On Tuesday morning, I had the Dr. Nancy Show on MSNBC on in the background when this segment on “aggressive” female athletes came on:

Dr. Nancy’s comments on the rising “aggression” in girls’ and women’s sports particularly annoyed me, like when she said this:

Title IX has meant that we really are looking at women’s sports so differently than we did just a generation ago. You want women out there, aggressive, smart, nuanced…. How do you take them up to that spot and not sort of, um, I want to say, let girls be girls, but push them to the sort of stuff you would expect out of men’s sports, but perhaps an inch or two shy of that?

Why do women have to be an “inch or two” less aggressive than men when they play sports? Is that not lady-like? Does Dr. Nancy think they shouldn’t sweat, either? What happens if they break a nail?

I am not advocating violence in sports, whether it’s men’s or women’s sports. However, every Sunday men suffer injuries on football fields that they will have to deal with the rest of their lives. There are many sports that are, by their very nature, aggressive and violent (football, rugby, etc.) There are also rules and codes of honor for every sport that both men and women should be held to. As long as both male and female athletes are following the rules, they can be as “aggressive” as they want.

Anything else is an offensive double standard.

I’ve got a guest-post up at the Adventures of a Young Feminist blog on the Denise Handicapped episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Here’s an excerpt:

Last week on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry meets a woman named Denise in a coffee shop. They flirt and Larry asks her out. Larry is excited about it… until he sees Denise is in a wheelchair.

Larry is clearly repulsed by the idea of going out with Denise but as he tells his friend Jeff, “I was stuck. I didn’t want her to think I was a bad guy.” Jeff tries to reassure Larry that it’ll be okay to date a woman in a wheelchair by saying, “It’s an adventure, it’s an adventure.” Yeah, Larry, dating a woman who can’t walk is like a trip to see the freaky disabled woman in the sideshow at the circus. Who knows, she may even get frisky with ya. That’ll be adventurous, for sure.

Now head on over to Adventures of a Young Feminist and keep reading: