I Have Some Issues

Or, "Can I be a feminist and still like to listen to sports radio?"

This post started life as a long, penetrating dissertation on sports and gender relations in society. It worked in Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor, Yeardley Love (the LaCrosse player allegedly murdered by her boyfriend), sports radio, and beer commercials. But, it was too much and kind of boring. Maybe I'll break it down into several different posts. Or, maybe I'll only get around to this one rant.

So I listen to a lot of sports radio. Really, it's not good for my brain but it's fun. I like listening to sports pundits better than I like listening to political ones. Sports Guys are frequently smart and well-informed, and even though they also frequently aren't, when they aren't then at least the silly gossip-mongering is relatively harmless.

I should make a few things clear from the outset. First, when I listen to sports radio, I'm not looking for lefty political correctness (in fact, sports fandom cuts so thoroughly across political lines that sports talk radio in general is studiously apolitical, because it has to be). I'm certainly not looking for a Take Back the Night rally or serious discussions of female empowerment. When I want those things, I know where to find them, and it's definitely not on ESPN, and I'm fine with that. Second, I'm not actually all that easily offended anymore. That's probably a function of my job. I've been a criminal lawyer for so many years and seen so many serious outrages against people (done both by and to my clients) that having some lawyer or judge call me "Sweetheart" barely even registers on the Slight Annoyance Meter anymore. Plus, it's still true that the legal field is majority male, if no longer overwhelmingly so. Being able to be "one of the guys" and put up with a certain amount of locker room talk has been pretty adaptive behavior in my line of work.

Lastly, I understand that I'm not the primary demographic for sports talk radio. If women, particularly women over 40, represent much more than 15 or 20% of the listening audience, I'd be pretty surprised. So, let's be conservative and estimate that 90% of the listening audience is male and the other 10% is female.

Still, it's also fair to assume (just extrapolating from the percentages of the general population and the demographics of this area) that somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of the listening audience is non-white. And in the neighborhood of ten percent of the listening audience is (gasp!) gay. But it goes without saying that anyone in sports radio making any public comment that's even close to racially offensive would be instantly fired, or at least loudly reprimanded and forced to apologize publicly. And regardless of what individual personalities' attitudes might be about gay folks, homophobic remarks aren't considered OK anymore either. If some local sports team were to make a trade that the host considered bad or run a play that was boneheaded, it would not be OK for that host to describe it as "gay." And yet, gender-based insults are rampant in sports radio and I admit it's kind of starting to bug the crap out of me. The whole bit about insulting men by referring to them as women is starting to make me tired. It's not considered OK to call something "gay" as a pejorative term (and it should go without saying that I agree it isn't OK), but it's more than OK to insult guys by calling them girls.

Can we please be done with that? I'm kind of over that horseshit. I've heard that insult all my life. I don't want to get mad and fly in a huff over it and be the stereotypical feminist (Joke: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!). But still, really, enough already. Maybe women aren't the majority of the listening audience, but some of us are listening. When you use my entire gender as the basis to insult someone, why does it never for one nanosecond occur to you that I might find that, well, insulting?

In the scheme of things I admit this is pretty minor. As I said, my much deeper and more far-reaching discussion of this petered out. But seriously, it is totally possible to discuss--ad nauseum, in fact--whether LeBron James is going to stay in Cleveland without behaving like a bunch of giggling fifth-grade boys insulting the girls. And some of the girls might want to listen, boys.