If "female" has no firm meaning, then "We need more women coaches" is a meaningless demand
People who lost the plot during the opening credits have no grounds for bitching about the actors
Erin Strout has compiled another complaint for whoever still reads Women’s Running, now an online-only offering and among the most inaptly named publications in history.
That Strout is a repurposed Chucky doll powered by misandry and self-delusion does not make her every utterance wrong. A publicity-chaser who fails to understand running and has a nearly unblemished record of cartwheeling ineptitude may still produce work that contains or transmits valid points. (One way to become a staunch anti-intellectual yourself is to assume that stupid people whose ideas you habitually dislike are always wrong about everything. This is tempting, but the hook is nothing more than a ruse by God, who, by the way, is already knee-deep in empty amyl-nitrate vials on only day two of Pride Month and won’t be administering any moral tests until midsummer.)
In this case, Strout’s point reduces to simple, undeniable math: Almost every head coach of a shoe-sponsored U.S. running group is white and male. In a country that’s 50 percent female and around 30 percent nonwhite, only around 12 percent of these coaches being women and 0 percent holding ethnic-minority status basically cannot be the result of random chance. Whatever the factors are determining this imbalance, they could point toward something insidious, so these figures require scrutiny, although it’s worth remembering that pro running represents only a tiny slice of the coach-runner interactions unfolding on the daily.
(Actually, how about we* first look at the leadership of Outside, Inc., which “operates” what remains of Women’s Running? Eight out of the company’s ten executive-level personnel are men, seven of whom are white; the two women are white and attractive, the latter quality obliterating any chance that these ladies bear legitimate Wokish inclinations. I think Strout should write about this motley bunch next.)
But in boilerplate Wokish, leftist-bozo fashion, Strout ruins whatever case she might be trying to make by speaking highly of the current batch of pro coaches, even if her praise is insincere. She proposes, in effect, that an injustice is defined here by the data themselves, not by any consequence of those data. She has therefore written an advocacy piece with a thesis that reduces to, “Some of these people doing exactly the jobs they’re supposed to be doing need to be replaced by those with darker faces and different genitals.” Since the Wokish already believe this racist idea and others properly reject it, this thesis unlikely to move anything in anyone’s mind.
Despite Strout having 11,500+ Twitter followers, her tweet about the article attracted extraordinarily little measurable attention. As of early Friday evening in Japan, only about 1.6 percent of those 11.5K followers had been sufficiently moved to even hit the “like” button, and only about a dozen people had responded with comments—most of them not supportive of Strout’s thesis despite the absurdly leftist cant of Twitter.
I’m not sure why this is, given that this subject actually might have some social-justice bite. It could be what I’ve noted on this site repeatedly—that Wokism is not a concerted push to uplift the truly needy, but a chaotic jumble of narcissistic whining and grifting, mostly by those walloped at birth with the ugly-stick and privileged, nominally educated liberals with no actual stake in anything they say on behalf of the ostensibly oppressed. I mean, it kind of looks that way, even without squinting hard.
That brings up a crucial element in the extreme gender imbalance Strout highlights. Why is it that the same people who insist that anyone who merely believes or decides they’re a woman is in fact a woman—no restrictions—so selectively obsessed with achieving gender equity? Maybe they don’t realize that in claiming that biological sex is an illusion—and that really is what “trans women are women” and all it contains reduces to—then what earthly difference does or could it make what gender label a given coach applies to himself or herself?
Alison Wade is an example of a fervent pro-transgender-pro-DSD pundit. She pretends that Francine Niyonsaba and her testicles belong in women’s events, and was sure to note when Nikki Hiltz came out as a lesbian and then “came out again” as nonbinary (that is, changed her story). So why does biological sex suddenly and transparently mean a great deal to Wade and her Fast Women readers when, say, it’s time to celebrate women “pumping” in unison before the start of the Boston Marathon? Might it be, again, that their ranting and raving on purported behalf of runners of color, size, et cetera is mostly bullshit and at its throbbing core nothing more than the usurping of cultural momentum for the purposes of trumpeting one’s personal grievances, and seeing fewer white men around no matter the collateral damage—including to women who actually compete?
Also leaving Strout and her ilk with waning rhetorical leverage is their complete unwillingness, even inability, to tolerate the idea that other people’s disagreeable ideas might have merit. I obviously disagree with having biological males being allowed to compete in sports as girls or women, but I wouldn’t be so pissed about the entire running media adopting this idea had they not done so with such undiluted contempt and smearing of people rejecting the “trans women ae women” stance. None of these outlets have run so much as a single “Hey, this is actually unfair to us” column from a woman or girl athlete, or anyone. That idea is not allowed, in no small part because the only way to prop up an insane unscientific and shitty concept is to snuff as much criticism of that concept as possible.
One person who did respond to Strout’s tweet: Dena Evans, who has all the fundamental chops Strout was looking for, even if she’s not coaching a big-name club. Evans diplomatically chided Strout (who should investigate the meaning of “diplomatically chided”) for rambling unironically from a position of ignorance, much of it arguably rooted in what the Wokish call “Whiteness” or simply “white privilege.”
Strout’s response? Publicly backpedal and attempt to cover her ass. Strout is as organically well-suited for journalism as I am for having a baby. (Remember, I’m 52.)
Another respondent was Hawi Keflezighi, a sports agent (read: Professional parasite) who managed to be even more vacuously emphatic about the supposedly great, if overly pallid and scrotum-laden, state of professional distance-running coaching c. 2022.
Notice that this takes Strout’s “there is a serious numbers gap” and immediately elevates it to “there is a serious opportunities gap”—and applies it not only to coaches, but to athletes. That’s right; paid black competitors are extraordinarily rare in the annals of athletics.
Hawi Keflezighi is an idiot if he really believes this, but again, he’s an agent, so he’s primarily a rank opportunist. And he wouldn’t be an agent at all if not for his brother Meb happening to have been a world-class runner. If we* want to make sure the most deserving folks wind up with the richest rewards, let’s* eliminate nepotism from the picture along with sexism and racism.
Still, even if the only reason these assholes can offer for wanting to effect a shift in the given numbers is “excessive whiteness,” the numbers are nevertheless strange. Why is it that so few women are head coaches with shoe-company-funded groups? I bet Dena Evans has more answers than I do—it’s just a suspicion—but those jobs are far less glamorous than they look to the average Twitter jogger-layabout with low vocational and overall self-esteem.
I wonder if Erin Strout has ever had any meaningful conversations about coaching athletes with anyone who has worked with serious talent. I don’t think she would even understand the mindset involved, much less the scope of the responsibilities and the willingness to eat bullshit on demand—from the sponsoring agencies, from athletes, and from mouth-breathing quasi-fans who refuse to internalize what professional or even sandlot sports are even about.
Based on the pay and the hours and the background required or desired, I think the profession rewards an inherent obsession with running at the level of numerical and historical geekery, like Alex Hutchinson exemplifies so well, and like Steve Magness used to exemplify before Magness decided he needed to become running's version of Dr. Phil with a dollop of Morgan Freeman on the side.
Also, of female track and cross-country coaches are relatively plentiful within the NCAA’s 1,000-plus distance programs, and many of these coaches are minorities. Before runners become pros, they (usually) have multiple college and high-school coaches first. While it looks good to have a diversity of faces at the top level, it’s more important that younger runners have access to coaches they can identify with and trust, not just coaches who earn token praise from the restive mob for the great job they’re doing despite melanin and estrogen deficiencies and an excess of gray hair.
Coaching also inevitably involves bossing people around for no truly good reason (rarely are the outcomes of sports contests life-or-death issues). Who likes to do more of that, women or men? It’s not only possibly but certain that women as a rule just aren’t as interested as men in these kinds of coaching jobs.
92 percent of U.S. kindergarten teachers are women. Do you suppose that's mostly owed to a lack of opportunities for men, early-onset social conditioning urging women into nurturing and caregiving roles, or…or…basic human biology exerting its effects on a societal scale? (The percentage of black and Latino teachers does, in contrast, match up well with America’s demographic profile.)
Seeing no minorities in these coaching roles, on the other hand, and in particular no women, is jarring. But in reality, there just aren't many retired, vaginated American distance runners of color. There will be once the African-born ones who became U.S. citizens to make American Olympic teams better age out of competing, but if they’re smart, they won’t be clamoring for whatever jobs are left in distance running. Hey, there’s always Regina Jacobs. I bet that would fly better than the return of Brooks Johnson, one of the worst assholes the sport has ever known.
Shalane Flanagan can always start her own team if she wants to. Lauren Fleshman and Mary Cain have become coaches in retirement, although that didn’t last long for Fleshman and Cain working with the New York Road Runners means she’s affiliated with the shittiest running organization in the entire country, in its most hideous and corrupt city, so that’s like not being a coach at all. I enjoy it when terrible things happen to New York and hunger for more of them.
The coverage of the Prefontaine Classic last weekend was a joke—not because the announcers bungled splits or names or otherwise behaved unskillfully, but because of the entire packaging. I will get to that within the year, but the announcers being forced to pretend that Niyonsaba is not only a woman but some kind of hero made me want to just delete every file on my computer pertaining to distance running and say, “well, good thing I only spend almost 40 fuckin’ years paying attention to this retarded excuse for a sport.”
I think that running’s harpies should work needs to expel men (of color and otherwise) from elite women’s races before concerning themselves with how many people of color are coaching those runners. But luckily, my opinion means nothing, because this “sport” is mostly in the hands of the feeble and the feckless.