Saltos y Corridas

Something which has always interested me is the complete lack of interest in sport that some women display. There is a very good article (which I found on F-Word) about women's participation in sport. I have conflicting feelings about these things... Basically because part of me can't help thinking that if women just got to play sports, rather than standing around in teeny skirts and being forced to do cross-country and not being taught about comfortable and useful sports bras, then maybe they'd love it. Competitive sports are held up to be the "bad guy" here, but I know enough women who utterly adore them (and play extremely hard) that this doesn't seem to be the complete picture. Look at the league I play in in NYC - one of many, and on average over 90 women going for it every Saturday at full tilt running after a ball. Crazy. But we do it. And while we're there, hundreds of fit young women scampering round at a ridiculous pace in the cross-country competitions that go on there.

Underlying these negative feelings, there is, as Dr Tess Kay of Loughborough University explains in her research, "a mismatch between girls' view of their bodies as passive and decorative and the use of the body as active and functional in sport". For any strategy to succeed in persuading girls into sport it has to take account of their complex and often hugely unconfident feelings about their own developing femininity.

This taps into one of the real areas of interest for me. Simulation of starvation conditions, painful surgery - be it elective caesareans or liposuction - in order to make oneself thinner. Bodily actions, physically tough, but without any positive effort - all about denial and what someone else can do to you. And yet, sport is a powerful, active thing to do. Running makes me feel stronger, happier, more powerful - with my knee knack I genuinely miss the feeling of being able to run up a large hill at the end of an hour's run. You cannot get that feeling anywhere else... Sport gives us endorphins, positive body images - not just for burning calories but a concept of the body not just as something to be valued for its thinness, its breasts, its lack of flab, but for its power, strength, reliability. That would be nice.

IN OTHER NEWS

1) Angry about this, which has weird echoes of the "Tutsi cockroaches" radio broadcasts, which may well be a strange reaction on my part, but is what I thought of. Particularly resonant as well given the hostility at the moment here towards Nicaragüenses, as Nicaragua is currently before the CIDH (Interamerican Court for Human Rights) in San José regarding the tardiness in bringing murderers of Nicas to justice.

2) Glad these women have been released, but the concept of these women being in prison or charged for this is outrageous. Until you realise that in fact adultery is still a crime in most of the US... still, for both sexes, not just women!

3) Something I already knew - swimming pools in NYC are RUBBISH. Well, to be fair, the one where I live is nice - a big, Olympic size pool, clean and warm water in the showers, plus with an outside pool, good in the current sweatfest that is the Big Apple. Compare that to the one near my school, which is cockroach central and, basically, horrible. Yet I cannot afford the $1000 it would cost to join the local Y (very charitable, that), so it's Riverside or nothing, quite frankly.