Feminist Looking Glass

I was reading a short article in Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine about a “growing urban sport” called bicycle polo.  I had never heard of it, but it’s what you think it is.  Teams riding bikes instead of horses play on small paved courts and try to get street hockey balls into a net.  It sounds pretty cool.

The author of the article played up the “rough-and-tumble mentality” of the sport: “Bicycle polo takes the traditional sport and swaps the horses and preppy associations for battle-scarred bikes and hockey’s rough-and-tumble mentality. Helmets and pads are optional; trash-talking is encouraged.”

The problem I had with the article was this.  The author (a woman) quoted a photographer who had been following the sport for quite a while:

“It can get pretty intense. One guy must have gone down five or six times,” he says. The teams are coed, and everyone on the court is fair game. “No one was saying, ‘Go easy on her, she’s a girl,’ ” [he] says.

Why was it necessary to add the part about no one was saying . . .?  Isn’t it enough to just say that both men and women play in the same game?  Wouldn’t that get across the point to prospective players that the teams are coed?

While some sports are more social than competitve, bike polo obviously is competitive.  It would be demeaning for anyone to “go easy” on one of the competitors for any reason.  It is also demeaning for an author to write that players do not “go easy” on anyone.

Filed under: Pop Culture, Sports Tagged: | Sports, Stereotypes