The Miss America contest, founded in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Sept. 8, 1921, turns 100 this week. Just one of the minor perks of patriarchy, the annual pageant requires women vying for education scholarships to stiletto and twirl across stage in gowns and bathing suits. Let it be noted that Miss America stripped the bathing suit competition from the agenda in 2018 as a way to signal its commitment to the empowerment of women. Then again, how do you compete with Miss U.S.A, owned by Trump until 2015, who vowed during a Howard Stern interview to “get the bathing suits to be smaller and the heels to be higher.”
(Not Even) Half Baked
Gold medal for Mansplaining
American long distance runner Molly Seidel, who won bronze at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, tweeted her experience of being mansplained by a seatmate on a recent place trip. “On my flight was talking to a guy next to me & it came up that I run. He starts telling me how I need to train high mileage & pulls up an analysis he’d made of a pro runner’s training on his phone. The pro runner was me. It was my training. Didn’t have the heart to tell him.” That’s what it takes to be an Olympian: restraint, discipline and charity when seated next to the dude without a clue.
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(Not Even) Half Baked
Swimming while Black and dribbling while breastfeeding
A marathon swimmer in this summer’s Tokyo Olympics was told her swim cap didn’t meet regulations. A brand sold by a British company, Soul Cap is extra-large and designed to protect natural thick and curly Black hair. The world sport’s governing body refused to officially recognize the cap, saying it failed to meet Olympic criteria by not following “the natural form of the head.”
Did they read their own official Olympic games website extolling as commitment to diversity and inclusion regardless of age, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief or intellectual or physical impairment. Sounds like they had it covered! But the ‘thick curly hair’ curveball really threw them. Faced with outrage, the ruling body took a second look at the cap.
Also in lead-up to the Olympics, Canadian basketball player Kim Gaucher said the Olympic game’s rules would force her to “decide between being a breastfeeding mom or an Olympic athlete.” Tokyo organizers move quickly to revise the rule to allow Olympians to bring newborns to the Games.
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Earth is yesterday’s news: Time to move on
If we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all there. That familiar feminist wisecrack finds new meaning with the recent antics of three of the world’s richest men.
Wannabe extra-terrestrials Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have finally been and returned from space. But the measuring, comparing and taunting amongst them hasn’t stopped. Prior to launch it was all about getting it up and keeping it up as in rockets and whatever. “Can’t get it up (to orbit),” Musk taunt-tweeted Bezos. Post excursions, they brought out the ruler i.e., Who flew how high? Bezos won that round over Branson when his rocket crossed the Kármán line, the official boundary separating earth and space.
All three space frontiersmen hope to pivot at some point from space tourism to space colonization. They want to provide an alternative address to those wishing to escape life on earth when the time seems right. Spending their excess gazillion dollars on helping to heal the earth just doesn’t seem to create the same buzz for them.
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The gender politics of sucking up
The best ever campaign poster to promote breastfeeding depicted a woman in corporate suit with infant suckling at her breast. Sometimes It’s Okay to Suck Up to the Boss, read the tagline. Twenty years ago, the campaign conveyed a clever, layered message for the times when few workplaces recognized the needs of new mothers. Of course all that has changed. LOL.
Today’s breastfeeding controversy is not about where it’s done but what it’s called. Early this year, a U.K hospital revisited terms used in its ‘perinatal service’ to better include trans and nonbinary patients. Most notably, breastfeeding could now be called chest feeding.The new lingo didn’t go down well with many women. Admittedly, the rationale for the new term can be difficult to follow. A trans male or cis male (with the rare ability to produce breast milk) is still producing it from breasts. Men have breasts. That’s why they can get breast cancer. Why are some parents iffy about using the term breastfeeding? Said one tweet: “Using the word “chest feeding” isn’t logical in any sense (apart from being another “win” in the erasure of women perhaps).”
The hospital says its “additive approach” uses gender-neutral language alongside the language of womanhood.” Breast feeders can continue to call themselves breast feeders. But when in a parenting group or La Leche League meeting, they are encouraged to use inclusive language, and never assume gender identify by appearance alone. Neither should they be surprised if, at such a meeting, after stating pronoun preference, they are asked to declare themselves as either a BF or a CF.