Wearing sexy uniforms erodes female Olympians' confidence, but males poaching their medals does not
Raging envy plus seismic projection equals the logic of the modern liberal feminist
Anyone who agitates for the inclusion of males in sport spaces designated exclusively for females sacrifices the right to be taken seriously as an advocate for female athletes, women in general, sports, or anything requiring the acknowledgment of basic consistency. As a corollary, anyone who cheers when males granted access to those sport spaces prevail over the female professionals there, and suggests that high-school girls beaten by boys at championship-level meets should just deal with it, can never honestly speak or write the words “I am an advocate of girls’ and women’s athletic opportunities and visibility” or their equivalent. Whatever level of in-group visibility or commercial success such a person has achieved does nothing to resolve this conflict.
On the other hand, from the standpoint of an overt enemy of the idea of girls or women playing sports, it would make perfect sense to want to see these sports spaces ruined, and in a creatively excoriating way—by peppering them with mediocre, mentally unwell, or merely grandstanding males. But all of the advocacy I’ve seen for this kind of anti-female-sports mayhem has flowed entirely from the very sources that logic would suggest would be the first to forbear it: women who follow and tirelessly promote women’s sports and, as a “WTF” bonus, are constitutively suspicious of the motives of (self-admitted) men involved in those sports.
Yet the person who produced these opinions, Alison Wade, would argue with a straight face—were people like her willing to openly debate anything, that is—that she’s pro-woman all the way, despite the patent absurdity of this claim vis-à-vis Wade’s long public record of wanting testicles to be circling the track in women’s-only running races and establishing women’s world records.
It doesn’t matter how many race results Wade compiles and includes in her weekly newsletter, or how many podcasts she listens to by and about women runners and claims to adore, or how willing she is to emit feminist-adjacent social-media blurts. This woman is a plain enemy of women’s sports and women’s progress and is undeniably either in the throes of a genuine psychotic disorder or secretly despises women. There is no other way to resolve the incoherence in her stated ideologies, and its in-group popularity doesn’t excuse any one individual in that frazzled group from the obligation to somehow refute this incoherence if he or she wants to be taken seriously.
I don’t think Wade is psychotic, though I would argue she meets traditional criteria for being mentally challenged merely by appearing to fail basic reality tests. I think a simpler explanation is that she despises higher-value women, but is willing to leverage their achievements for her own gain by promoting them in the same newsletter in which she calls for the institution anti-woman policies. Wade can, in this manner, simultaneously exploit and—let’s be real—verbally abuse pro women runners for her own financial gain because she knows that active athletes and coaches can’t speak their minds about transgender issues without being canceled or otherwise marginalized. And people can’t speak openly about a whole slate obvious, basic facts these days because this is the radioactive waste-repository the sport of running (and ambient culture) has become—in part because of the march and expansion of Wokism throughout academia over the past two decades, but mostly thanks to today’s corporations and media selecting systematically and exclusively for anti-white (and especially anti-white-male) racists, half-ton fabulists, science deniers across various fields, and the most florid all-around rhetorical hypocritical money-grubbers and cowards on offer.
If this is true—if Wade hates or resents successful women, but can’t afford to openly say so—then how might she express this indirectly? Well, one way might to be raise hell whenever too much attention seems devoted to hotness and pretend that something other than simmering envy is motivating this anti-hotness clamor, such as concern over athletes being body-shamed, even by announcers conspicuously not guilty of any body-shaming comments.
We* should therefore expect Wade and her cult of pseudofeminist and misandrist followers to be displeased with one of the Paris Olympics track-and-field uniform options Nike recently rolled out. Wade’s Monday newsletter, in addition to pushing the efforts of race-grifters, included a somewhat playful but nevertheless revealing (if not immodestly so) passage about the kits:
First, Nike got exactly the reaction it was hoping for with its sartorial gambit, which was any loud reaction at all. During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Nike rolled out an ad featuring U.S. 1,500-meter runner Suzy Favor Hamilton escaping a Jason Vorhees-style psychopath.
The spot drew sufficient outrage, and NBC quickly pulled it. (Favor Hamilton, having thrown down a still-cracking 3:57.40 in July in Oslo, would take what she later admitted was a high-pressure pratfall in the 1,500-meter final in Sydney with around 100 meters to go and trot across the line in last place.)
Did Nike regret this or suffer any damage? Has it made any similarly unpopular moves since and laughed them off without consequence? Wade may want to consider the fact that not everyone is as upset as she is over these uniforms, even if the colors are ugly.
Citius Mag is the grease-slicked online property of body-shaming white-knight Chris Chavez, so it’s natural that Wade would direct her readers to a surely definitive tweetstorm with Chavez’ imprimatur at the top. But Wade, should she ever wake up one day feeling the need to express consistent values, may want to consider whether Chavez isn’t in Nike’s pocket himself.
Wade, even after getting assurance from one woman that the crotch of the kit was perhaps acceptable after all, mused that problems will ensue if some Olympian wants to wear the “racy” uniform and cannot owing to prohibitively wide labio-vulvar apparatus, or perhaps an inopportune flare-up of doper’s clit. Fear not, says the staff of Beck of the Pack in unison: France is home to a panoply of skilled, on-demand tailors, all of them discreet. But more to the point, this seems like something only women with Olympic bodies and meaningful Paris dreams need to be worrying about.
Also: Wade is worried about this, but thinks these poor overexposed women should have to race against larger, hairier people who really would make a scene in this style of kit thanks to starkly unconventional pudenda and other aesthetic-kinetic factors? What’s going on in these people’s minds?
Erin Strout, another pro-“trans inclusion” jogger and stealth misogynist, did an even better job than Wade of demonstrating that she knows this is not her issue to whine about while being unable to resist projecting personal insecurities detectable from the moon without sensory augmentation.
Strout seems to believe that having the opportunity to write for a raft of degraded media outlets qualifies her to opine on the primary in-competition stressors of Olympic-caliber athletes. If Wade, Strout and other women who think like this weren’t committed to blocking and trying to punish people with sane opinions, their minds might open a sliver and they might be able to rescue themselves from their own nonstop absurdities.
On the matter of trans advocacy from running’s body-negative pseudofeminists, as more and more sports fans and other Americans have become willing to say what they have thought all along about “trans inclusion” in female sports, pro-trans running-media types have grown noticeably quiet about the subject. And it’s possible that even within their bubble of histrionic jabber-yack, some of them have caught wind of the WPATH files and rising (if media-suppressed) outrage over the diabolical mangling of children, leading to further reticence.
But one thing that will never arise from the folx in this crowd is any kind of admission that they have been deeply wrong, and—far more important than an obligation to snarf down humble pie—any acknowledgement of the real harms being caused by the policies and norms they and some of running’s other more popular (or at least louder) pundits have been promoting for years. It’s the active solicitation of behaviors and policies that make life worse for Americans most people never see that most upsets me, not goofy Internet static flying from self-centered, stoically self-debased, and otherwise imperfectly functioning running fans and “fans.”