or What Does Inappropriate Mean in Today’s World?

WARNING: This blog is not about yoga. This blog is about ME My living in an athletic female body that was molested by her gymnastics coach at 13. I did not tell anyone but my little sister. I knew no one wanted to hear what I had to say.  That year the coach who molested me was honored by our school district with the title Teacher of the Year.

Today Former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for molesting over 150 athletes.

Here is the blog: Title Nine Backlash

I am the original batch of Title IX beneficiaries. I am a 56 year old woman. Sports, and the friendships I made from those sports have enriched, and even saved my life many times over.

I was  freshman in high school in 1977. The male to female spending was an actual thing the Athletic Director kept track of.  My Dad was the head football coach. I knew how much money that sport cost the school— lots! I was a varsity gymnast.  We had home and away leotards and warm-ups. We had real  gymnastics equipment, two coaches and  lots of “fame” in school. If anyone ever said that our sport was costing the school too much money, I knew that  was not true. We were not spending a fraction of the football budget. We were riding the first fantastic wave of the coming of the age of equality. We were athletes, and we were awesome. Things were changing!

It is 2018, forty one years have past since that first wave of women in sports became a part of the Federal law of these United States I live in. And still the playing field is NOT level. My heart sinks when I see the scraps that women athletes are competing for in terms of everything from funding to media coverage.

When we do get media coverage it looks a lot like this.

Scanty coverage for females. She is naked, that is paint.

Title IX is a portion of the United States Education Amendments of 1972, Public Law No. 92‑318, 86 Stat. 235 (June 23, 1972), codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688, co-authored and introduced by Senator Birch Bayh; it was renamed the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in 2002, after Patsy Mink, its late House co-author and sponsor. It states (in part) 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.

What about the non-education programs, or the activities not receiving Federal financial assistance? What about just being treated appropriately?

How is it that the scale of what is appropriate is be measured by a nation whose biggest  sports magazine  features my gender on their covers mostly while we are wearing  tiny weeny bikinis on beaches  rubbing our vaginas and/or booties in tropical sand while making pouty I want to suck your Dick Tracey faces.

What does Inappropriate mean in today’s world?

In this current wave of Harvey Wientstien inspired sexual harassment media wave, I would like to point out a tiny blip in the lack of media coverage of a group of girls that were in the National Soft Ball championship and got disqualified for this snap chat picture. This snap chat event happened this summer, and to me it directly relates to being heard, to being treated like a human being, rather than being treated like a vagina with sugar and spice all around it.

The back story behind the picture is that the other team that had been poor sports………and then the story was changed to those terrible girls took this picture before the game.  Who cares!!! These girls took a rather adorable picture of themselves celebrating themselves and the ability to be a team, to do goofy stuff together.  In the dugout we celebrate with a quick selfie saying we stand together as a team and let you know how we feel about how you treated us on the field, or how we anticipate you are going to treat us on the field (or in the workplace in our future). Again, who cares.  In this article the public shaming is branded “A teachable moment.” What the hell is the media trying to teach these girls?Little League spokesman Kevin Fountain called the post “inappropriate” in a statement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, explaining that it violated the league’s “policies regarding unsportsmanlike conduct.”

SHUT YOUR PRETTY MOUTHS YOUNG GIRLS, and hope you grow up to be what the media considers worthy of putting on the Swim Suit issue.

If snap chat were around when we were little I am sure we would have posted some crazy pictures of us being crazy fun girls in the locker rooms being together, bonding, becoming  a part of something, having fun, not being violent, being somehow sweet as we make our way into the full-on anti-women world of sports in the United States of America. The world of sport is just a micro-cosmo of the world where here in the United States of America women are still paid  76 cents to the dollar nomatterhowyousliceit  compared to men. eveninthesamejob

These girls are in the process of learning to stick up for themselves. Maybe they were snap chatting (whatever that is) about the gender pay gap they will be facing.

LISTEN TO THEM!

STOP SHAMING US FOR DEFENDING OURSELVES! STOP SHAMING US FOR BEING OURSELVES!

Question. is our culture just using female athletes to develop the “sexiest” models? Or worse yet, is our culture trying to strip away our power by treating us like strippers. Why must we be either sweet or sexy? What about the entire realm  of being in between these currently accepted ways appropriate for female to be?

They (the girls being neither sweet nor sexy) were disqulaified from the event. And these adorable young girls where just taking this selfie for shits and giggles… What does it matter? Why disqualify them? Where they not being lady like?

If the media is allowed to take young girls voices away, maybe the young girls will stop trying to tell us what is going on for them. Oh goodness, I hope that is not the case. I hope they continue to try to build their identities  and continue to push back. I hope they speak up.I hope young women continue to form life long bonds with their teammates. I hope young women stop being shamed for being themselves, and stop being praised for being naked and submissive.

Aly is ready to burn it all down Below  is an expert of Aly Raisman’s testimony concerning being sexually abuse by her team doctor. She speaks up for nearly 150 other athletes, and also calls out the  USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee for what she sees as a systematic enabling of Nassar’s crimes and an inadequate response to the devastating scandal on their doorstep.

She (Aly Raisman had in the past, long before this trial) begged USA Gymnastics and the USOC to conduct full and independent investigations into how Nassar’s abuses were allowed to go on for so long, and clean out any and all people who failed to protect her and her fellow gymnasts.

“I have represented the USA in two Olympics and have done so successfully,” Raisman said. “And both USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee have been very quick to capitalize and celebrate my success, but did they reach out when I came forward?

“No,” and then she paused.

For this sport to go on, we need to demand real change, and we need to be willing to fight for it. It’s clear now that if we leave it up to these organizations, history is likely to repeat itself.

Now is the time to acknowledge that the very person who sits before us now—who perpetrated the worst epidemic of sexual abuse in the history of sports, who is going to be locked up for a long, long time—this monster was also the architect of policies and procedures that are supposed to protect athletes from sexual abuse for both USA Gymnastics and the USOC.

Raisman asked the judge to sentence Nassar to the strongest possible allowed by law to send a message to abusers that their time is up. She added: “Please, your honor, stress the need to investigate how this happened so we can hold accountable those who enabled Larry Nassar.”

At the end of her statement, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina looked at Raisman and said: “I’m an adult, and I’m listening, and I’m sorry it took this long.”