"We're helpless and need to be rescued" is a bad look when peddling empowerment
Having power means thriving in an often-callous world, not shielding yourself from its ego-deflating realities
Women runners with large Twitter followings routinely churn out self-defeating ideas like this one:
So, life as a straight woman with aspirations of becoming famous is untenable unless men as a rule think you’re hot, and the answer to this is to complain about men nonstop and give kudos to Lena Dunham for making something of herself despite being ugly (a word I thought was way off-limits, perhaps explaining the tweet’s short lifespan).
Crouse and her ilk are also convinced that the world sees women over 35 as unattractive despite their active lifestyles and ample disposable income. (Crouse is in her late thirties and lives in Manhattan.)
I’m picking a lot lately on one relatively well-known meathead—if she’d respond to any of my brief but direct concerns, I might relent—but this kind of “I suck, but it’s someone else’s fault” philosophy, mostly from the under-40 crowd, has become inescapable among running’s most active distaff chatterboxes. Many of them are slobs to the naked eye who show little to no evidence of running at all, and if they do, they often cheat.
The weird combination—demanding respect for resilience and innovation, yet displaying every symptom of thumb-sucking helplessness (e.g., substituting facile ranting for difficult action, hunting for reasons to feel slighted, demanding that alternative viewpoints not be shared at all)—is a feature, not a bug, of the Wokish, and it’s what sets them apart from natural runners, who are more compulsive and have a higher tolerance for discomfort, and therefore need to go back to leading the running media.
I’m convinced that, while women’s running figures elsewhere have shown plenty of inclination to be devious on their own, Lindsay Crouse can be blamed for the bulk of the explosion of dishonesty in the running media. If The New York Times is printing absolute bullshit with impunity, and charging people for the privilege of reading it and paying this clown’s salary, why shouldn't others with estrogen-honed axes to grind get on the train, too?
But perhaps worse than the normalization of public bullshitting by whiny running figures and figurines is the outright damage Crouse is doing to the very women she seeks to lure and enchant, and, so far, somehow does manage to attract in fairly large numbers.
How is it that someone who understands, even insists that women’s running is dangerously overridden with eating disorders, and has built a great deal of her followership on her reporting of that issue, can unspool this kind of crap and expect no one to notice or care about the conflict?
Simple. Crouse’s “reporting” on Mary Cain’s experience with the Nike Oregon Project (now being fist-fucked by she-demons in Hell’s version of Portland) was abysmal, and the only reprisals this earned from within was Fast Women’s vague condemnation of the story’s placement. She has been lying and contradicting herself without consequence to her career for as long as she’s been on the payroll; what, exactly, besides the sudden appearance of a conscience or a total mental collapse, is going to stop her now? (This is no secret to those snickering at her antics, but Crouse doesn’t want to help women, or anyone; she wants to remind them she’s better than them, even though she’ll never believe this herself and rightly so.)
Also, you should have noticed already that, rather than hear any tangible examples of institutional oppression from the complainers, we* are treated to imaginary offenses an and an endless barrage of broad accusations—of “whiteness,” of anti-trans bigotry, of fat-shaming, of being blind to eating disorders and depression, of everything that can possibly initiate pangs of butthurt in susceptible individuals. Where apparent or real injustices exist, we’re expected to unconditionally view these through the lens of one person being victimized by another, with insuperable group dynamics defining every such conflict.
It’s been close to a year since I started really noticing this stuff, and so far, the biggest example of the supposed “white supremacy” ruling running is a race director not wanting muckrakers of all political persuasions spilling their grievances onto his Facebook page. For all the endemic racism, sexism and other -isms that allegedly need to be purged from running, it doesn’t actually seem to be anywhere, which is why we* see the same blabbering “inclusion” heads over and over. They are, probably to their delight, much like porn stars in this respect.
Basically, if you feel bad and belong to the right identity group, you can blame your lack of self-esteem on something besides the inherent lack of luster in your own efforts. And if you think I’m kidding, just look at the theme running through my posts about bad media behavior. In each case, someone—Ben Chan, Latoya Shauntay Snell, the “all athletes are girls” crowd acting on behalf of trans girls—is claiming to have been victimized by someone higher in the power structure, or been privy to such victimization. While these things unfortunately do happen, it doesn’t help the causes of any of the aforementioned people that each of them is a proven liar or journalistic con artist.
So why are so many grown-ups now seemingly intent on feeling bad, while at the same desperately believing that always feeling good is required to be successful—rather than predicating their happiness on some personal definition of success?
As Jesse Singal describes in his just-released social-science critique The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, self-esteem has always been an industry of sorts in the United States. In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which was the first bestseller to suggest, more or less, that great results flowed from positive self-esteem rather than the other way around.
This became amplified at around the time I was finishing college in the early 1990s. For whatever reason, people became less enthusiastic about stratifying kids by academic ability level, probably because roughly 95 percent of parents have at least one child not in the top 5 percent using performance metrics, and a lot more than one in every 20 parents seems to require a kickass child. And since I am drawing much of this from within the bowels of my own ass as it is, I’ll mix in that the increasingly pictorial and interactive Internet caused a lot of problems for kids and their parents when it came to kid developing identities apart from frank comparisons to others.
The 1990s brought not only mass online communication but countless Chicken Soup for the Soul books, Oprah, and a zillion other proponents of “If you feel it, you can be it.” This, again, was nothing new, but it came amid a groundswell of actual self-improvements, at least superficial ones. Teenagers for the first time had parents with six-packs who could outrun them, and those benefiting most from a generally solid economy chose in large numbers to fight the well-underway American obesity boom by completing, and in some cases running, marathons. (Most of this shit, like every U.S. fad promising blindingly white smiles for all though the power of mind-manipulation and self-actualization, seems to have originated on the West Coast.)
What’s most interesting about Singal’s work here is, reduced to a couple of sentences, this: Now that a lot of the data is in—to the extent any of this can be usefully quantified, of course—if you look for a measurable, reproducible effect of any sort of self-esteem-improvement training on objective, real-world outcomes, you won’t find one. But if you ask the people who take part in these games if their lives have gotten better, on average, they say “Yes.”
The conclusion that seems obvious to me here is that a lot of younger and almost-middle-aged adults are viciously deluded about their standing and capabilities—especially those who, for example, manage to fail upward through Ivy League Institutions and retain great jobs in publishing despite both purposeful and unavoidable incompetence. But this is an inevitable result of trying to convince at least 50 percent of the population that they’re better than nine-tenths of humans who have ever shat upon the pimple-studded face of the earth.
But while this has been going on for a couple of decades, with all this neuroticism fermenting and maturing in the minds and bodies of people now populating colleges and the workforce, the transformation of this turmoil into flagrant lying and a stoic disrespect for any kind of journalistic standards seems a consequence of a fundamentally different movement, which, as you already know, goes by names like “Wokism” and “anti-white racism” here, and “social justice” and “inclusivity” elsewhere.
Wokism has made it not merely okay but often obligatory to require personal safe spaces, install mental and social-media filters to prevent the appearance of uncomfortable ideas, and blame other people and institutions for any illicit static that manages to seep through these defenses. (I’m tempted to add that it doesn’t help matters than wealth inequality is a real and worsening problem, but most of this crap is coming from well-off women of various colors.) Rather than strive to surmount real personal or institutional obstacles, today’s cohort of rambling do-nothings invents obstacles they blame on oppression by others, then invents corresponding stories of triumph over those imaginary woes and foes.
Instead of even defining coherent goals amid all the catastrophizing, male-bashing and racist finger-pointing, they make endless bitching and self-victimization a goal in itself, encouraging other whiners in the throes of vocational, social or athletic paralysis to similarly attribute their perceived shortcomings and unattained goals to malevolent external agents.
Blaming other people for feeling bad is also nothing new. But under Wokism, people no longer need to slip into this kind of thinking by themselves; everyone who is not a cis white male is now roundly encouraged to find an oppressor to blame, even in scenarios where this is childishly silly. If you find yourself unable to haul your ass through a marathon in under seven hours, lie about it, and attempt to silence the person reporting the lie using racial slurs and additional lies, you’ll get a pass for this as long as the ass you suck at hauling around happens to be oversized and dark-skinned and that of your oppressor is pale and male.
The inevitable result of this, after the finger-pointing trend doesn’t fix anything, is for people to simply blame God, i.e., their own DNA, for manufacturing an assortment of proteins that fail to produce the desired cosmetic or intellectual result at the whole-mammal level. This will never be fashionable, as it would quickly throw into view this is everyone’s lot in life, and that in good health, rather than wallow, we might try to extract the utmost from whatever that DNA plus the environmental soil in which it functions can endow. (I am not an exemplar of this, but I also don’t claim to be artificially constrained from pursuing my dreams. I just happen to have low-wattage dreams nowadays.)
People will always yell at runners for fun, gawk instinctively at the more physically attractive, manifest some measure of competitive aggression in sports coaching, prefer lowbrow entertainment over anything requiring deep thought, malign their betters, put down their critics, and—I’d bet on it, anyway—seek out ladies with big fake hooters and taut, waggly asses (or alternatively, buff-chested gym bros with proper scruff and nutrition secrets) when cruising Web porn and Instagram, if not necessarily in real life. I’m pretty sure my dad taught me all of this when I was very young, albeit in coarser language and with fewer references to the Internet.
Pockets of the world will always be cruel and stupid, and as daily merchants of cruelty and stupidity, the Wokish know this better than anyone—they just want to be on the dispensing end of it. The rank-and-file doesn't need this anti-empowerment, pro-division shrieking.
When I ask longtime runner friends what they see as the biggest difference between road races 25-plus years ago and those of today, they don’t cite obvious things like people running with phones, the percentage of entrants who are power-walking, and the beer trucks (never the best of ideas) being replaced by massage tables and vendor booths. It’s the atmosphere, which strikes most old-timers as an unlikely blend of self-loathing and self-absorption. People want to be seen thriving and smiling and socializing and receiving a medal, which is fine, but a lot of them seem confused when the world at large doesn’t really give a shit about either your sub-four-minute mile or your 40:00 5K.
In the end, this kind of obvious projection of personal psychic unrest doesn’t just fail to contribute in a positive way to efforts to shepherd deserving women, minorities and others into position of influence; it makes women and others who really are still getting boned by the institutional shaft look, to a cynic skimming the surface, weak and infantile, incapable of doing a goddamn thing unless the world shuts up about how good certain people look, run, write, coach, parent, test-take, copulate or whatever, as such acknowledgements invariably make others feel inadequate.
Small children who have committed an oopsy and are backed into a corner by their parents’ accusations sometimes lie despite knowing how things will end, because maybe, maybe, if they pine for magic to pull them of discomfort of their own making, it can happen. What’s to lose? They’ll be scolded and sent to their room either way. But a kid working their way clumsily through the phases of normal development is one thing. Adults who have never been exposed to or completed these phases holding media jobs (among other positions of importance) and using them to trumpet angry, wishful thinking is a different problem in both substance and scale, and I hope more people start to notice how prevalent it’s become in an alarmingly short time.
You get that, ladies? Your media and influencer icons make you look exactly like the stereotypes liberal feminists—and a lot of happily cooperative men—have been working hard to overturn since before you were born: In need of hand-holding and protection from cradle to grave. Ironically, before long, the only people who will understand how hilariously backward this is, and be able to rattle of a long list of women runners who are truly amazing athletes and human beings, are older runners like me who welcome and appreciate progress but resist Wokeness.
No one I know is arguing that the institution of running is not in need of change; no respectable social institution is ever anything but dynamic and accommodating, and, to name one of several easy examples, women and girl runners are still nowhere close to being adequately connected to all of the right resources. But the loudest noises presently being made in this area are not being directed toward meaningful efforts to improve this, and some of the most prominent ostensible allies of women’s running are practically indistinguishable from coked-up saboteurs.
(Finally, since this is a largely repetitive expression of frustration with the decline of the running media and the self-serving Trojan-horse tactics powering that decline, if you want a nice perspective from the inside on why Crouse’s self-promoting antics are bad all around, see this.)