I repeat… why do sports editors insist on foisting this ignorant self-centered Chick Split on us? Perhaps you recall what I said last time about the lunacy of assigning women with no interest in sports to write about them for a sports page read primarily by men:
I’m a 26-year-old woman born in upstate New York, raised in bucolic Connecticut suburbs and educated by friars in brown robes at a small college in the Berkshires. I listen to public radio. I drink nonfat lattes while thumbing through the L.A. Times in black, plastic-framed reading glasses. I display a Human Rights Campaign bumper sticker on my car. I had a vegetarian phase.
I hate to pigeonhole myself, but I’m not supposed to like the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I’m supposed to think it’s barbarically primal, and offensive, and artless.
But you met me at a very strange time in my life.
After my first trip to Las Vegas, my attitude is different. I was completely riveted by UFC 62.
Short Translation: “ohmigod, you would totally think that i’m, like, so above that icky boy stuff, but, like, i actually liked it! can you believe it?
Subtext: “I’m a college-educated career woman and feminist with all of the approved female sensitivities pursuing a media career, so please cut me some slack and understand that I’m being ironic when I pretend to like this grotesque exhibition of neanderthalic male violence to which my patriarchist editor sent me only in order to keep my job. Sweet goddess, if they don’t put me on camera within six months, I swear by Gaia’s gargantuan vulva that I’m sending another application to the New York Times Style Section.”
Seriously, ESPN couldn’t find a single writer anywhere in the country who actually follows UFC? I don’t follow it at all, and even I watched the first four.