For all its well-written female characters and feminist storylines, Friday Night Lights is, overall, not one of those exceptions. It would be unrealistic if it were; it’s about a small Texas town that idolizes its football team, and small Texas towns do not idolize (or, often, have) female football teams. The show offers us complex, three-dimensional female characters like Tyra Collette, Lyla Garrity, Tami Taylor and Becky Sproles, but Jess Merriweather is the only character who demonstrates that love of sport (in a story in which “sport” = “football,” the be all and end all of sport in that town) isn’t reserved for men.

In season four, Jess strode into that hyper-masculine domain with every bit as much passion as the male characters, and the extra savvy, self-awareness, and anger that comes from being a woman in a man’s world. She became a cheerleader because it was the only way for a girl like her to get close to the sport she grew up teaching to her much younger brothers, but as she gets older, that’s not enough for her. Helping her little brothers and running drills with her football star boyfriend isn’t enough; she wants to be involved for herself. She convinces Coach Taylor to let her be an equipment manager, with the intention of someday becoming a high school football coach.

Jess argues with her boyfriend Vince (Michael B. Jordan) in the locker room
Jess’ storyline is consistent with FNL’s aversion to creating caricatures; the people around her are not divided into evil, misogynistic villains and helpful, sympathetic allies. Coach Taylor, the compassionate hero of the show, dismisses her completely at first and has to be talked into giving her a chance. Her boyfriend, Vince, is portrayed as an essentially good guy, but he gets angry and protective when his teammates start messing with her. He was raised in a culture that makes him feel emasculated and threatened by having a girlfriend who handles herself among the boys, and the show realistically portrays Jess’ frustration at having to reconcile her feelings for Vince with the way his issues hold her back.
Also realistic is how personal Jess’ storyline is. She isn’t a feminist crusader; she’s a reminder to feminist crusaders of who they’re fighting for: high school girls who find their dreams limited by rules they didn’t ask for or create. She’s a girl with her own ambitions and goals, and she’s interested in systemic issues only to the extent that they get in the way of those goals. When Coach Taylor tells her there are no female football coaches, she goes home and prints off a story about the first female high school football coach in America (even though, as Coach Taylor points out, it’s only a story because there isn’t a second one). The point of Jess’ storyline is that she shouldn’t have to do this kind of feminist campaigning; the path to her dreams should be no less clear than it would be if she were male. 
Jess as a cheerleader
FNL offers us some feminist crusaders; Tami Taylor takes on higher-up perpetrators of systemic injustices on issues of education and abortion and lobbies her husband in defense of Jess’ right to work in football-related jobs. Citing Tami as an inspiration, Tyra Collette ends the series by expressing a desire to go into politics, so she can make a difference on a larger scale. Jess, however, is not in it for the politics. She’s in it for her own rights, and systemic political issues just happen to be in her way.

Jess starts the show defined by her relationships to the male characters; she’s a love interest for Landry Clark and Vince Howard (and a catalyst for issues between the two of them), and her status as a cheerleader makes playing a supporting role to boys a central aspect of her life. However, even when her only important storylines were romantic, she was known mostly for not taking shit from the male characters. In a culture in which most students, especially female ones, let the football players get away with anything, she stands up to Landry for destroying her bike, and calls Vince out on going back to his life of crime. 
Jess talks to Landry (Jesse Plemons) at her locker

Jess’ autonomy develops far beyond simply filling a “sassy” love interest role, as her own, independent storyline really starts in season five. She talks to Tami Taylor about her frustrations with going back to being a cheerleader after spending all summer working with her boyfriend, Vince, on his football skills. She refuses to be a “rally girl,” whose job it is to take care of her football player by wearing his jersey and presenting him with baked goods every week.
This is when Jess, with some help from Tami, begs Coach Taylor for a job as an equipment manager. Coach Taylor doesn’t understand why this is important, but he lets it happen. She faces expected sexist jabs that come from being a girl in the boys’ locker room, but what makes her angrier is the way Vince tries to control her and keep her out of there. By the end of the series, her romantic storylines are subplots to her dream of becoming a football coach, just as most of the male characters’ stories are focused on their own dreams.
Jess and Vince
Jess’ other relationships show us how she got the way she is. She grew up poor, and she takes on a lot of responsibility, working long hours at her dad’s restaurant and taking on a parental role to her younger brothers. She gains maturity beyond her years, which shows in all aspects of her life. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a teenage female character who’s emotionally aware and straightforward about her feelings. She breaks stereotypes about game-playing girls by being upfront and honest with Vince and Landry in her romantic relationships and shows similar assertiveness with her father.

All this backstory should leave us unsurprised that Jess is willing to take on the odds and fight for what she wants, as she’s spent her whole life doing that. She fights her father when his hatred for the game of football emotionally harms his son. She fights Vince when he displays juvenile, sexist behaviour, and her refusal to take this from him leads to the end of their relationship. It’s implied that growing up female in a man’s world (and with dreams of existing in a very male-dominated part of that world), and poor and black in a world dominated by the more affluent, mostly white side of town, is what’s made her as strong as she is. 
Jess stands with members of the football team
However, one of my favourite aspects of Jess’ character is that she manages to be mature and savvy without being unrealistically stoic, the “strong female character” who shows no real weakness or emotions. Her feelings for the boys she dates are genuine, her love for her brothers and parents is obvious, and most of all, her passion for the game of football is overwhelming. She doesn’t always know the perfect way to fight, and she gets as angry, frustrated, depressed, and excited as anyone else. We see her cry sometimes, and not in the media’s common “it turns out the ice queen is really just an emotional woman all along” way, but in a “she has emotions – strong, weak, positive, negative, often nuanced and mixed, just like all the other male and female characters” way. Her emotions don’t make her weak or unlikable, but realistic and relatable, so you (or, at least, I) can’t help but root for her.

It’s Jess’ ability to be strong while still being emotionally realistic and flawed, and having nuanced relationships while still having her own goals/agenda and an independent storyline, that put her in the rare, coveted category of a truly three-dimensional female character. The fact that her storyline involves struggles against systemic sexism, perpetrated in a realistic way by well-meaning people around her, is icing on the cake to make her a feminist’s dream. We never see Jess score a touchdown, but she’s one of my favourite fictional feminist sports figures.

Sarah Stringer is a psychology student in Ontario, with an interest in the political aspects of pop culture.

Women in Sports Week: The Toughest Trio: A Review of ‘The Boxing Girls of Kabul’ (2011)

Saber Sharifi trains women boxers in The Boxing Girls of Kabul

This is a guest post by Rachael Johnson. 

The Boxing Girls of Kabul is a Canadian documentary about the boxing careers of three young Afghan women, sisters Sadaf and Shabnam Rahimi and Shahla Sikandary. It was written and directed by the Afghan-Canadian filmmaker Ariel J. Nasr. Based in Afghanistan, Nasr produced the recently Oscar-nominated live action short, Buzkashi Boys (2012).

The Boxing Girls of Kabul opens with harrowing archival footage of an execution of a woman at the Olympic Stadium in Kabul on November 16th, 1999. Many will recall this secretly-recorded film from news reports, but it will always disturb and haunt: the kneeling woman, clad in a pale blue burqa, attempts to turn her head to her executioner as she is about to be shot. Mercifully, the camera cuts to a blue sky and carries us directly to contemporary Afghanistan. We see, in close up, the determined brown eyes of a young female boxer training at the very same stadium where women were executed during the dark days of Taliban rule.

We are first introduced to Sadaf who tells us that she and her fellow fighters spar in the same gym where girls were imprisoned. She is somewhat frightened by the place itself but explains, “When we play sports, we forget our problems. When I box, I feel happy. I box because I want to advance myself, and advance Afghanistan.” Sincere and ambitious, the girls want to determine their own destinies. Shahla says, “In the future, I want to be the most progressive and bright of all Afghan girls…a champion.” All are hungry for medals. 
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Boxing has always, of course, been the most traditionally masculine, most brutal and most controversial of sports. Female boxing remains a divisive issue around the world and only became an Olympic event at the London 2012 Games. It is all the more remarkable that girls from a land scarred by gender discrimination have taken up the sport. The girls’ coach, Sabir Sharifi, explains, “The Taliban were absolutely opposed to sports. They had an especially strong opposition to boxing.” A girl boxer in a hijab is an incongruous image for many–or most–Westerners. For the Taliban, female boxing is simply sinful. Boxing has also, however, been the sport of the marginalized and oppressed so it is perhaps unsurprising that these young Afghan women have chosen boxing. The sport for the trio is identified with self-empowerment and female self-worth.

It is interesting to see the boxing girls of Kabul negotiate the streets and shops of the capital with their trainers–as well as journey abroad for competitions–but the interviews with them and their families at home and in the gym provide a more intimate and perhaps more illuminating portrait of the nature of their lives. In the locker room, we see the trio and their peers talk about exam results, tease each other about their hair and spray bottled water over each other. These glimpses serve to remind the viewer that their interests and aspirations are fundamentally the same as most young women around the world. They also give a strong idea of both their incomparable pressures and camaraderie.

Nasr also provides helpful insights into the attitudes of the men in the boxers’ lives. Their coach is a very likeable, middle-aged man. Sharifi formed the girls’ boxing team in 2007 with “a few brothers.” He himself was a victim of Afghan’s tragic, war-torn history. The 1980s Soviet occupation, he explains, put an end to his Olympic ambitions. Sharifi and his colleagues consistently demonstrate support and affection for their charges. He says he wants champions. There persists in the West an Islamophobic, racist belief–even among self-proclaimed progressive people–that all Muslim men in all Muslim lands dominate, control and persecute their daughters. The forward-thinking likes of men such as Sharifi constitute a formidable response to such bigotry. He is not alone. Shahla explains that it is her father who supports her the most in her family. “He thinks that a girl can be someone in the future,” she says. Sadaf and Shabnam Rahimi’s father is also encouraging while their progressive mother wants them to continue both their education and sporting career.
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Female boxing, of course, enrages the Taliban and Afghan conservatives in general. The girls are given the opportunity to compete in Vietnam and Kazakhstan. Unhappily, increased recognition brings increased intimidation for both trainer and coach. Sharifi is threatened on the street while Shahla experiences pressure to stop boxing from her brother. He is shown to be infinitely more conservative than her father. In English, he expresses concern that his sister’s boxing career will endanger the family in the event of a full-blown Taliban resurgence. He worries that the family will be accused of being “kuffar” (non-Muslim). “Nothing except this,” he insists. But is he merely motivated by concern for his family’s safety? He scorns his sister’s independence, accuses her of not praying with satisfactory piety and delivers this extraordinarily unsettling threat: “If I was in my father’s place, I would set so many restrictions she wouldn’t even be able to eat without being afraid.” But the girls bravely pursue their sport despite these difficult and dangerous circumstances.

There are other obstacles. Funds and facilities are inadequate. They do not even have a ring. In Vietnam and Kazakhstan, we see them outclassed and overwhelmed by their hosts. It is painful to watch, but I was reminded by a quote by the novelist and boxing writer Joyce Carol Oates: “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.” The girls, understandably, complain of inadequate training and resources, but they are also, of course, cutting their teeth. Shahla is fortunate to secure a bronze medal in Vietnam–there were only four in her weight class–gaining the attention of the Afghan media. Her father is proud of her achievement.

We learn, at the end of the documentary, however, that Shahla no longer competes. Pregnant with her first child, she visits the gym “when she can” and works part-time. You wonder if she will return. It is heartening though to hear that Sadaf continues to compete and that Shabnam aims to be a doctor. Perhaps they have been empowered by their mother’s words: “In Afghanistan, we have to fight against men to show we have pride.” 
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Documentaries like The Boxing Girls of Kabul are invaluable in that they give voice to the voiceless. These young women possess a rare courage. Spirited, ambitious and attractive, they make engaging subjects. The cinematography (by Nasr) is not particularly striking in The Boxing Girls of Kabul and it is a no-frills documentary formally. The director is modest and unadorned in both style and approach. The interviewer is a silent presence; the boxers as well as trainers and family members speak for themselves. This works well as they appear to reveal their hopes and fears quite openly. The documentary, however, is simply too short at 52 minutes. The trio’s stories could have been further developed. It is evident that they box for themselves, their gender and their country, but it would be have been rewarding if the filmmakers had explored their motivation more deeply. Their influences could also have been cited. Which fighters (male or female) inspired them?

The young women are trail-blazers in a patriarchal society still plagued by religious extremism. They are, equally, children of war. For decades, Afghanistan has been blighted by conflict. Bizarrely, the documentary does not mention that ongoing war between foreigners and the Taliban. The prolonged presence of the American military in Afghanistan is curiously absent from all conversation. It would have been interesting to know the boxers’ thoughts on the conflict as well as the role of the West in relation to the status of women in Afghanistan. The Boxing Girls of Kabul gives relatively little historical background and context. It does not explain how the Taliban came to power or shed new light on their mindset. (If you want to learn about the roots of Taliban, start with Ahmed Rashid’s 2000 book Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia.) 

Listening to Shahla’s conservative brother was, then again, quite enlightening. His obsession with what others think reveals a deep lack of imagination and reflects a fear of difference. Social conformity seems to have a tyrannical hold on him. The documentary does, however, unsettle stereotypes about both Afghan men and women. This is invaluable. Nasr has created an affecting, compassionate portrait of proud, independent Afghan womanhood in The Boxing Girls of Kabul. Ultimately, there are few things more moving than witnessing the endeavors of an oppressed group or people.

Rachael Johnson has contributed articles to CINEACTION, www.objectif-cinema.com and www.jgcinema.com.

Women in Sports Week: Bend It Like Bynes: Ambivalent Empowerment in ‘She’s the Man’

Everybody has a secret …
This is a guest post by Caitlin Moran.
The first time I saw She’s the Man, I was in the middle of a 23-hour band trip bus ride, and probably in the first stages of delirium. I had low expectations for the movie, and even lower expectations for what remained of my sanity—and yet, when one of the chaperones popped in the She’s the Man DVD, I found myself loving it. I was sitting next to my best friend and varsity soccer teammate, and we were both loopy enough from extended time on the road to enjoy the goofier moments of the movie while still reveling in the extended soccer scenes. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I returned to the movie seven years later to examine its depiction of high school sports—watching Amanda Bynes change clothes and genders on a Spin the Apple carnival ride can only be funny so many times, right? (Wrong—I will never not laugh at that scene.) But whether the rest of the movie would uphold the integrity of the female athlete was a different story altogether.

Justin and the rest of the Cornwall boys. You’re gonna regret this, bro.

Like that other perennial high school favorite set on an unbelievably beautiful campus, She’s the Man is based loosely—loosely—on Shakespeare, in this case Twelfth Night. Bynes plays Viola Hastings, a high school soccer star, living out the last days of summer playing the beautiful game with beautiful people, including her boyfriend Justin (Robert Hoffman), on the beach. But the start of school brings unwelcome surprises: in the first ten minutes of the movie, Viola and her teammates discover that their school, Cornwall Prep, has eliminated the girls soccer team, leaving them without a way to showcase their skills for prospective college scouts. (Viola harbors dreams of wearing the Carolina blue at UNC Chapel Hill, no doubt a nod to the women’s soccer legends like Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, among others, who played there.) If this were a very different movie, Viola would have brought a Title IX claim against Cornwall, and we would have been treated to courtroom montages instead of training scenes. But Viola takes a different route: after Justin laughs in her face at the idea of the girls trying out for the boys’ team—and gets himself epically dumped—Viola hatches a plan to impersonate her twin brother Sebastian (secretly in London with his bandmates) at rival high school Illyria, make the boys’ soccer team there, and beat Justin at his own game. Literally.

Hell hath no fury like a girls soccer team scorned

Complications ensue, as they must. Viola-as-Sebastian finds herself in the middle of a messy love triangle between her hunky roommate Duke (Channing Tatum, at his most bro-with-a-heart-of-gold) and Duke’s object of affection, Olivia (Laura Ramsey), who begins falling for “Sebastian” during intimate chats over dissected animals in science lab. Circling this sticky wicket are Monique (Alexandra Breckinridge), the real Sebastian’s horrid girlfriend who refuses to be dumped, and Viola’s mother (Lynda Byrd), who cherishes dreams of seeing her little tomboy walk across the stage as a debutante. Oh, and there’s a tarantula.
Even in the midst of all the hullabaloo, the movie does manage to devote a fair amount of time to soccer. Viola tries out for the boys’ team and makes second string, after informing Coach Dinklage, played by real-life footballer/testicle-grabber Vinnie Jones, that she is unable to play on the “skins” team in shirts v. skins because she is “allergic to the sun”—and yes, you can buy that phrase on a hoodie. Second string, however, isn’t good enough to get Viola on the field against Cornwall, so she strikes a bargain with Duke: he’ll help her up her game enough to make first string in time for the Cornwall game, and she’ll convince Olivia to give Duke a date. They both succeed, but when the real Sebastian returns from London the night before the big game, Viola’s tangled web begins to unravel. But still—I’m sure you can guess where this is going, in the end, right down to the final game-deciding penalty kick awarded to Viola against—surprise!—Cornwall goalie Justin.
Who is that handsome fellow?
 
Viola’s conquest of her gross ex is facilitated through this penalty kick, on a pitch where the winners and losers are clearly delineated. This isn’t a symbolic victory: Viola literally puts the winning point on the board. Unlike the weak, intolerable Monique, who is destined to storm in and out of scenes in a constant state of prissy frustration, Viola uses soccer to transcend her status as a girl, which otherwise would mark her as an idolized object of desire (Olivia), a walking punchline (her unfortunately headgeared classmate Eunice), or tokens of sexual conquest (her former teammates Kia and Yvonne, who pretend to be her desperate exes to increase her cred with the Illyria boys). Through her athletic talent, Viola gets to vanquish the boy who insulted and belittled her on a playing field where the subsequent victors are easily recognizable.

Amanda Bynes as Viola in She’s the Man

Interestingly, although Justin almost immediately becomes the villain who Viola must overcome, it didn’t start out that way. In fact, the first lines of the movie are Justin’s, emphatically celebrating Viola’s goal during the beach soccer game, before telling her that she’s better than half the guys on his team. Here is a perfect example of the affirming boyfriend that sunny, sassy Viola deserves. It’s only when Viola threatens to encroach on Justin’s (literal) turf that he changes his tune, agreeing with Cornwall coach Pistonek that girls can’t play sports at the same level as boys. Obviously we’re meant to revel in the downfall caused by his misogyny, and I certainly did, but we’re also meant to celebrate the willingness of Duke—and Coach Dinklage—to give Viola a spot on the team despite her gender once she’s found out. Yet I find myself unable to believe that the eminently “no homo” Duke we met in the first half hour of the movie would have reacted any differently than Justin did, if he knew that “Sebastian” was a girl all along.
In the end, She’s the Man is ambivalent about the role of soccer in Viola’s life. On one hand, Viola does prove that she can play with the boys, and at times even exceed them. She conquers Justin and Coach Pistonek, who doubted and mocked her. But everything about her soccer career is irreparably tangled up with her relationships with boys. When she decides to impersonate her brother, she’s doing it just to stick it to Justin—no UNC Chapel Hill scouts will come to see her as a boy. Even the side volley she uses to score on Justin in the final game wouldn’t have been possible without a setup from Duke (who taught her the move in the first place).

Viola (aka Sebastian) hanging with the guys

The last shot of the movie shows Viola and Duke together on the field in Illyria red, seemingly bearing out Coach Dinklage’s rather touching commitment to equality on the pitch. But whether this equality can be sustained long term—especially on a team of guys who were so impressed when Viola-as-Sebastian cruelly humiliated Monique in front of an entire restaurant—remains to be seen. And even if it can be, what happens to the rest of Viola’s former teammates, still stuck at Cornwall without a team or a twin brother to impersonate? Don’t they deserve a revenge penalty kick as well? For real-life Violas—and Kias and Yvonnes—the importance of Title IX protection can’t be overstated. What the movie could have done was show that all female athletes—not just the ones good enough to play with the boys—deserve their day on the pitch. Perhaps there will be a sequel—She’s the Man: Title IX Lawsuit. Now that’s a sports movie I would pay to see.
Caitlin Moran is a textbook editor with a penchant for sassy footnotes. After spending many years battling Western New York winters, she now lives in Queens with a cat and too many books for her apartment. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Pleiades, Pure Francis, and the Women’s Media Center blog.



Women in Sports Week: ‘The Blind Side’: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

Movie poster for The Blind Side
This guest post by Nine Deuce previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 23, 2011.
Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.
Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

Sandra Bullock schools Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

The movie chronicles the major events in the life of a black NFL player named Michael Oher from the time he meets the rich white family who adopts him to the time that white family sees him drafted into the NFL, a series of events that apparently proves that racism is either over or OK (I’m not sure which), with a ton of southern football bullshit along the way. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wife of a dude named Sean Tuohy, played by — no shit — Tim McGraw, who is a fairly minor character in the movie despite the fact that he is said to own, like, 90 Taco Bell franchises. The story is that Oher, played by Quinton Aaron, is admitted into a fancy-pants private Christian school despite his lack of legitimate academic records due to the insistence of the school’s football coach and the altruism of the school’s teachers (as if, dude), where he comes into contact with the Tuohy family, who begin to notice that he is sleeping in the school gym and subsisting on popcorn. Ms. Tuohy then invites him to live in the zillion-dollar Memphis Tuophy family compound, encourages him to become the best defensive linebacker he can be by means of cornball familial love metaphors, and teaches him about the nuclear family and the SEC before beaming proudly as he’s drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

The Tuohy family prays over mounds of food

I’m sure that the Tuohy family are lovely people and that they deserve some kind of medal for their good deeds, but if I were a judge, I wouldn’t toss them out of my courtroom should they arrive there bringing a libel suit against whoever wrote, produced, and directed The Blind Side, because it’s handily the dumbest, most racist, most intellectually and politically insulting movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes the Tuohy family — especially their young son S.J. — look like unfathomable assholes. Well, really, it makes all of the white people in the South look like unfathomable assholes. Like these people need any more bad publicity.

Quentin Aaron puts in a pretty awesome performance, if what the director asked him to do was look as pitiful as possible at every moment in order not to scare anyone by being black. Whether that was the goal or not, he certainly did elicit pity from me when Sandra Bullock showed him his new bed and he knitted his brows and, looking at the bed in awe, said, “I’ve never had one of these before.” I mean, the poor bastard had been duped into participating in the creation of a movie that attempts to make bigoted southerners feel good about themselves by telling them that they needn’t worry about poverty or racism because any black person who deserves help will be adopted by a rich family that will provide them with the means to a lucrative NFL contract. Every interaction Aaron and Bullock (or Aaron and anyone else, for that matter) have in the movie is characterized by Aaron’s wretched obsequiousness and the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned over the head with the message that you needn’t fear this black guy. It’s the least dignified role for a black actor since Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of James Robert Kennedy in Radio (a movie Davetavius claims ought to have the subtitle “It’s OK to be black in the South as long as you’re retarded.”). The producers, writers, and director of this movie have managed to tell a story about class, race, and the failures of capitalism and “democratic” politics to ameliorate the conditions poor people of color have to deal with by any means other than sports while scrupulously avoiding analyzing any of those issues and while making it possible for the audience to walk out of the theater with their selfish, privileged, entitled worldviews intact, unscathed, and soundly reconfirmed.

Kathy Bates wants to fist bump Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Then there’s all of the southern bullshit, foremost of which is the football element. The producers of the movie purposely made time for cameos by about fifteen SEC football coaches in order to ensure that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line would drop their $9 in the pot, and the positive representation of football culture in the film is second in phoniness only to the TV version of Friday Night Lights. Actually, fuck that. It’s worse. Let’s be serious. If this kid had showed no aptitude for football, is there any way in hell he’d have been admitted to a private school without the preparation he’d need to succeed there or any money? In the film, the teachers at the school generously give of their private time to tutor Oher and help prepare him to attend classes with the other students. I’ll bet you $12 that shit did not occur in real life. In fact, I know it didn’t. The Tuohy family may or may not have cared whether the kid could play football, but the school certainly did. It is, after all, a southern school, and high school football is a bigger deal in the South than weed is at Bonnaroo.

But what would have happened to Oher outside of school had he sucked at football and hence been useless to white southerners? What’s the remedy for poverty if you’re a black woman? A dude with no pigskin skills? Where are the nacho magnates to adopt those black people? I mean, that’s the solution for everything, right? For all black people to be adopted by rich, paternalistic white people? I know this may come as a shock to some white people out there, but the NFL cannot accommodate every black dude in America, and hence is an imperfect solution to social inequality. I know we have the NBA too, but I still see a problem. But the Blind Side fan already has an answer for me. You see, there is a scene in the movie which illustrates that only some black people deserve to be adopted by wealthy white women. Bullock, when out looking for Oher, finds herself confronted with a black guy who not only isn’t very good at appearing pitiful in order to make her comfortable, but who has an attitude and threatens to shoot Oher if he sees him. What ensues is quite possibly the most loathsome scene in movie history in which Sandra Bullock gets in the guy’s face, rattles off the specs of the gun she carries in her purse, and announces that she’s a member of the NRA and will shoot his ass if he comes anywhere near her family, “bitch.” Best Actress Oscar.

Sandra Bullock braves the Black Neighborhood

Well, there it is. Now you see why this movie made 19 kajillion dollars and won an Oscar: it tells a heartwarming tale of white benevolence, assures the red state dweller that his theory that “there’s black people, and then there’s niggers” is right on, and affords him the chance to vicariously remind a black guy who’s boss through the person of America’s sweetheart. Just fucking revolting.

There are several other cringe-inducing elements in the film. The precocious, cutesy antics of the family’s little son, S.J., for example. He’s constantly making dumb-ass smart-ass comments, cloyingly hip-hopping out with Oher to the tune of  Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” (a song that has been overplayed and passe for ten years but has now joined “Ice Ice Baby” at the top of the list of songs from junior high that I never want to hear again), and generally trying to be a much more asshole-ish version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. At what point will screenwriters realize that everyone wants to punch pint-sized snarky movie characters in the throat? And when will I feel safe watching a movie in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure a scene in which a white dork or cartoon character “raises the roof” and affects a buffalo stance while mouthing a sanitized rap song that even John Ashcroft knows the words to?

Sandra Bullock reads a story to her child son and Michael Oher

And then there’s the scene in which Tim McGraw, upon meeting his adopted son’s tutor (played by Kathy Bates) and finding out she’s a Democrat, says, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a black son before I met a Democrat?” Who would have thought I’d ever hear a “joke” that was less funny and more retch-inducing than Bill Engvall’s material?

What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if  the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.

I just don’t even know what to say about this movie. Watching it may well have been one of the most demoralizing, discouraging experiences of my life, and it removed at least 35% of the hope I’d previously had that this country had any hope of ever being anything but a cultural and social embarrassment. Do yourself a favor. Skip it and watch Welcome to the Dollhouse again.

Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina.

Women in Sports Week: ‘Edge of America’: Indigenous Communitism on the Hardwood

Movie poster for Edge of America

This is a guest post by Amanda Morris.

The opening images of Showtime’s movie, Edge of America, directed by Chris Ayre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), and inspired by a true story, are of a journey. A car drives through a peopleless desert landscape on an open and carless road. The driver, Kenny Williams (James McDaniel), is the new English teacher for the Three Nations Reservation in New Mexico. Our first view of the reservation is through his eyes as he stops at the edge of a pond and consults his map as he tries to find his way. But the first spoken words we hear are the Navajo language as two tribal women dicker over a price at a roadside stand. This outsider/insider construct continues throughout the movie as Kenny navigates and learns reservation life and culture through his female colleagues and students and especially his players once he agrees to coach the girls’ basketball team.

Movie still of the Lady Warriors on the basketball court
Based on the opening scenes, the viewer might assume that this story is about Kenny, but it is not. This movie ultimately focuses on community, defining one’s own identity, and the grounding strength of women. Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver created the term “communitism” by combining “community” and “activism” in his book, That the People May Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. The concept works well to describe what happens in this movie. Weaver writes, “Native peoples find their individual identities in the collectivity of community” (160). Edge of America is also a good example of representational sovereignty, in which “the Native is self-defining” instead of being colonialist minstrels for the dominant culture (163). The girls that Kenny recruits to play as Lady Warriors certainly face identity challenges in academic terms: None of them performs well academically and so were not allowed to join the basketball team, despite being the best players. As a result, the team is filled with lesser-skilled girls who flounder and have an impressive losing streak. School radio DJ Dwayne (Cody Lightning, Plains Cree), frequently reminds his listeners that the Lady Warriors are “all losers, all the time.”

James McDaniel, Delanna Studi, and Irene Bedard in Edge of America
Being defined as losers is something that the girls struggle to reverse as the movie progresses. Kenny guides them through physically hard practices and mentally hard readjustments of their personal expectations, and the Lady Warriors begin to coalesce into a self-defined community of proud women basketball players, but the road toward this goal is not straight.

This film privileges the indigenous perspective from the start and specifically shows strong women guiding the action either explicitly or implicitly. From Mother Tsosie (Geraldine Keams, Navajo) telling Kenny, “Drive” when he gives her a ride to the res in the movie’s second scene, to Annie Shorty (Irene Bedard, Inupiat/French Canadian/Cree) saving Kenny by giving him a ride to school the first day when his car breaks down, to Carla McKinney (Delanna Studi, Cherokee) teaching Kenny a lesson about humor and stories in his classroom. Each woman that Kenny encounters has something to teach. Annie challenges Kenny’s coaching strategy when he runs the girls hard during basketball practice and again near the end of the film. After the Lady Warriors have made it to the state finals, Annie and Kenny face off in a hotel room over his anger and his inability to accept imperfection in his players. Annie tells him that the girls have done everything he’s asked, from practicing hard and getting good grades, to winning. Kenny asks, “Then you tell me why I’m pissed off.” Annie retorts gently, “Because you’re a black man in America.” Kenny snidely agrees and Annie yells, “Well then get over it. You’re talkin’ to Indian people here. Get over it, get on with it, or get the hell out!”

The Lady Warriors look on as their coach sings the National Anthem
Many scenes involve such confrontations of assumptions, whether subtle or overt. In one softer scene, “Baby” Tsosie (Trini King, Navajo) experiences a traditional healing ceremony by her mother before a practice after she loses her ability to sink a basket, which Kenny disrupts and dismisses, saying, “Look, anybody who’s been witched, stand over there; the rest of us have basketball practice.” The community of women in whose presence this ceremony takes place is broken, and when Mother Tsosie calls African American Kenny a “white man” in Navajo and leaves, Annie asks Kenny, “Are you out of your mind? Insulting an elder like that?”

Kenny may be the English teacher and girls’ basketball coach, but he has a lot to learn about tradition, community, ceremony, and the ideas that are important to Three Nations peoples. In this respect, Kenny is the viewer’s guide, helping us to understand, even superficially, that indigenous peoples still exist and have ideas and practices that may sound and feel unfamiliar–but that resonate with truth. Eventually, a fellow teacher, Cuch (Wes Studi, Cherokee), takes him out into the desert for a talk.

Cuch offers Kenny a new perspective

Judgments and assumptions frequently threaten to subvert or ruin relationships and weaken the strength of community as each scene builds to the final game, but strong women are often the reason those relationships and community sense don’t fall apart in this film. Kenny learns to adapt his colonial assumptions and expectations to the needs of his Lady Warriors and discovers his own identity in the process.

The cast of Edge of America
In the skillful hands of director Chris Ayre, Edge of America presents the idea of indigenous peoples as communities with dignity, humor, intelligence, and skill, which is in direct opposition to the typical Hollywood “Indian.” Truly, this film is a refreshing change from that norm and a more realistic presentation of the realities, challenges, and joys of modern reservation life. Viewers likewise learn to think in new ways about American Indians today, thanks to the vivid storytelling and representations of one corner of indigenous experience in Edge of America.

Watch the trailer here. 

Amanda Morris, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of multiethnic rhetorics at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, and when she’s not writing or wrangling students, she loves shark fishing, gardening, and cooking with her man.

Call for Writers: Women in Sports

For some reason, Netflix keeps giving me a list of Sports Movies I Might Like. It took me about nine years of scrolling through the list to find a single Sports Movie featuring a woman—A League of Their Own (which is also the only woman-centered film Complex included on their list of “25 Best Sports Movies Streaming on Netflix Right Now”).
A League of Their Own, however, is not the only Sports Movie ever made about women. (And not to knock it, but the most famous scene in the film revolves around a dude—a drunk Tom Hanks yelling “There’s no crying in baseball” at one of the players). The lack of availability of these films, though, especially on a large-scale platform like Netflix, is yet another instance of women’s stories not being taken seriously.
And while there are a number of important articles that appear when you google “women in sports movies,” the second hit that comes up (after Wikipedia) is “Top 10 Hottest Women in Sports, Movies, Television and Whatever.” The one after that? ESPN’s ridiculously titled, “Evil Women of Sports Movies.”
Gross.
There are, fortunately, so many amazing organizations counteracting this nonsense by supporting women and girls in sports, from the Women’s Sports Foundation to the Feminist Majority Foundation.
Of course, we couldn’t have this conversation at all if it weren’t for Title IX. The law, passed in 1972, states that:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

This has undoubtedly influenced and empowered women and girls, and people are more willing to push back against discrimination now; Cassy Blythe’s Facebook page, “Let Her Play”—in honor of her 12-year-old daughter Maddy—has almost 50,000 likes.
But Dave Zirin wrote in his article for The Nation called, “Serena Williams and Getting ‘Emotional’ for Title IX” that in 1972, the majority of the public agreed with sports columnist Furman Bisher’s opinion of Title IX when he wrote:
What are we after, a race of Amazons? Do you want a companion or a broad that chews tobacco? What do you want for the darling daughter, a boudoir or a locker room full of cussing and bruises? A mother for your grandchildren or a hysterectomy?

Okay, bro.
We’ve certainly made great strides in girls’ and women’s participation in sports, but those stories aren’t showcased as often as they should be onscreen. Even when those stories are told, they tend to be problematic—either reducing women to objects or painting them as manly, tomboyish, and therefore unattractive. (There are notable exceptions, of course, and feel free to write about them. Just don’t feel bad for wanting to write a scathing piece about Adrian’s relationship with Rocky, for instance.) In order to more fully explore some common tropes about women in sports movies, male-centric films aren’t necessarily off limits—as long as the focus remains on how the women characters are most affected in the film.
Take a look at the oh-so-incomplete list below for general ideas about a potential topic. And if you’re especially feeling the Sports Theme, watch Julie Foudy, Olympic gold medalist and World Cup star, talk about the importance of Title IX and the necessity of educating our youth about its history.

As a reminder, these are a few basic guidelines for guest writers on our site:
–We like most of our pieces to be 1,000 – 2,000 words, preferably with some images and links.
–Please send your piece in the text of an email, including links to all images, no later than Friday, August, 23rd.
–Include a 2-3 sentence bio for placement at the end of your piece.
Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts. We look forward to reading your submissions!

Here are some potential films to write about but please feel free to suggest your own:

Against the Ropes
The Bad News Bears
Bend It Like Beckham
Blue Crush
Bring It On
The Cutting Edge
Eddie
ESPN’s Nine for IX Series
Girlfight
Gracie
Heart Like a Wheel
The Hot Flashes
Ice Castles
Just Wright
A League of Their Own
Love & Basketball
The Mighty Macs
Million Dollar Baby
National Velvet
Off the Rez
Pat and Mike 
Personal Best
Quarterback Princess
She’s the Man
Soul Surfer
Trouble with the Curve
Venus and Serena
When Billie Beat Bobby
Whip It
Wildcats
Wimbledon

Biopic and Documentary Week: The Blind Side, Take 2: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

This piece on The Blind Side, by Nine Deuce, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 23, 2011.

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The Blind Side movie poster

 

Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.
Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

Click here to read the full piece on The Blind Side.

Biopic and Documentary Week: The Blind Side, Take 1

This piece on The Blind Side, by Stephanie Rogers, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 3, 2010.

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The Blind Side movie poster

No. No to the over-abundant racial stereotypes showcased throughout the film. No to the kind-hearted southern woman as the Black man’s White Savior. No to the shallow, embarrassing, surface-level portrayal of class issues. No to the constant heavy-handed references to God and prayer and sexual morality. No to falling back on the tired tropes of wives as mommies and women as over-bearing and emasculating ball-busters. No to this film’s best picture nomination. Just … no.

imdb synopsis, as composed by Anonymous:

The Blind Side depicts the story of Michael Oher, a homeless African-American youngster from a broken home, taken in by the Touhys, a well-to-do white family who help him fulfill his potential. At the same time, Oher’s presence in the Touhys’ lives leads them to some insightful self-discoveries of their own.

Living in his new environment, the teen faces a completely different set of challenges to overcome. As a football player and student, Oher works hard and, with the help of his coaches and adopted family, becomes an All-American offensive left tackle.

The real synopsis, as composed by me:

The Blind Side depicts the story of a white woman who sees a Black man walking down the street in the rain. She tells her husband to stop the car, and he obliges—oh, his wife is just so crazy sometimes!—then, out of the goodness of her white heart, she allows him to spend the night in their offensively enormous home.

Unfortunately, she can’t sleep very well—the Black man might steal some of their very important shit! But the next day, when she sees that he’s folded his blankets and sheets nicely on the couch, she realizes that, hey, maybe all Black men really aren’t thieving thugs.

Then she saves his life.

There’s a way to tell a true story, and there’s a way to completely botch the shit out of a true story. Shit-botching, in this instance, might include basing the entire film around an upper-class white woman’s struggle to essentially reform a young Black man by taking him in, buying him clothes, getting him a tutor, teaching him how to tackle, and threatening to kill a group of young Black men he used to hang out with.

Click here to read the full piece on The Blind Side.

Biopic and Documentary Week: Blast from the Past: Jonathan Kaplan’s Heart like a Wheel

Heart Like a Wheel (1983)

This is a guest post from Melissa Richard.

Coming from a family of amateur drag racers (and a family where women outnumber men), it’s no surprise that my super-duper #1 female idol as a kid was Shirley Muldowney. A three-time National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel champion, Muldowney has been a part of professional drag racing since the mid-1960s and faced innumerable obstacles gaining entry into the boy’s club of the NHRA. Although not the first woman to race, she was the first to be licensed as a professional competitor and ran cars for the better part of nearly four decades, retiring only due to lack of sponsorship in 2003. Naturally, at the height of her career in the 70s / early 80s, her gender made excellent material for a biopic of her life, Heart like a Wheel (1983). And, perhaps just as naturally, the film does a pretty disappointing job of capturing the complexity of a woman who struggled to break the gender barrier in professional drag racing. 
Shirley Muldowney behind the wheel

Directed by Jonathan Kaplan and written by Ken Friedman, Heart like a Wheel hits the high points of Muldowney’s rise to prominence in the racing world: her beginnings as an amateur drag racer (which she did for extra money as a young, newly married waitress); her desire and ability to race professionally with the help of her first husband, mechanic Jack Muldowney, and son John; her divorce from Jack and relationship with fellow racer / crew boss Connie Kalitta; the failure of that relationship and, of course, the movie’s climax in which Muldowney beats Kalitta to take the NHRA U.S. Nationals championship in 1982. Heart like a Wheel has a certain B-movie quality to it, but garnered a 1984 Golden Globe nomination Best Performance by an Actress for Bonnie Bedelia, who plays Muldowney in the film. While not tremendously popular at the box office, it received favorable critical acclaim at film festivals and, among racing aficionados at least, still holds significant underground popularity.

Like most “women breaking barriers” films, especially those involving sports, Heart like a Wheel has a sort of against-all-odds feel to it that makes you want to like it, even if you know hokey story lines like that tend to be amped up by filmmakers for the benefit of paying audiences. This is no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that viewers are privy only to a watered-down version of the significant odds that Muldowney really faced. There are the typical sexist lines that a female drag racer could’ve expected to hear in a male-dominated sport (like when an announcer decries Muldowney receiving a kiss from her husband prior qualifying for her competition license ) and scenes that illustrate the roles Muldowney had to play as an hyper-sexualized novelty in order to do something she loved and was good at (including taking on the exotic name conferred on her by Connie Kalitta, “Cha Cha,” which she later rejected as a racing moniker). 
The “Cha Cha” version of Muldowney, 1972

Instead of developing important moments, like those in which she has trouble getting sponsorship because of her gender or struggles to make ends in the furious balance between a burgeoning racing career and a family, the film aims most of its dramatic focus on Muldowney’s romantic relationship with Kalitta.  In all of the drama of her seven-year fling with her hot-headed, womanizing guy, the lines and scenes that purport to represent the barriers Muldowney broke down seem pale and artificial, like they’ve been inserted only for the sake of occasionally reminding the viewer that Muldowney had to put up with a lot of macho crap in order to race.  

In all fairness, Muldowney and Kalitta’s relationship did have a significant impact on her career. They were involved professionally as well as personally, and her decision to cut him from her crew once the romance died made her even more of an underdog that she already was in the NHRA (since she couldn’t make it in racing without a bigger name than her own, apparently—or a man). In life and in the film, Muldowney took advantage of Kalitta’s license suspension (for fighting) and asked if she could race his top-fuel dragster with him as her crew chief, which put her on the road (literally) to three NHRA top-fuel championships. In fact, Kaplan and Friedman’s decision to organize the movie’s plot around Muldowney’s relationships with men is not unwarranted and lends an interesting masculine frame to a movie about a woman who came from and broke into, well, a masculine-framed world. From the opening black-and-white scene in which we see a young Shirley sitting on her father’s lap as he drives “too fast” down a deserted road through to the end when she shakes her fist in victory alongside her son / mechanic, this is a movie about a woman who lives in a world of men, is influenced by men, is supported and abandoned by men.
However, the male relationships that fostered Muldowney’s confidence and faith in her abilities hardly go noticed—especially the encouragement of her father.  One of the more touching scenes occurs in the first 10 minutes of the film, when a young Shirley Roque and her then beau Jack Muldowney approach her burly father to ask for permission to marry.  Tex Roque, a rough-and-tumble Country and Western singer, does not necessarily object to the marriage based on Shirley’s age—she’s sixteen—nor does he object to her choice of husband—he says that Jack is a really nice kid. What he objects to instead is that Shirley’s decision to marry so young will thwart her development as a self-sufficient woman. He advises her that “there’s not a man anywhere who’s worth giving up your ability to take care of yourself.”  Tex died fairly early in his daughter’s racing career, so perhaps there just wasn’t enough of a presence there to make it a bigger part of the film, but his advice – that Shirley take care of herself – doesn’t necessarily serve as the story arc that it seems set up to be.  Muldowney certainly gets things some things done herself: soliciting sponsorship, getting those needed signatures of support for her license application, and generally making it known that she would “mouth off” when she needed to.  But the crucial lesson for Shirley behind Tex’s advice gets lost in the development of her relationship with Kalitta, who is important in telling the Muldowney story, but who is certainly not the whole of it. 
Connie Kalitta (played by Beau Bridges) in Heart Like a Wheel

The relationship with Kalitta, of course, sets up the film’s narrative climax: the 1982 U.S. Nationals race in which Muldowney beat Kalitta to claim her third national title. They’d separated before the ’82 race, and the romance – in the film, but also to NHRA fans at the time—injects the duel with a provocative rivalry in which the little lady who can drive fast beats not just a male competitor, but a cheating, lying bastard.  It’s one of those convenient moments from Muldowney’s life story that make for a good Hollywood story, but the real victory there is overlooked by the film.  In 1982, no one had won three national NHRA titles and suddenly, someone had.  And it happened to be a woman. This achievement, though, is lost behind the drama of Muldowney beating a former lover who treated her badly and, by the film’s end, you wonder if Heart like a Wheel was really about a woman breaking into the male-dominated world of racing to begin with.

Maybe Heart like a Wheel is just a love story with fast cars in it—something for the boys and the girls in the Hollywood mindset. But the real story here is one about a woman who loved to drive and compete, inaugurated the participation of women in a sport decidedly “for boys,” and dealt with a mountain of complexity in the process (the usual accusations of being a bitch that go along with being an ambitious woman, the failure of her first marriage because of her racing career, and the emasculating threat a woman with a great ability posed to her male competitors). As someone who watched this movie over and over as a kid, and who could still watch it over and over as an adult, I can’t help but love Heart like a Wheel because I love Shirley. But I don’t love what Heart like a Wheel says about a woman who had a tough row and has served as a significant influence to those who follow in her footsteps– and what it doesn’t say about the challenges of women in a world dominated by men.


Melissa Richard is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a part-time English instructor at High Point University in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. She writes about nineteenth-century factory girls in British literature and culture, likes to take photographs of things and stuff, and thinks that dancing is really fun. 

Emmy Week 2011: Friday Night Lights: Deep in the Heart of Texas

Cast of Friday Night Lights
Each woman in Friday Night Lights, like each man in the show, is defined by their relationship to football. Or rather, the town tries to define them by their relationship to the featured football team (either the Dillon Panthers during the first seasons or the East Dillon Lions during the last two). What is and remains fascinating to me is how in the face of this identity pressure, the women are often more successful in redefining themselves than the men.

(I’d have included pictures, but I defy you to find a picture of any of these women on the Internet that doesn’t put them in some sort of come-hither pose that exposes a whole lot of skin. Sigh. These ladies deserve better.)

One of my favorite characters over the final two seasons of Friday Night Lights is Jess Merriweather. She is the eldest daughter of a former football player-turned-restaurant owner, older sister and surrogate mother to two younger brothers, and football lover. When we first meet her, she is a cheerleader for the new East Dillon Lions (and that image of her remains during the final season’s opening credits); one could wonder why we never saw her as a Dillon Panther cheerleader, but it becomes clear that she probably would never have fit in with the Lyla Garrity-types at the old high school.

No, it becomes clear that Jess is only a cheerleader because it is the only legitimate way for her, a girl, to be close to the game she adores. We see her coaching her younger brother, watching the games not in order to find a potential mate but to dissect plays and increase her football IQ. She is a smart, driven young Black woman, trapped between her love of football and the very gendered expectations of the town. When she is given the opportunity to “coach” star quarterback/boyfriend Vince over the summer, she finds her outlet. Unfortunately, once school and the season start up again, she is relegated to the demeaning role of “rally girl.”

The rally girl is a problematic, but all too realistic, role for Jess. She views herself as Vince’s equal, not his servant. The typical role of the rally girl is to do whatever she can to “motivate” the football players to play at their best on Fridays. In fact, the rally girls wear their respective player’s jersey, essentially owned by the player. It also should be noted that the girls get no say in who their player is; the girls randomly pull jerseys out of a box, and the player can barter and trade girls if the price is right (in one case, it’s a prized pig – do with that what you will). For most of the girls, it is an honor to be a rally girl, to be associated with the “star” football players. But that is not what Jess wants anymore from football; residual fame and greatness is no longer enough.

Jess, instead, becomes the equipment manager for the team. She gets a respectable uniform (versus the scantily-clad cheerleaders), access to the locker room, the coach, the sidelines, and the game. Her job is far from glamorous; she cleans jock straps, washes towels, works to prevent staph infections. Of course, this role strains her relationship with Vince; Vince tries to protect her from the ribbing the team subjects her to, while Jess wants to prove she can hold her own, on her own. In fact, it is Coach Taylor, and not the players, who has the most difficulty accepting Jess in her new role.

Jess fights for the respect of the players and Coach Taylor, working hard to be the best equipment manager/future coach she can be. She presents Coach Taylor with a profile of a female high school football coach to prove to him that it can be done. He tries to scare her by laying out her odds for success. Jess’ confidence never wavers, and Coach Taylor, champion of lost causes (see Vince, as well as Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen), is won over. We last see Jess as an equipment manager at her new school in Dallas.

Jess is just one example of the type of strong, well-developed female characters Friday Night Lights has created. The final two seasons also allowed us to get to know Mindy Riggins: older sister to former cast member Tyra Collette, stripper, mother, and wife to Billy Riggins (who was a former Panther star). In the early seasons, Mindy was simply an excuse for Tyra (and the rest of the cast) to visit The Landing Strip, Dillon’s local strip club. Mindy and their pill-popping, boozy mother Angela, were representative of everything Tyra wished to escape. Tyra did, in fact, successfully make it out, attending UT Austin. But what about those who are left behind in the small town of limited possibilities?

Mindy follows what might be seen as a stereotypical small-town girl path: she gets pregnant and gets married. Both she and Billy struggle with paying their bills and finding meaningful employment. But in what could easily have become a caricature of “white trash” existence (drinking, fighting, divorce, abuse) becomes a very real picture of two people trying to make it work in tough economic times. Mindy also steps up and takes Becky under her wing, a girl in whom she sees much of herself. Mindy also has a boozy mother, an absent father, and is left on her own to navigate through life (but more on her in a moment). When Mindy witnesses Becky being abused by her father and step-mother, she steps in (forcing Billy to do the same) and defends Becky. This is an incredible act from someone who, up until this point, saw Becky as competition rather than a sister. Mindy was perhaps the first person who ever stood up for Becky, acting as the advocate she herself probably never had.

This relationship, of course, is not without its problems; Mindy takes Becky and her son to The Landing Strip and even allows Becky to waitress at the club. Stripping (and as an extension, the strippers themselves) are neither glorified nor vilified by the show. In a town where economic opportunities are limited regardless of gender, these women make money the best way they can, using their bodies to pay the rent. There is nothing glamorous or liberating about their jobs, besides the “easy money” that can be made. But that money isn’t as easy as Becky thinks it is. We see Mindy furiously working out in order to get her body back into shape for the job, and even then, she is relegated to the humiliating “lunch shift.” But the women are also treated with dignity, at least within their group. They are far from being victims or victimized; initially, the show seemed to be saying that Mindy was a stripper because she didn’t have a father and her mother was lacking. But during the last two seasons, the strippers move from being symbols of failure to symbols of survival.

Mindy finds a community with the women of The Landing Strip, and a support system that she never had before, finding a place where she can be honest about her past abortion and how it is still impacting her relationships. The ladies from the strip club also take Becky to participate in one of her pageants; when one of the judges criticizes Becky’s choice of “supporters,” Becky clearly chooses her new family over her dreams of winning pageants. I’ll admit that I bawled like a baby during the final episode when Mindy and Becky say goodbye to each other when Becky moves out to live with her mom again. Family, in this show, is who sticks with us through the hard times.

Which brings us to the issue of the abortion. Becky gets pregnant during the fourth season (by a football player, no less), and she does, indeed, go through with having an abortion (some would argue at her mother’s insistence). Initially, the abortion more immediately impacts another character, Tami Taylor, who was at that time vice-principal at Dillon High School (Becky goes to East Dillon). Tami was brought in to counsel Becky when she had no one else to turn to. But while Becky seems to have come through the abortion okay, we learn in the fifth season that she still carries some unresolved feelings about the boy who got her pregnant.

This portrayal of a young girl feeling trapped by a bad situation is handled, to my mind, sensitively and realistically. Becky is not left unaffected by the procedure, nor does she seem permanently and disastrously scarred. Those around her (her mother, the mother of the baby’s father, the community) seem more upset and emotionally reactionary than Becky herself. It also seems that the extreme reactions of those around her affect her more than the abortion itself; it is again only when she confides in the strippers that she gets the level-headed and unconditional support she needs to move past the event. Abortion, it would seem, is not the issue; the hysteria surrounding it is.

These are just three of the complex women of Friday Night Lights. I’ve focused on the final two seasons, as this is the season that is up for an Emmy. One could look at the evolution of Lyla, Julie, Tyra, and other early-season characters, as well as the myriad of “minor” characters who have populated the edges of the show (Maura the rally girl, Epyk the problem child, Vince’s mother, and Devin the lesbian spring to mind). Each one deserves her own essay, devoted to all the ways the show did (and didn’t) do the characters justice.

Lee Skallerup Bessette has a PhD in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing in Kentucky. She also blogs at College Ready Writing and the University of Venus. She has two kids, and TV and movies are just about the only thing she has time for outside of her work and family. She also contributed a piece for Mad Men Week at Bitch Flicks called, “Things They Haven’t Seen: Women and Class in Mad Men.”



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