Having apparently exhausted its supply of culture-war meat, Women's Running resorts to cannibalism

Outside's lowest-hanging fruit represents the fitness-rag apotheosis of inventing social problems people can complain about forever, mostly in cave-woman grunts

Women's Running is so desperate to crank out fresh content that—in addition to relying on male contributors and semi-literate hacks across the gender spectrum to force any main-page article turnover at all—it has started attacking its own recent work.

Given the cheerfully genocidal title “Why are Running Towns So White? And What Can We Do About It?”, the article can be summarized fairly as follows:

We published an article less than five months ago about five towns that greatly appeal to runners. We fucked up! It turns out those cities are still racially segregated. How we at Woke Central somehow missed this the first time around is another story, but anyway, yeah. In case you keep missing the memo, BIPOC people don’t participate in endurance sports owing largely to safety concerns, which we at Women’s Running seek to allay by continually portraying running as the most hostile, unwelcoming, and oppressive social environment on God’s fart-scorched Earth. Building bridges is our specialty!

And for the nineteenth time, meet the insufferable Alison Désir, in every respect but actual skin color an upward-failing dumb rich white girl, right down to the obvious grifting and suckling at the veiny Wokish tit while it’s still a-bulgin’, even admitting that she doesn’t care if women’s running itself disappears. Fuckaroo! All roads traveled by plodding female loudmouths eventually lead to runner-in-name-only Alison Désir.

So, what to do about this “problem”? Well, since we made it up, we’re not actually proposing any solutions, silly! We don’t do that—here or ever! If we did, and they were effective, we’d be out of work. So, it’s on to more talk about spaces! More talk about change, mostly from self-dealing functionally illiterate clowns who write chum like this! Follow me on Twitter pull my finger haha

The author, Emilia Benton, would most likely find this summary uncharitable if someone read it aloud to her, slow-w-w-w-ly enough for her to understand it. Benton is a mush-brained fitness runner who regularly supplies garbled and unpublishable chum to corporate-run running outlets, which publish it anyway because garbled chum is all these outlets now offer.

The first two paragraphs alone have me wondering whether anyone at Women’s Running looks at the wordgunk the publication commissions before shitloading it to the live Web, as those paragraphs include these gorgeous grammatical infelicities:

the statistics on their demographics was also glaring

many actually are diverse within regard to the running community

You may recall Benton as the "How to Take a Shit, Dudes!" pussy-pathology specialist who mocked my Substack writing as the non-journalistic and unreadable opinions of a mere blogger—one who, on top of his work not appearing in reputable sources, could be dismissed out of hand by “social-justice activists” because of his sex and race. 

Almost certainly without Benton’s knowledge (although the poop thing makes me wonder) and absolutely without her permission or intent, every item she has produced that I have seen is, outside the tempest-in-a-Wokish-teapot in which she gleefully operates, a soon-to-be-forgettable sliver of a grubby zeitgeist and an Internet-polluting joke. Sometimes, the joke is funny in a way that even the blinkered Benton herself could probably appreciate (“I got paid by a men’s magazine to write about dropping a deuce! SCORE!”). Usually, it is not, revealing Benton as just another energetic, opportunistic, and hypocritical dimwit swinging a Wokish misinformation hatchet around.

Evidently, Désir’s book The Unbearable Whiteness of Running, which was originally supposed to be published this year, won’t be published until sometime next year. Remember, Désir’s premise for running having what she calls a white-supremacy problem was the murder of a black runner by white assailants who weren’t runners. As horrifying as this episode was, Désir’s jumping on the wound and pouring acid into it by somehow holding the running community itself responsible is not merely inflammatory beyond measure; it also opens the door to accusing the running community of anti-white racism or misogyny because of documented violent crimes committed against white female runners by assailants of color. To take this step would be both grotesque and unjustified, and, the whimsical dicta of 2021 American identity politics notwithstanding, that works in both directions.

Désir is a rambling moron, but she knows enough to understand that her thesis here, despite its brazen illogic, lies beyond the reach of conventional literary criticism, since anyone writing exactly what I just wrote would be immediately canceled for “denying that anti-black racial injustice exists in endurance sports,” or some such canard completely unrelated to what I actually wrote. Which is that Désir is full of shit and (mostly) knows it.

Like everyone in her sad writing cohort, Emilia Benton evinces supreme confidence from the depths of her own ineptitude, functioning as if intentionally setting herself up to be humiliated by the very people and entities she bitches about the loudest. Faced with an avalanche of this crap whenever I go looking, I admit that the pure humorist in me—if there is one—wants to take over when I write these intentionally unflattering posts. There is no denying that the people I slam are laughably inept, and they manage to perpetrate Nth-degree ineptitude of precisely the sort they accuse their adversaries. They’re fucking cowards, hiding in the comfort of their shitlib-dominated social-media accounts and restricting their pushback to quasi-anonymous message-board fist-fucking and banana-ramming. Perhaps they are best belittled and then ignored, like intentionally annoying sitcom characters, so primitive and lowly are their thoughts and conduct.

Yet it is truly amazing; Benton, Erin Strout and many of the other recently hatched Wokish fitness writers have journalism degrees and—ostensibly, at least—copy editors backing them up, and this fucking gibberish is the best they can do? Even if they wish and are welcome to use “magazine” space to process their personal issues and rave about nothing but bullshit, don’t they at least want to do conduct this sad mission more eloquently? I never took an English comp class in college; Christ, I was a reta…a fuckin’ ding-a-ling back then, at least in the words of many of my New England-raised friends, and barely earned a bachelor’s degree. I face significant, even grievous mental challenges. As a consequence, neither my writing nor my ideas are close to perfect, but I do strive to present clean and readable output, and to be rigorous and objective when research is required.

Oops. Guess who doesn’t think rigor and objectivity even belong in research? A white woman writing for the Urban Institute. Yes, you’re reading this correctly: A respected think tank is classifying rigor and objectivity as harmful research practices. Without diving into the weeds here, I’d bet my life that if Asian-American kids didn’t score higher than white kids on the SAT, and white kids didn’t in turn score higher than black kids—or better yet, if the hierarchy were inverted—the Urban Institute wouldn’t be so intent on unpretentiously shitcanning inconvenient facts.

And this brings me to why I can’t just go full Doug Stanhope in these posts. Living in a fact-based world is fairly important; I have no kids or spouse to lie to or receive fables from, so I like engaging in reality instead. Much of my angst comes from being, however reluctantly, a rationalist—someone who believes that it’s possible to get people to change their behavior by convincing them of a more reasonable path than the one they’re on, one that divides up the pie both reasonably and humanely. (This is not to be confused with someone who believes he always has the right answer.) “Rationalism” itself is an irrational stance, because people prove continuously that they—no, we, no asterisk this time—are not consistently rational actors. We do stupid shit all the time, singly and as whole societies; look at the colossal clusterfuck America has become under COVID-19, then decide if you would rather laugh at the big picture or whether you would rather see, say, fewer people scurrying around in literal gas masks on Boulder’s rec paths because of the stunning level of ignorance (or, maybe, showmanship) this and similar displays require.

Waiting endlessly for people to wise up and pursue their stated, bettering-society goals—which, when it comes to the media, are almost always different from their actual, self-centered goals—with some degree of honor or a dogged reliance on factual events is like being an endlessly jilted lover, or someone awaiting the literal appearance of Jesus Christ. It’s a set-up for chronic disappointment even isolation, explaining a great deal of what I presently find unsatisfying about my own life and how I got here. The more I try to laugh, the more psychologically liberated I feel. But I also feel like a dick for doing it even when I know I have every reason to pull no punches, at least often enough to keep me grudgingly returning to purely running-centric topics after every semi-cathartic blogshart.