Feminism and the Olympics

I don’t necessarily consider myself a rabid feminist, most of the time. I am a feminist, of course – I think that women and men should have the same opportunities and that gender should not be a barrier to anything except childbirth. But I am not particularly hard-core about it. I’ll point out sexism when I see it but I don’t make speeches, I don’t preach. I’m not a feminist that thinks that the only way to get a sort of balance is to spend the next few generations promoting women at the expense of men. I don’t even think that most of the things that other people point out as sexism is necessarily sexism.

And then I watched the Olympics, and the rabid feminism side of me came out. It started, a little bit, at the beginning of the Games, when I became aware that female ski jumpers had applied for admission to the Games, and the IOC had denied them because, apparently, women don’t jump far enough to make it interesting. And I thought, hmm. That’s kind of odd and unfair. But I didn’t really think anything more about it, except when articles would mention it, because the Games had started so there really wasn’t anything to be done about it for this year anyway.

And then my switch was tripped by something that a commentator said after the women’s gold medal hockey match. As they were handing out the medals, this commentator was naming each player and praising them. For one of the Canadian players who’d scored a goal, she said, “That was worthy of a men’s hockey game.” And that’s when I started to see red.

It’s one of those comments that sounds like a compliment, and was probably intended to be a compliment, but it basically says that women’s hockey is not as good as men’s hockey; that women aren’t athletes of the same caliber as men; that women are only valued in sport as they relate to men. It’s a figurative pat on the head for women’s hockey: oh, isn’t that cute, how the girls think they can play the same games as the boys.

And I’m sure that it wasn’t meant in a negative way, but that almost makes it worse. This is what people mean when they talk about societal sexism. The women of the Canadian and US hockey teams deserve credit in their own right for participating, for playing well, and for winning the medals that they did. They should not be compared to the men; it should certainly not be even implied that they are less capable than the men.

Quite a lot of the men’s hockey players, on a number of national teams, are professional hockey players. The women aren’t. The women are mostly college players, early twenties. The women are amateur athletes (and that gets into my issues with professional athletes in the Olympics in general, which is another rant). The women have just as much right, if not more, to be at the Olympics and to be credited wholly with their success, not to have it degraded in any way.