I'm a little late jumping on the Imus mess here but there's an aspect to it that I haven't seen anywhere else yet so it's still new whatever the timing. Not that it matters. My statcounter tells me that I finally shook off the last straggler who kept coming back here looking for something. Now that I have no readers I'm back to writing entirely for my own satisfaction. It's a lot like jerking off, except with less cleanup required.
Anyway, back to Imus. More specifically to the Rutgers women's basketball players that he maligned maliciously enough to lose a $10 million a year job. Wow! That's some serious offending.
You're still waiting for the part of the story you haven't heard yet, I know. And here it is: This incident sets the cause of women's basketball back 20 years. Why? Because in going so far to portray the Rutgers players as defenseless victims in this, all women's basketball players come off looking like, well, defenseless victims.
That would have never happened had Imus called the Rutgers men's team "a bunch of nappy-headed thugs." (Luckily no one reads this blog so I won't get in trouble for saying that. Even if someone stumbled across it, I don't make any money from it so I have nothing to lose. And it was just a hypothetical anyway, jerk.) I'm not sure it would have gained any notice had Imus insulted men instead of women.
Male players are public figures who ask for pretty much whatever abuse they get in exchange for the limelight and (often) the dollars that follow (yes, even in college). Yet the Rutgers women's players were just innocent girls, completely undeserving of such ridicule. They're just out there trying hard, playing their little game -- isn't that cute! Women's basketball certainly isn't something anyone takes seriously enough that it raises the players to the level of celebrity that makes them fair game for any unfair scorn heaped on them.
Perverse as this sounds, that's bad for gender equality in sports.
Labels: gender, sports
