Editing is hard

I spent ages and ages on this video, and when I compiled it into a .wma file, all the precision timing was lost. but it's still awesome and worth watching for the lulz.

It seriously bummed me out to see that I'd have to go back and redo everything to fully realize the video in my head after months of working on this intermittently, amounting to several hours of my life for a one minute video using someone else's footage and someone else's music. I have even more respect for editors now.

And if that didn't cheer you up, here's my new favorite song:

Cut from "Burning Low" in the fourth season of Adventure Time.

So apparently Santa Cruz

is a bastion of pretty redheads.
...fuck me.

This is now the fifth city I've been to in the last two weeks. If I wasn't so attached to LA, I wouldn't want to go home at all. But this trip has also been filled with plenty of angst and drama (lost bags, broken bikes... booo!) so I'm looking forward to being back to the usual routine. I have a feeling I'll be back on the road pretty soon though- Seattle and Portland have me fairly motivated, and maybe I'll even find my way back to the Midwest. I'm hoping to write up a few more ideas that are hanging out at the back of my head too. Tentative increase in productivity, woo!

A Letter's Follow Up

See? The bike polo community's awesome.



Notice anything different today? No more Venus symbols! Just the referee one, which I'm proud to have by my name. (TWO players requested that I ref their games at DPI last weekend. /bragging.)



And for an unregistered user as well- no more automatic listing as male.

Success! No fuss, just a bit more egalitarian.

I Write Letters

I'm so excited to finally be using this title!

So as most polo players are already aware, there's a new website in town: hardcourtbikepolo.org. It's being used to track team and player statistics throughout the major tournaments of the season, and act as a registration tool for tournament organizers. While there are some technical and design issues which could be debated, my problem is with the site's presentation of gender.

[click to enlarge]

This is a screencap of the registration page for the Desert Polo Invite, taken on 2/3/12. Notice anything yet?


How about on this page, where players are sorted by who's logged the most miles traveled?
That's right. Every woman on the site is followed around by a Venus symbol. There is no Mars symbol for the male players, because as we all know they'rethenormalonesamirite? As such, this extra line of coding is seriously Othering to the women of bike polo.

Which brings me to my next point. There are only two choices on the 'gender' tab of a player's profile, as shown above. The default for all players when they first sign up for the website is male. I found this very offensive, and immediately changed my gender to reflect my personal identity. But now I find myself stuck in this catch-22, where I must either be disingenuous to my chosen gender identity, or be forever marked as Different from the other players on the site.

So earlier today, I sent Zach (who built the site) this letter:

Hey Zach,

I would like to request that you remove the coding that places a Venus symbol next to the names of every user listed as female on the hardcourtbikepolo.org website. Several other players and I have discussed the matter, and we find it to be an offensively unnecessary demarcation. We believe that the women of bike polo should be able to be viewed equally and not alienated from their peers.

In addition, we would like to request that you make the default player “unspecified” in gender. The default human is not male, and it is unfair to support the patriarchal assumption that this is the case.

Thanks,

Sarah

Men, Women, Polo

The way I see it, polo is currently at a crossroads. We can buy into the precedent that the mainstream has already set up for us, and begin to segregate based on gender. This will lead to more mainstream, shittier polo, because you're cutting out half the competition. We can reinforce the notion that people with vaginas are delicate little flowers who need protecting from the REAL MANLY MENZ of the world. We can avoid confronting those difficult misogynistic attitudes that are so blatantly obvious whenever coed games occur in tournaments today. And we can then watch the women's league dwindle into obscurity and near-extinction, as most professional sports* have done before us.

On the other hand, we can continue to play as hardcourt has always been played- open to all willing to hold a mallet and possibly suffer bodily injury. We can remain on the fringes, daring to offer up a legitimately level playing field, without grossly insulting the dozens (hundreds?) of women who have been playing with their club since its inception, only to be suddenly turned away because their vagina suddenly makes all their past game play irrelevant. We can open our eyes to the gross transgressions that are made every day, in every form of bigotry, and work to change those attitudes and behaviors from within, rather than punishing a minority group for the hatred directed towards them. We can acknowledge that if a majority of women are easily intimidated by us crazy stick-wielding folk, it's because they have been raised in a threatening environment where women must be timid and fearful to conform and survive, not because all women are inherently like that.

Another thing to keep in mind- segregation based on gender creates a huge problem when we encounter trans people who would like to join us on the court. Do we really want to send the message that we, like almost every other sport out there, do not recognize their bodily autonomy and ability to create their own identity?

*I'm mostly thinking of the WNBA here- I mean, who gets as excited about their Finals as they do about any NBA game? No one I know, certainly.

x-posted to LoBP.com, in response to Kiersten's question about women's place on the court.