Women Aren't Allowed To Be Excellent
Let's just change that, shall we?
In the 1990s I began working full time as an anti-violence activist. Really double full time as I worked in an anti-DV shelter and also at my own activist efforts writing, connecting people, creating a safe-home network to supplement anti-DV shelters, travelling, speaking, consulting and educating. It was a ton, and also it was the best time of my life. While I had had my own experiences with abuse, the first five to seven years were spent constantly learning new things and always, always, always ending the day just a bit better than I found it when I woke up.
I was a relatively unknown activist, but not entirely. Universities and conferences would book me as an important speaker, but I wasn’t going to show up on Rachel Maddow. I cared. I worked hard. I got things done. And though my speciality was niche, in that specialty there wasn’t anyone doing better work than I was. Just a minnow, but the biggest fish in my pond.
And that is all it took for me to be harassed and threatened. Rise to a level of “good enough to be noticed” and somebody among those noticing you will target you for the worst possible treatment. My own small experience with publicity and the harassment that can follow has made me both sensitive and sympathetic to what others go through, and they’ve been going through a lot lately.
As I said at Wonkette:
From Utah to Kentucky, girls are held back or harassed or even terrorized for displaying greatness. The same states would like you to believe that trans girls will steal opportunities and scholarships. But there’s a place in 6th grade basketball for everyone who wants to play, and even if you’re opposed to lowering tuition for all, more Caitlin Clarks mean more TV revenue and more ticket sales and thus more scholarships.
Over the past few months there have been three related stories that came along, each perhaps not meriting its own story, but together needing some attention.
Angel Reese
Near the end of the WNBA season, rookie star Reese was injured. She’d had a standout year in a number of respects. At the time of her wrist injury, she was leading the league in rebounding, though the knock on her game was that her shooting percentage was quite poor for someone taking the majority of her shots within 5’ of the basket. To some this diminished the value of her rebounding numbers as well, since quite a few were rebounds of her own misses, and would you rather have her miss twice with a rebound in between and no points, or sink the first attempt and lose the rebound? But even though fans would prefer her to sink more baskets, it still showed talent, strength and determination to keep taking the ball back off the rim.
Of course, to some this was suspiciously good, and she came in for unfair critique as well, with people mouthing off that she was missing on purpose to pad her rebounding stats and spreading other ridiculous conspiracies. But after her injury was the worst. Entirely without merit or evidence, a YouTuber claimed that Reese had been using illegal performance enhances and that the injury was faked to cover a league-ordered suspension. None of that was true, or at least there was zero evidence for the claim then and there’s still zero now. It all amounted to nothing more than an attack on a Black woman for being too good at her game.
Paige Bueckers
Bueckers is still in college. She’s had a wonderful college career, though many hoped for even better. She and her teammates at the University of Connecticut have been plagued with injuries the last few years, but have still been in the final four or eight teams. The school receives outsized attention because of the history of winning championships there — more than any other school — and the fact that it’s near a decade since their last one. The relative drought isn’t for lack of talent, and it’s not even all down to injuries. South Carolina has been the best team of the last five years and their coach Dawn Staley is keeping them at a high level of excellence year after year. Iowa had good talent plus Caitlin Clark, the single best college player since at least Britney Griner, but I would say since Diana Taurasi. Louisiana State University’s Tigers had Angel Reese, ferocious determination, and a heterosexist though very intelligent and talented coach, Kim Mulkey. Even South Carolina, as good as they have been, wasn’t cruising to the championship game.
But UConn is still UConn, and they will always get a great deal of attention. And Bueckers is still UConn’s leader and star, having won national player of the year honours in her first year, before the emergence of Clark. As a result, she’s in the public eye as much as any college player. What came next was sadly inevitable: a man from Grants Pass, Oregon with a dangerous sexual fixation stalked and harassed Bueckers. He was arrested on August 27th of last year, which did not appear to stop him. He was rearrested on September 13th. The case passed through the courts quickly and in December he plead guilty and was sentenced to one year in jail plus three years probation. At Bueckers request the jail time is suspended, meaning it is held in reserve as a threat to ensure that her stalker complies with conditions of his probation, and he was returned to Oregon to serve his sentence far away from Connecticut and Bueckers.
While it is good that this ended without injury, it’s another example of how women who attract attention for their talents inevitably suffer for it.
Caitlin Clark
That leads us up to this week, when police arrested a 55 year old Texas man because he “repeatedly sent threats and sexually violent messages” to Clark directly and to her team. The charge is felony stalking, and the situation is distressingly similar to that of Bueckers this past year and many, many other famous women before them. While ESPN reports that the indictment’s charge carries a maximum term of imprisonment of 6 years, it’s more likely that, like Buecker’s stalker, this man will receive a suspended sentence with strict requirements to remain far from anywhere Clark lives, works, or plays.
Also like Buecker’s stalker, police tried to stop his behaviour with earlier contact. ESPN reports that the court filing includes a quote supposedly delivered to the police at that time in which he downplayed his threats and insisted he was only joking:
"It's an imagination, fantasy type thing and it's a joke, and it's nothing to do with threatening," Lewis told police, according to the court documents.
But it is threatening. And these are the types of tortures that evil fuckfaces continue to inflict on prominent women athletes. The cumulative effect, whether in acting, sports, or any other position that attracts media attention, is to punish most those women who perform the best.
If we want women to be great, we must continue to fight violence, abuse, stalking and harassment. This is a particularly crucial moment, as the attacks on DEI in schools and workplaces threaten to roll back protections and even avoid teaching young children how to recognize and stop these behaviours. It would be wrong to say that the situation is worse than, say, the 1980s when Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered. We’ve added new laws and police take such crimes at least somewhat more seriously than they did in the 80s. But there is a new prominence for women athletes, who used to struggle to get recognition outside of the two Olympiads every four years.
That increased visibility can put elite women at the same risk as famous singers or actors, and the danger that one of our sports superstars will be killed is nightmarish. Given how many young girls have been inspired by exceptional women like these three, a public attack might discourage young girls from even trying for greatness. The lies, demonization, harassment and abuse all have to stop before we end up writing more articles about something worse.
Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!
Great googly moogly! I now have over 400 followers on BlueSky. Has anyone ever had so many?
If no one is laughing, it's not a joke, it's abuse.
Thank you for this, and all the work you do