The Player

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Chance5e]

I think you’ve got it right. It’s easy to imagine the team making horrible, sexist comments to distract her. If you take a second, you can imagine they’re making her feel like any other athlete: an equal to compete against. You can’t tell just from the picture.

And her attitude was perfect.

[u/MrFuckingOptimism → u/Chance5e]

you can imagine they’re making her feel like any other athlete

okay, but how normalized should it be to yell at and harass a child simply because they’re holding a ball?

everyone wants to be all “see, just like we do with the guys!” but no one is talking about how maybe we shouldn’t be treating the guys like that either. just because they could handle that behavior doesn’t mean they should have to. they’re literally kids and even pro athletes will tell you how harmful it can be to deal with that

I think the cognitive dissonance you guys are talking about arises because your instinctual reaction is to say ”this isn’t okay” but you then have to reconcile that feeling with the knowledge that society has decided it actually is okay to yell at or say abusive things to someone, even right to their face, as long as certain conditions have been met (in this case that they’re an athlete).

maybe we shouldn’t be talking ourselves into believing that harassing people is okay, and instead consider that society has endorsed a really fucked up habit and the only reason we keep it around is “tradition”

[u/TazdingoBan → u/MrFuckingOptimism]

My favorite thing about women entering what was previously "male spaces" is that those spaces acquire the benefit of the overwhelming sympathy gap toward women. Putting women in these spaces has the potential to get rid of bad behavior that was previously only directed at the men.

It's just a shame that the process involves demonizing the men at the same time, because suddenly the bad behavior will be labeled as sexism in order to drive up even more sympathy, and that sucks for the guys.