No hockey hoopla

From the Star & Sickle:

Many thought the older, more experienced women who beat Team Canada last weekend in a warmup to the 2006 Winter Olympics would win against the high schoolers. Especially after coaches agreed to a no-checking rule.

But the young Warroad Warriors lived up to the town’s long history of hockey honor, winning 2-1 by beating the women at their own game of finesse and speed.

I find it curious that it is still considered a major political event for a professional women’s tennis player to have beaten a 55-year old man in an unsporting match – it’s seldom mentioned that Riggs had to cover the doubles court and still only lost 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 – while one of the world’s top women’s teams can’t beat a squad of high school boys.

Interestingly enough, it’s seldom either the male or female athletes who get worked up about sex issues in sports, since everyone who plays a sport knows perfectly well how things stand. It’s only the feminist propagandists, the dweebs with two left feet who go into academia, and the clueless wonders who take both types seriously that think there’s anything to discuss. Remember when the media was prattling about how the US women’s soccer team would beat the US men? To their credit, Mia Hamm and company didn’t want any part of that claim.

One of the many reasons I quit critiquing amateur fiction at the Critters Workshop is that I kept running into writers of both sexes who insisted that a Xena-style uber-warrioress was perfectly credible; that no magic sword or divine heritage was needed to explain why a woman was inexplicably faster and stronger than the trained warriors she was dispatching with ease. They would defend their silly stories with tales of a cousin who was a martial arts champion and so forth… naturally, not a single one of them had ever so much as witnessed a round of fencing, sparring or any other related activity.

VOX: “Can’t you just make her a half-elf or something, all right?”

WOULD-BE WRITER: “You’re just being sexist! My sister….”

VOX: “Okay, look, if she suddenly started flying, would you feel the need to explain it?”

WOULD-BE WRITER: “Um… well, yeah, of course!”

VOX: “You’ve described her as a peasant farm girl. She’s strong, she’s independent, she’s survived the tragic murder of her parents, etc. Fine, if cliched. But the reader will find it no more credible for her to suddenly dispatch 15 elite warriors of the Kingsguard than it is for her to inexplicably fly.”

WOULD-BE WRITER: “That’s because no one can fly. But women are just as tough and strong and fast as men. My sister….”

VOX: “You’re right. Keep it just the way it is. No, I have no more suggestions, I’m sure it will be a best-seller.”