man-on-womens-sports2007: February 2008

Just finished watching my tapings of last month's US figure skating nationals, and the event was surprisingly surprising, engaging, exhilarating and otherwise nice. Group 3 of the ladies free skate included Alissa Czisny, Beatrisa Liang and Caroline Zhang. No, that was not the final group: that was the group that preceded the final group. And if you had watched Group 3 during the free skate and had not seen the short programs aired just hours earlier, you would have wondered what trickery the judges could have wrought to foster the expectation that better performances could be had. Well, better performancies were had: much better, excitingly better. Ice dancer Tanith Belbin and her partner Ben Agosto were the only expected gold medalists who were actual gold medalists, but notice the expression of Tanith's face (above) as she awaited the final ice dance performance of the evening of their training partners Meryl Davis and her partner Charles White, who had exceeded the technical marks of Belbin and Agosto in the preceding two dance events. Davis and White (below) did take the ice dance silver. One could not have asked or wished for a better show.

So, you go back to the thing about the waning popularity of figure skating. My attention was not fully on the broadcasts, and there was what appeared to be an endless succession of commercials that made me at one point scream "Who are they talking to?" Women. Oh, yeah, I forgot about them for a second. Rampant cluelessness.

But one commercial really took it up to the next level of thinking: a network commercial for its coming series "Lipstick Jungle" starring Brooke Shields, Kim Raven and Lindsay Price (as to those last two I have no clue.) It appears to be about powerful boardroom women. Take Brooke Shields away, and the chances of its surviving the season, I thought, were nil (Brooke's sitcom survived despite the naysayers, so I'm leaving that alone.) I thought the chance of survival slim, because there is so much female oriented programming already on the majors, giving women alternatives now to even "their" sports. And, from a sociological perspective, women can now choose to value watching "their" sports as they value sports in general in their lives. They have viable alternatives.

And what really got to me in watching the hours of US nationals was the fact that personally I did not tire of watching figure skating, but rather the mindset not female that dominated the production of the hours and hours and hours of figure skating programming that was had in that day.

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