A wrap-up of the Chris Chavez hit job

No bully campaign is complete without side-splitting demands and a missing rear-view mirror

I didn’t expect this or any other contrary response to Chris Chavez’ recent intentional public shart and its consequences to compel a reaction from him or anyone involved in spreading the mess around, or from the accused announcer himself. I assumed instead that the production would play itself out in a way that established both the emptiness of Chavez’ gripe and the hypocrisy* of the complainers who climbed aboard the rage-train. (While I have little choice but to draw on Twitter material for my saltier entries, I have no intention of engaging in lengthy discussions with any principals there because of the enfeebled nature of communication on that platform, e.g., the ratio of anonymous and duplicate accounts and bots to actual people.)

This set of guesses proved correct. Like most online outrage-fests, it was a story with a noisy beginning and no conclusion whatsoever, with any counter-points ignored outright when not dismissed as mansplaining or a failure to “get” the required picture. Lize Brittin covered the important parts of this nicely, but I can’t say I have nothing to add, because Lize leaves out a lot of seasoning, like specific names and examples of ugly behavior.

Looking back at the disturbance in the Internet force now, its most incredible feature was something I hadn't seen before my first post: Mary Cain's Instagram lecture.

You have to appreciate, if not admire, the breezy totalitarianism in Cain's gag-reel list of suggestions and demands, which starts with at a questionable assumption (that male athletes can be “made fun of and called overweight”) dependent on a false one (that the pacesetters in Prague had been belittled or called overweight). These include eliminating men from announcing — except, presumably, for young, useful idiots like Chavez — and never mentioning athletes’ fashion choices without consulting them first. The entire post looks like the work of someone who has never watched more than a couple of track meets on television; I bet I can name more good women track announcers than she can name track announcers, period. It looks, in fact, like something prepared for her by Lindsay Crouse, the self-parodic New York Times hack who threw her into the spotlight last year in a manner about as defensible on ethical grounds as the Nike Oregon Project itself was.

Just imagine what running or any sport would look like if ideas like Cain’s were taken seriously by anyone in charge. A reality show on PBS, maybe, or a silent film showing a parade of thinly clad, over-caffeinated people engaged in what might be an athletic contest. And under such draconian coverage rules and fascist-style crackdowns on the range of people allowed to be on the coverage side, would women in the media still be scratching their heads about why more people don't watch women's sports?

All of this noise is almost indistinguishable from the cries from religious groups with “Family” in the name to cancel characters like Tinky-Winky and shows like Family Guy. If you’re unable to see this display and others like it as analogous to the goofy unrest and insistence on radical speech regulation of the Bible-bopper crowd, it’s because you either don’t want to or are — bless your heart — unaware of what the Bible-bopper crowd gets up to every time a Republican gains the presidency.

Maybe this is part reality and part wishful thinking, but I can’t see many of the 15,000+ people who have “liked” Cain’s post agreeing with many of its granular suggestions. Instead, it’s a tacit acknowledgement that a young woman superstar runner who suffered a career downturn thanks to a sociopathic, weight-enforcing male coach should get to have her say on the general matter of men talking about female athletes, period, even when the particular grievance she’s yakking about now is baseless. That may sound patronizing, but it’s as optimistic a take as I can extract from the whole bog of mass-projection and semi-coordinated online drives for personal status gain.

Crouse is an easy mark, here and in any controversy into which she bumbles, her inexplicable status as a New York Times opinion editor notwithstanding. You may recall her opining that replacing male track announcers with women would diminish the (nonexistent) laughter of the announcing crew. Yet this is someone who bragged about dating the same guy Lady Gaga went on to date, both on camera and in one of a number self-congratulatory and parochial columns that Crouse claims represent “service journalism,” and whose Wikipedia page looks like something I would write as a “favor” for a daft ex-girlfriend I secretly resented. On Sept. 19, she tweeted “Imagine working out for the sake of your own health — as opposed to looking attractive to men,” but later deleted it.

It’s not that it’s sketchy or unusual to have such things on one’s mind; it’s that she's admitting that she thinks females exercise chiefly to display fitter bodies for men. If this is true, on what basis can she say that adding female announcers — at least ones like herself — would diminish the attention on female bodies?

You can view these ventures as comical, or not. To me, Crouse’s persona is reminiscent of a guy with a closet full of Viagra and unused dumbbells complaining that women are overly focused on penis size and big muscles; though attention is precisely what she wants, I sort of feel bad for her. Either way, can such a person be seen as representing a voice of sincere concern for women, when her primary driver in life is clearly to “beat” other women in every way possible?

It can’t be over-stressed that this started with a comment that no reasonable observer would perceive as sexist or offensive at all in the context of paid, professional athletes. Did the athletes themselves express dismay? Nope. But you can see the chain of purposeful amplification: Chavez wants adulation from a certain demographic, and this announcing gives him an opening; Cain was coached by a something out of a Mike Judge script — a derisive, controlling, win-at-any-cost male (and professional and college sports do attract this element) who’d already been suspended by USATF by the time she was dragged into the NY Times to "offer" her story, giving her carte blanche today to spout absolutist policy proposals and other absurdities; high-profile Twitter women uncritically propagate the contrived outrage, some of them pretending that they haven't taken precisely opposite stances when they were pro runners.

The entire thing is, from afar, laughable. Crouse’s theme is excreting dolorous nonsense from somewhere in Upper Manhattan about matters that concern a tiny sliver of young, successful Americans, like maternity leave for professional distance runners and better track announcing; when she occasionally pretends to speak for the common woman, it’s unlikely that many are fooled. But pro runners have a lot more influence, and some of the loudest "Don't focus on women's bodies" voices are emerging from bodies that have modeled running kits. And if focusing on bodies per se is so bad, why don't they start by taking aim at the legion of midpack Instagram runners whose accounts dutifully include some GPS data but are nothing more than bored housewives showing off implants in bikinis, usually from Texas? Or at the pro groups who like to pose in racing kits for photos in non-race situations? Obviously, this is a list that could go on practically forever.

But yuk-yuks aside, I should also explain why this kind of impulsive move, which Chavez will probably never reconsider because it got him the upvotes his ego craving in the moment it prompted him to unleashed his contrived fury, bothers me more than it might most people. Starting about six years ago, I had an unusually deranged former coaching client make up a bunch of stuff about about me in an effort to ruin my life. That this ultimately landed in court didn’t discourage her, and she has since enlisted a far-right Christian bigot I started blogging about in 2018 in her dwindling cause; he’s been making wild stories up about me ever since. It’s no exaggeration to say that both of them have tried to ruin my life, one over malignant non-romantic abandonment issues and the other because my posts prevented him from getting away with the lies and hatred he was used to posting and deleting in various places. I haven’t been silent in response to either dirtbag, and it’s hard to say if there have been real consequences beyond my spending an inordinate amount of time writing unkind words about both of these assholes. The point is that the media members I am criticizing here are running the same basic script, and as my two low-wattage haters show, any idiot post indignant and dramatic-sounding claims and hope that the initial wound can’t be completely healed by later applications of truth.

But the real harm here isn’t limited to potentially damaging the careers of people who have done nothing wrong. As Lize notes, it’s the needless stoking of people’s personal insecurities when so many genuine sources of this already exist. If you follow some of the Twitter threads I linked above, you’ll see all sorts of people who, whether they viewed the original clip or not, were infuriated and perhaps reminded of traumatic eposides — times someone made a comment about their own bodies, or things they wish they could change, whatever. It’s revealing that Chavez et al. are aware that certain kinds of comments about women’s bodies are harmful, yet have no problem propagating non-instances of such comments when any whiff of a rationale for doing so presents itself.

Maybe they run some kind of rough calculus before hitting the “post” or “tweet” button: “Is this everything I really want it to be?” I have no idea.

But I do know how to wrap this up in the right lingo: Hey, clicks, amirite?

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*In the interest of not pretending that I can read minds (please see: “He said muscular, but meant fat”), I should probably refrain from calling every self-contradictory utterance by Twitter gangsters hypocritical. While this is often accurate, it’s plain that in at least some instances, these aggressors lack the insight to even experience cognitive dissonance around whatever they’re complaining about. By way of analogy, imagine a creationist dog-breeder who trumpets Genesis 1 as an alternative to evolution — not just to contribute to the Christian clamor, but also because he hasn’t thought deeply enough about his own claims to recognize them as inconsistent with his own daily observations, and has no incentive to do so when thousands of goobers are giving him electronic approval.