Sexist Palaver

I was watching bull riding last night on TV, which in its PBR variant is a sort of slick, polished, pop-culturally hip version of older rodeo events. PBR events are rodeo without the obscure roping events and with loud music and pyrotechnics, something partway between rodeo events, patriotic rallies and rock concerts.

Anyway, there is a woman on the Versus TV crew, Leah Garcia, whose job is to do quickie interviews with the cowboys, which often go like this:

Leah: What did you do differently this time?
Happy Cowboy: I hung on and dint get bucked off.

Or:

Leah: What are you going to have to do differently to get back into it?
Sulky Cowboy: Not get bucked off, I reckon.

Not prime journalism, in other words, but someone has to do the flavor stories. Last night they gave her an opportunity to actually express some of he opinions on bull riding and the season in general – to do something akin to actual reporting - and after rendering her opinions, she sent it back to the booth with a sort of “What do you think of that?” remark.

What did they think of that? Did they take her opinions at all seriously? Of course not! They didn’t even acknowledge the fact that she had had opinions! One guy just said “She’s sure a lot prettier than we are.” There you go, you knucklehead, don’t even take her opinions seriously and only comment on how she looks. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be insulting – or did he? Bull riding's a pretty traditional sport and plays to pretty traditional people who don’t always seem to have a lot of use for new-fangled inventions like city folk, women with opinions, and Brazilians.

So with that said, I now approach the subject I really wanted to talk about, that being Ashley Force winning an NHRA Funny Car race title. See this link for official NHRA news:

http://www.nhra.com/content/team_report.asp?articleid=28489&zoneid=86

It’s not my normal policy to congratulate people for winning things like this – John Force has won umpteen titles and I never congratulated him, and other than respect for his accomplishments, I never went out of my way to honor Don Garlits either. So does congratulating Ashley Force amount to a kind of institutional sexism? Am I calling attention to her sex or her appearance instead of calling attention to her skill as a driver? I don’t know – but I do know that beating John Force isn’t easy, and reaching 320 miles per hour in a Funny Car isn’t easy, and doing it consistently enough to win the event isn’t easy. So, congratulations.

I confess I was always one of those guys who assumed that Ashley was driving simply because her father wanted her to. John Force would likely not be an easy man to turn down. He’s passionate, he has a larger-than-life personality, and he seems to have some difficulty taking “no” for an answer, so I always assumed Ashley was in drag racing just to buy a certain amount of family peace – easier to race than to fight Daddy Force all the time. But perhaps I’m wrong – I don’t know, but I would think it would be hard to win the title if you didn’t have a fairly high level of commitment to the task.