Tag Archives: feminism

Equal Opportunity for Women, Hot Dog Eating Edition

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It should be pretty clear by now that I love food: making it, eating it, writing about it … mmm, food. It should come as no surprise that I’m a fan of Competitive Eating. Specifically, every Fourth of July, I love to tune in to ESPN and watch the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. At noon today, Ted and I were camped in front of my laptop to watch the live stream.

 

The very first event of the hour-long presentation is the women’s hot dog eating contest, but it was not always so. In fact, the division of the competition into men’s and women’s contests only happened last year. For the second year in a row, Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas won in the woman’s division, eating 45 dogs this year. Prior to 2011, Sonya competed — and acquitted herself very well — with the elite men of the competitive eating field.

 

Joey Chestnut eating his way to victory in this year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Right now the men’s Nathan’s champ is Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. In fact, Joey just won his 6th straight title, tying him with Takeru Kobayashi for consecutive Nathan’s wins. Kobayashi no longer competes in the Nathan’s contest after a conflict with Major League Eating, which took over the Nathan’s event in the mid ’90s. Joey ate 68 dogs this year, tying a previous world record-setting performance of his; Takeru competed in the inaugural Crif Hot Dog Eating Contest, and they say he ate 68.5 dogs. But that’s it’s own strange conflict.

 

Second and third place at Nathan’s this year, in the men’s division, went to Tim “Eater X” Janus and Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti, with 52 and 51 dogs consumed respectively. Fourth place went to up-and-comer Matt “Megatoad” Stonie, who is only 19 and giving elite eaters a run for their money; he ate 44 dogs — less than the Black Widow.

 

This whole women’s division thing really pisses me off.

 

I understand the need for divisions. Joey Chestnut is in a league of his own, but below him is a collection of similarly matched elite eaters, and it’s clear that Sonya Thomas is among them. Why not have divisions based on skill-level qualifier rounds? The Black Widow would easily qualify to compete with the likes of Jaws and Deep Dish. And while it’s true that some sports are better left gender segregated for reasons of physiology, size and strength differences that might legitimately prevent female athletes from playing alongside male athletes in sports like football and hockey are completely moot in competitive eating. Most of the elite competitors, although fit, are not particularly large. Megatoad is all of 120 pounds; Takeru Kobayashi is 128. Sonya Thomas is quite wee at about 100 pounds, but that clearly doesn’t have any impact on her ability to cram dozens of hot dogs into her mouth quickly. While there is a physical component to competitive eating (both Chestnut and Kobayashi work out year-round), and some training techniques, it’s not a matter of size or strength: there’s absolutely nothing relating to the average physiological differences between men and women that requires the imposition of gendered competitive divisions. This is more like declaring that a high school math team or quiz league needs to be divided according to gender.

 

Now, it may be the case that women make up a minority of elite competitive eaters — Black Widow’s closest rival, Juliet Lee, came in second in the women’s competition, having eaten “only” 33 dogs in 10 minutes. Hell, it may be the case that women are in the minority when it comes to math teams and quiz leagues. But that’s not a matter of ability, it’s a matter of acculturation. Given all of the super fucked-up narratives about food and control and morality that our culture foists on women, it’s no surprise that fewer women consider entering the field than men. I assume that Major League Eating developed the Nathan’s women’s contest in the hopes of increasing women’s participation in competitive eating, but they’re taking precisely the wrong approach. Women aren’t inspired when they see the best, elite woman competitor ghettoized, pushed into some less-than opening act; they’re inspired when they see an elite woman performing competitively alongside the best in the field in the world. A friend of mine had the opportunity to see Sonya Thomas go up against Joey Chestnut in a wing eating contest that wasn’t gender divided, and she said watching the Black Widow take on the champ was amazing. If Thomas — and any women like her — can play at the level of Chestnut and Bertoletti and Janus, then she should get the chance. And seeing women competitors out-eat men will do a lot more to increase other women’s participation in Major League Eating — and hell, who knows, maybe even help to destabilize some of those super fucked-up narratives about women and food — than pushing them down the bill will. Plus, you know who won that wing eating contest? It wasn’t Joey Chestnut — Sonya Thomas kicked his ass.

 

So personally, I’m calling on Major League Eating to get rid of this counterproductive. unnecessary, and, frankly, insulting gender division in its Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Equal Work, Equal Pay, Equal Hot Dogs!

 

Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas, a personal hero of mine.

 

In Which I Am Torn About #TightsAsPants

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Dear Reader, I’m sure you’ve encountered at some point one or both of the following:

*Someone wearing a pair of tights and a longish shirt apparently thinking that said tights suffice as lower body covering.

*Someone remarking, commenting, tweeting that “tights aren’t pants!” (I think I’ve sent such a tweet myself in the past.)

I had occasion to mull this extremely first-world conflict last week, and as it’s been on my mind since then, I decided to take to the blog.

I follow a few nice ladies on Twitter who live in Australia, and often I see them all talking about something that is an apparent mystery to me, but which was obviously a recent topic in Australian media. Last week, I noticed that, all on the same evening, several of them twittered things like, “I will wear what I fucking please! #tightsaspants” I take it, though I do not know for sure, that some Australian lady-commentator made derogatory comments about people who wear tights as pants, prompting some general outrage and frustration.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a proud fat lady, and as such I feel a fair amount of feminist outrage at the way fat women’s bodies are policed and, to a lesser degree, the way our fashion choices are circumscribed, either literally because of a lack of shopping options or metaphorically because of the general shaming and nagging society inflicts when fat women don’t dress according to the mystical “what fat people are supposed to wear” rules (“slimming cuts” - whatever the fuck that means, a lot of black, no loud or clashing patterns, etc.). I’m not much of a clothes horse - it just doesn’t interest me, and I doubt it much would even if I were thin and rich and had all the clothing options in the world - but many fat activists use fashion - or, “fatshion” - as a tool of not only self-expression but of resistance: resistance to a dominant cultural narrative that demands of fat people, and fat women especially, that they not take up too much space, literally, and figuratively by standing out, by refusing to be cowed by consensus opinion that our bodies are not “right,” not attractive, grotesque, offensive, and shameful. (Marianne Kirby has an excellent recent blog post on this subject on her website, www.therotund.com, that started me thinking about this.) This, I think, is part of a larger patriarchal culture that tries to demand acquiescence by women to the idea that they are primarily valuable only as sexual objects for men, and as such must remain constantly available and constantly “attractive” as the dominant culture conceives of the term. By not being “attractive” in this way, fat women advertantly or inadvertantly defy this patriarchal command - as do women who are queer - and so we are punished for it by harassment, shaming, policing, and stigma. (Straight women who meet the standard of what is “attractive” and yet who are loud, uppity, and reject the notion that their value is situated in their sexual availability are also punished, if sometimes in different ways.)

The point is that it is a form of radical resistance to a hostile, oppressive culture when women, fat or not, do not do as they are told and do not follow the script of what is “acceptable”.

When resistance is couched in fashion, there is normally a predictable backlash: the offending women are shamed in one or both of two ways. They are either slut shamed or body shamed. In the case of the former, they are told that the way they dress makes them look whorish, and if they are assaulted, they were asking for it (this victim blaming is part of a rape culture that terrorizes women and demeans men, but let’s leave that for another day). The latter preys on the anxieties inculcated by a predatory capitalism and the patriarchy about the “necessity” of being always attractive, and manifests, usually, as an attack on the woman’s body shape and weight: “You’re too fat to wear ______.” Consider the narrative around skinny jeans, for instance, and then check out this post from Natalie Perkins over at www.definatalie.com for an excellent example of resistance - shaming - and, happily, another round of resistance.

So in summation, those Australian feminists were wrankled because in general, attempts to control things like women choosing to wear tights as pants are actually merely attempts to control women, through slut shaming and body shaming; to corral them back into the role of sexual object, available to men for consumption because they are behaving as the patriarchy desires, working to appear as the patriarchy desires, and also because they are literally available - willing participants in the system of sexual objectification. And fuck a bunch of that, obviously.

And yet.

I cannot shake the fact that I think wearing tights as pants is tacky. Not because it makes women look slutty, because 1) it doesn’t, necessarily, and 2) I have no problem with women looking slutty if they want to as a means of expressing their own healthy sexuality. Also, since there’s noting wrong with being a (responsible) slut if one desires, there should also be nothing wrong with being slutty. Not because some women might not “have the body for it”: I, for one, am fat as hell, and NO ONE has the right to come at me like that’s a problem, because it’s not, no matter what I do or do not have on my fat body. Just … hmm. I just don’t like it. I feel about it the way I feel about young men who wear their pants belted below their ass, so that their underwear-clad ass is exposed, purposefully, for all the world to see. I want to go up to those young men and ask them, snarkily, “Do you not understand what pants are for? Or do you just not understand how to get them to work?” I want to go up to young women wearing nothing but tights and a shirt and say the same thing. This drive is basic, comes from deep down, and is in spite of everything I know about the policing of women as discussed above.

But then I feel guilty about this - after all, what right do I have to join in the shaming chorus? None, of course, even if my motivations aren’t as evil as others’.

So I guess what I’m left with is this: I support the right of every women everywhere, regardless of body shape or size, age, or anything else, to wear tights as pants. But I don’t endorse the practice, ’cause I hate it.

Thus ends another round of “Is Sabrina a bad feminist?”

Housewifery

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So. Spring is upon us and the school term has ended. This is by far my favorite time of year. The days are warming and lengthening, the plants are emerging in bright green freshness, and my toes aren’t constantly blue from cold. Also, I have absolutely nothing to do all day.

Well, no, that’s not accurate. I have plenty to do, but it is all at my own discretion, and that pleases me greatly. I had been contracted to teach an online class for Pitt’s summer term, but alas, it was cancelled due to low enrollment - I do lament that. I like to teach, and I like the money Pitt pays me to teach. However, even if I had been teaching that class, because it was an online course through the College of General Studies, my time would still have been basically unscheduled. And I love that.

One of the personality traits that has left me ill-suited to more traditional 9-to-5 work is a fierce resentment of schedules: I don’t mind doing work, but why can’t I do it on my own time? Why can’t I get up late and work into the night? Why can’t I work hard all morning and then goof off in the afternoon? What difference does it make, as long as the work gets done? I’m much happier when my time is my own. (I have similar feelings about direct supervision: I know what needs done, I have the skills to do it, just tell me when it needs done by, and I’ll do it - I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder all day, kthxbai.)

So here I am, with all the manipulable time in the world, and it turns out that when left to my own devices, I settle more or less comfortably into being a housewife.

Don’t misunderstand, I have my own interests to pursue. There’s swimming at the PAA; I am developing a summer reading list, and am currently reading Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (everyone should read the story “Bezhin Lea”); I’m hoping to get Sarah to my place soon to show me how to use my sewing machine (ahem); and I even have some knitting I plan to attempt, probably leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But day-to-day, I’ve been tidying and buying groceries and cooking. I’ve been trying to make lots of healthy stuff for Ted and I - veggies, whole grains, lean proteins - and so I’ve been buying stuff fresh every few days and hitting the farmer’s market, now that it’s open. Downstairs, I cleaned all the things, and Ted’s been making headway on the laundry, so next all the upstairs things will get cleaned. I’ve even been keeping up on the dishes.

I wonder if all of this could seem weird. I am a feminist, after all, and yet here I am, cleaning and cooking and not doing anything formal with my education and remaining completely dependent on my husband’s income. And I feel absolutely fine about that. To begin with, the belief that the work of keeping a commodious home for yourself and your loved ones is somehow less important than going to a job and earning money rests on two assumptions that I reject: 1) that there is such a thing as “women’s work” and “men’s work”, and 2) that “women’s work” is less important or meaningful than “men’s work,” and so women only achieve accomplishment and equality when they do not do “women’s work” and instead do “men’s work.”

Fuck a bunch of that.

Earning money is a nasty requirement for living in our dystopian late-capitalist society; it is not a measure of value or achievement in personal industry whatsoever. My husband is fortunate in that he earns (too little) money doing work that is at least not destructive and/or essentially meaningless. But the fact alone that his work away from the home earns money and my work in the home does not is not an indicator of the value of his work or of my work at all. Further, the fact that I happen to be a woman who is doing what is traditionally thought of as women’s work is moot to me - I am a person doing work that is worthwhile and enjoyable; the stereotypes others have ascribed to that work, or the history of its imposition on unwilling other persons, should not shape my opinion of it, or anyone else’s opinion of me my doing it. It is work that needs done in my home, and I am just the person to do it.

And luckily, I don’t have children, only cats, so the housewifery is still completed in plenty of time to read books and write blogs and attempt to sew skirts.

It also occurs to me that such a lifestyle as my own over the summer could appear lazy, and upon consideration, I think that this reveals a sad fact about our society: we’ve lost track of how much work is enough work. A friend of mine recently said on Facebook, “G.S.W. Gym, sleep, work. That’s all I do anymore.” Going to the gym is good - exercise is good for you. I know this person’s job is one in which she helps others, so that’s good, too. And everyone knows that sleep is good.* But what about hobbies, relationship-building and maintenance, and just free fucking time to listen to the sparrows in the hedge and sip a glass of cheap wine out of beautiful glass? I think Americans may have lost track of what work is for, and what it is not for. Work is for accomplishing things that need accomplished so that society can proceed as smoothly and happily as possible for as many different people as possible. Work is NOT for determining who is “better” than whomever else because of the nature or quantity of their work, for defining ourselves as individuals, or in general for anything other thing than maybe earning a little filthy lucre and, hopefully, improving the world or at least the city for ourselves and our fellows.

I’m improving my world and Ted’s and the kitty cats’, and that’s good enough for me. And hopefully, since his world at home is a little improved, Ted can do his work of improving the world or at least the city with a little extra vigor - no one does their work, whatever it is, in a vacuum, after all.

And come the fall, I plan to go back to work, God willing, as a teacher full-time - work that earns a little money and suits my personality and improves the world. The housewifery will likely slip, then, and we’ll eat a lot more take-out. But for the moment, it’s vegetables all the way.

Vegetables and blogs in defense of housewifery.

*I don’t mean what follows to be a critique of my friend - I’m not saying that she doesn’t maintain her relationships, make time for wine, or that she defines herself or others through her or their work; I’m not saying anything about her at all, except that the particular instance of her status update got me thinking in general terms about the general American population’s views on work. Just to be clear!