(no subject)

[pktechgirlbackup]

When the HPV vaccine came out, a lot of religious nutjobs opposed it because if we don't let God punish sluts with cancer, how will they get their comeuppance? Knowing that not all of us view sex as a capital offense, some of them phrased some of their objections as questions about the medical value of the vaccine. And so another group of people said "fuck you, sex is awesome and even if it wasn't, cancer is bad. we're going to promote this vaccine like woah." Many years later, I heard rumors the manufacturer had suppressed some evidence of adverse effects, which were possibly more frequent than seen in other vaccines. Any attempt to investigate this was drowned out by proponents so used to hearing bullshit criticism come from people who wanted to control women. Now, I don't know if the story of excess adverse effects is true or not (and I got the vaccine myself), but it's certainly a good story illustrating how you can get so used to tuning out the voices of your clearly wrong opponents that you miss legitimate criticisms.

My current book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports suggests that the same thing is happening with girls' and women's sports. As Hugo Schwyzer says, any book with the phrase "protecting our daughters" in the title is suspect, but the author, Michael Sokolove, really does seem to care about women's and especially girl's sports for the value it brings the participants, and simply wants to make these incredibly valuable activities not perform the equivalent of bringing down a hammer on the knee of one girl in twenty.

I'm of the opinion that even if there were no environmental effects, the range of men's behavior would differ from that of women's behavior. I'm still opposed to gender essentialism because humans are unbelievably varied and the fact that a trait is highly predictive for a group doesn't mean it's useful for predicting the behavior of an individual. But this fact was brought up mostly by people who didn't want girls to play sports because they thought it was bad for their uteruses, so the pro-sports people got used to tuning it out. Now, my personal opinion is that our training programs for high school athletes are abominable for both genders and aren't based on the slightest bit of research, but it appears to be even worse for girls than for boys, judging by rate of injury**, and this needs to be worked on. And while I think the training programs for male and female athletes, I think our pursuit of a one-size-fits-all approach is really part of the problem, and we need to focus more on how to teach kids to distinguish good pain from bad pain, how to track what exercises are most productive for them, and to respect the limits of their body.***

Meanwhile, there's the sexualization of female high school athletes.**** For years I assumed that the cheerleader bikini car wash was made up by hollywood and/or porn. The first time I saw one for real, I went apoplectic. I'm assuming I don't need to explain to any of you why this is bad, or why it was bad to illustrate the story with a picture of what a sexualized high school athlete might look like*****, so please just join me in being angry.

*while I have to work for every pound of gain. Bastards.

**I'm only a few pages in, the statistics given were for soccer, where girls have 8x the risk of ACL tears. If you count cheerleading as a sport, and you should, the discrepancy is worse, because they get no padding while risking considerably worse impact than football players.

***Which would have all kinds of side benefits too.

****I'm a bigger fan of this Schwyzer's blog than his officially published work- one of the reasons I don't do a lot of editing here, possibly too little, is that I've seen several bloggers I really like get more professional gigs and polish everything interesting out of their work. This article is saying valuable things, so I'm glad it was published, but it doesn't have the same sense of watching someone learn that his blog does.

*****I'm annoyed by the trend of including an on-theme but zero-information picture along with articles and blogs in general, but this one in particular.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

This is interesting and kind of depressing. The thing about injury rates is news to me — do they propose reasons why girls' rates are higher.

I would also like to state for the record that my high school and college both provided us with spandex volleyball shorts that covered most of our thighs. We complained about how they were spandex, but I could not have played volleyball if the uniforms had involved that kind of short shorts. I played for five years, and I loved it, and it was really good for me. Just ugh.

[crystalpyramid]

And for what it's worth, I appreciated the picture, because the uniforms depicted aren't what I think of when people complain about volleyball spandex, so it was informative. And it is, after all, just like a zillion innocent pictures on every high school's website, because it's hard to photograph anything other than the backs of the girls blocking.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Fair point, although I still wish they'd found another way.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not very far in the book. But from the teaser article and other reading I've done:

Overspecializing/overtraining hurts girls more than boys, because testosterone gives boys muscle growth whether they work the particular muscle or not, whereas girls' musculature is tightly correlated to what they're actually exercising. That means girls have fewer stabilizers and are more out of balance.

Stretching programs designed to mitigate the negative effects of testosterone in boys cause overstretching in girls (I don't think the programs are so great for boys either, but neither is overtraining. Nonetheless, this has a bigger impact on girls than boys)

Girls are more prone to eating disorders, leading to nutritional deficiencies.

The compromises made to enable childbearing make our joints less structurally sound

Girls are simultaneously more likely to play through pain (hard data) and less likely to be believed when they do complain (my perception). Certainly I'd be less likely to complain if my coach was forcing me into lingerie like the girl in the article.

Girls run differently than boys, land harder from jumps, and decelerate more quickly.

speculation on my part: Girls have to relearn their bodies during puberty in ways boys don't.

[crystalpyramid]

The testosterone thing is just so unfair. I want free muscles that come automatically no matter what I do, too!

I wonder why girls run differently. Do female kids run differently, or is it puberty-related? (Either biological, or the need to "run like a girl", which is an affectation I definitely remember some people initiating in late middle school.)

An attempt to elaborate on your speculation — girls' weight distribution and muscle capabilities (possibly just relative to weight distribution?) change a lot during puberty, and this requires a lot of relearning. It's probably aggravated by the fact that most girls are done with puberty in high school, while plenty of guys are still having major puberty-related bone and muscle growth in early college. And by the fact that puberty gives men athletic advantages and women disadvantages, at least in categories like "ability to do a push-up".

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Do female kids run differently, or is it puberty-related? Book hasn't said, will update if it does.

Good call on the puberty timing. Apparently it's within the range of normal for a high achieving high school female soccer players to enroll in college a year or two early so they can play college sports- in the top teams in the league. A 16 year old girl's body is competitive with a 20 year old woman's body in a way you'd never see in boys.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

The official list of suggested reasons women might tear their ACL more: wider Q angles (line between kneecap and hip), more likely to have knock knees, more upright posture during during athletics, more likely to have quads out of proportion to their hamstrings, women's athletic shoes are scaled down versions of men's, unspecified hormonal differences, unspecified neurological differences.

It's also worth noting that men tend to have an obvious reason their ACL snapped, such as a 200 pound man smashing them into the ground. Women's tend to snap spontaneously, or at most in response to a mild perturbation of the sort they've withstood hundreds of times.