I Love My Bike

I just want to write about how much I love my bike today. I feel like I've been on a second honeymoon, now that Eurynome is all fixed up and ready to roll. (Well, except for some minor tweak-y issues with the derailers and the rear brake.)

Last Saturday, it was so gorgeous outside that I had to continue riding all day long. I started my day by riding up Fig and the evil hill on Colorado to a "Yoga Booty Ballet" class in Pasadena. The class itself was very fun, but didn't incorporate as much ballet as I expected from the title, and didn't really integrate the dance with the yoga at all. I then decided to take a chance on a new route home- down Ave 64 from Colorado instead of Figueroa. The street is wide, well paved, and totally gorgeous, with lots of trees and beautiful big houses. Plus, the back hill up to No Manor is longer, but easier than the evil front side of Mt. Grommet.

After hanging out through the hottest hours of the day, I hopped back on my bike to explore LA the same way I've explored Seattle, Portland, and Calgary this summer- by wandering aimlessly and seeing what there is to see. I ended up stumbling onto the route outlined here by Josef of the Flying Pidgeon. I took this route in reverse from Marmion Way to Ave 39, but continued down Griffin through Lincoln Heights and onto the Broadway Bridge to downtown. I spent a long time hanging out in the park at Ave 60- there's a really cool bridge there.

The rest of the park is surprisingly spacious and pretty, given that it's crammed in next to the freeway. There's a perfect tree for hangout and reading under, too.

I rode into downtown as the sun set, lighting up that awesome skyline with the gorgeous colors only LA's smog filled sunsets produce. And cutting a path through those same enormous buildings in the twilight was quite fun.

I then took 6th street out to the Pan Pacific Park area. I was dumped back into the traffic that really requires full attention just as the stars were coming out. There's something about watching the sky as the stars begin to appear, one by one, that's just magical.

Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, hamav'dil bein kodesh l'chol, bein or l'chosech.

Blessed are you our Gd, Lord of the Universe, who separates between the profane and the holy, between the light and the darkness. (image of the ISS, from someone else's site)

I locked my bike to Rosie's car for dinner at Swinger's before driving home. Hey, I'm out of shape, all those miles hurt. But I really appreciate those days when I go on dates with my favorite person in the world- my bike.

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

Relevant quotations are relevant:

"But that's part of women being expected to bear the burden of empathy; the last thing you should do is be a person who doesn't TRY to care, so even when people act in an uncaring way, you try to figure out motivations or whatever instead of just dealing with their actions." -Sady
(http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/01/15/sexist-beatdown-guys-who-grab-butt-edition/)

That's definitely an expectation I've encountered. Wish I could think of an example suitable to share with the whole internet.

"I was fully aware that gender injustice against women was pervasive in politics, religion, and sports long before I took my first women's studies class. I just didn't yet have the words or confidence to articulate it." -Fannie
(http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/privilege-of-oppression-being-novel.html)

She really hits the nail on the head! I can think of so many times in my life when I could sense the incorrectness of a given situation, but didn't yet know how to express that frustration- times like clothes shopping with my aunt, who only wanted to dress me in pinks and yellows when I wanted the blue version of a shirt. These instances weren't exactly few and far between, even begin raised by second-wave feminists as I was. I'm glad that I can now look back on that feeling of discomfort and realize that I was identifying an injustice, instead of just being "crazy" or "weird".

Court decisions

So- the first amendment protects violent video games, but bodily autonomy is free to attack?
This is just my knee-jerk reaction, but it seems like a nice parallel that as the courts are protecting the media that encourage rape and rape culture in the most explicit ways, the services that protect people (mostly women) from such acts of violence are being dismantled by the legislature.
What the heck is going on in this country?

Minor Annoyances

At my office, we always have the radio on, which wouldn't be so bad if t weren't for the commercials. Commercials drive me up the wall in general, especially when you're listening to the same station, and only hear the same 5 or 10 commercials repeated every quarter hour throughout a full 8 hour workday. But one commercial stands out to me, every time. I can't find a video of it online, but here's my transcription:

Announcer: This is the sound of [male's] Chase mortgage: [sound of lawn mower engine]. This is the sound of [male]'s Chase mortgage: [sound of meat sizzling on a grill]. And the is the sound of Nancy's Chase mortgage: [sound of golf club swinging].
[...product information...]
Announcer: [basically, you too can Buy Things with a Chase mortgage]
[sound of glass shattering]
Nancy: oops... FORE!
Announcer: Or maybe, just lessons.


This contains so many blatant and subliminal negative concepts that I'm not even sure where to start. Basically, women suck and can't play sports. Blegh.

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.