The Olympics Are Still Sexist. Can We Enjoy Them Anyway?

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S1: This is the waves. This is the way, this is the way, this is the way. It is the way. This is the waves. Welcome to The Waves, Slate’s podcast about gender, feminism and swim caps. Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the things we can’t get off our minds. And today you got me Amira Rose Davis, a professor at Penn State and co-host of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down.

S2: And Me, Rebecca Schuman, a gymnastics writer for Slate.

S1: So the Olympics are finally here after a year of postponement and despite lingering covid concerns, they are off and running or swimming or jumping or whatever. The IOC is very proud to announce that this is the most gender balance games ever. And so far, the women of the Olympics have certainly been showstoppers from traditional powerhouse events like swimming to new competitions like skateboarding, where teenage girls swept the medal stand. The collective age, I think, was 40 to the Olympic. Women are not just showing up, however, they are speaking out because the so-called gender balance games are still teetering with inequities from the fight by nursing mothers to bring their children to Tokyo to swim cap bans or handball uniforms. So what’s the real story about gender at the Olympic Games? As a historian who researches women athletes in the Olympics? I’ve been asking myself that question for years. But one of the reasons I’m so interested in talking about this is because I’m also very conflicted and ambivalent about the Olympics themselves. And I love to work through those complexities and contradictions. I like mess. I’m still sobbing at fencing at 3:00 in the morning, but I’m always thinking about how to square that with systemic racism and sexism that seems seemingly as indistinguishable as the Olympic flame itself. I recently chatted with some of the black women on Team USA about these contradictions and messy, muddled pandemic games. You can check that out over on Slate right now. But I’m interested in now having this conversation with you, Rebecca, and all of you at the waves, from athletes to fans to casual observers or fervent armchair Olympic coaches, how do we reconcile the seeming gap between gender balance in happiness and some of the issues that have come up in these Olympic Games? Rebecca, why do you want to talk about this?

S2: This is a topic I can’t stop thinking about, because every four years when the rest of the world gets briefly interested in gymnastics, I’m obsessed always. It’s an affliction. I understand that. I hear a lot of the same things about why are the quote unquote girls so muscular and graceless now? Why is floor exercise all tumbling and weird leaps? What happened to the dance? What happened to the graceful days of Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci? Listen, if that’s how casual viewers react to the most gender balanced Olympics ever, I hesitate to ask what a Sexist Guan would do to them. And also what people don’t realize when they say this is that Olga and Nadia were themselves huge rebels against the gymnastics aesthetic of their time times. The International Gymnastics Federation didn’t want them doing all those new flips. Corbetts, Saulteaux on balance beam and uneven bars were almost banned because they were considered too dangerous, not proper to women’s gymnastics. Just as nostalgia always does, nostalgia for the good old days of gymnastics opens a decidedly ungraceful, racist and sexist can of worms and reveals decades, really a century of conditioned misogyny and bigotry.

S1: So what we’re saying is none of this is new. The gap between Olympic ideals and realities has always been vast. And today we will stand in that gap to talk about gender, race in the Olympic Games. Has it always been like this? Spoiler, yes. But what is happening now and where do we go from here? Coming up on the show, we chart some of the history of women at the Olympics. Consider the lingering issues at the games of which there are many, and then we will later ask what change is possible. That’s all coming up next on the waves. So it’s been claimed that this is the greatest, most equalised games ever.

S2: It’s true, Amira the International Olympic Committee has congratulated itself a lot for putting on, quote, the most gender equal games yet because a full wait for it. Forty nine percent of represented athletes are women.

S3: Well, the new head of the Tokyo Olympics Organizing Committee has launched a gender equality initiative. Siko Hashimoto says achieving a target of 40 percent women on the board is one of her top priorities. Shimamoto took over the Tokyo committee after her predecessor resigned over.

S1: The statistics are the closest we’ve gotten so far to having an equal number of men and women.

S3: The Associated Press. They’re calling the Tokyo Games the, quote, most gender equal.

S4: Olympic organizers of the Tokyo Olympics say this will be the most equal games in history, with women making up nearly half of all athletes competing over the next several weeks. We did it, ladies.

S2: Just under half misogyny is solved. If anything, I’d say it’s time to dial it back in case the ladies get overrepresented. You know, I mean, you don’t want it to just be the women’s Olympics.

S1: What do you think the Venn diagram overlap is between people who congratulate themselves on their progressive accomplishments? And, I don’t know, reality.

S2: I think that’s like two distinct circles.

S1: It reminds me of the last Winter Olympics when the US went out of its way to congratulate itself on sending the most diverse winter team ever with yay! But also it was like still ninety three percent white. And so like then we are having a both and conversation. The games can be both the most gender balanced ever and have more work to do and have lingering inequities and still have historical foundations built on antiquated but persistent gender norms and Sexist assumptions by those in positions of power left unchecked in the room where it happens. Because I don’t see leadership hardly represents the gender and racial makeup of the games itself. So yeah, both and.

S2: All right. What do you mean?

S1: Well, let’s recall that six months ago women held just seven seats on the IOC s board for the Tokyo Games, seven seats out of thirty five. OK, I’m not going to do fast math because I really can’t right now. But seven seats out of thirty five feels like not anywhere close to a number that would be equitable. And then of course, the Games then president Yuri Hashimoto in February said women talk too much and he was against giving them more seats, one to be careful about getting more seats on the board because he said they get emotional and they talk too much and they wouldn’t it be able to achieve anything in these boardrooms that created a firestorm, one of many leading into these games. We saw him resign. We saw 10 seats added to other people stepped down. And that whole brouhaha is what got women’s representation on the administrative level up to wait for forty two percent. But the fact that six months ago, it took all of that to even approach the 40s, that’s what I mean when I say the progress of this games. Much fanfare, but it feels more like watching, I don’t know, paint dry or molasses or it’s very slow is what I’m telling you here.

S2: Yeah. Yikes. I feel like also if I object to that, they’re just going to be like, well, that’s what a chatty woman would say. You’re just exactly like there’s no it’s a thing you can’t win.

S1: And that’s what I was always thinking because I was they added all these Susan all the women taking them, though, are now like, how is that not in your mind? Like, am I talking too much? Am I proving your point like it’s a mess? But I want to give you a brief history lesson here, because I think that a lot of what we’re seeing today has these kind of foundational roots in the development of how women got to the Olympics in the first place. So we’re talking about numbers of both athletes and in the boardrooms, but it’s always been a fight just like it is now. So have you ever heard of the Women’s World Games?

S2: I have a little bit. From my understanding, weren’t they so popular that they essentially forced the Olympics to include women? Is that is that the right narrative?

S1: Yeah, absolutely. Precisely. So if you remember, we go way back at the beginning of the twentieth century, women had a few events in the Olympics, golf, archery, but there was a lot of tension around running in particular. And there was no intention to allow women into the Olympics for track. But women like they do, don’t you know, they’re Chadi, right? They know they’re not going to sit by and wait for an opportunity. And so they created their own games, led by Alex Muleya from France, formed the Federation Sporty Feminine Internationale, or SFI, and they hosted their own games, which they called the Women’s Olympiad. At first, people were like, whatever, and nobody’s going to go to that. Who cares? Blah, blah, blah. Well, how wrong were they? Women from around the world started pouring into Paris to compete in these Women’s World Games at the time. It. So called the Olympiad, they were still using that language and they were running track events there, and that was one of the big points, is that they wanted to have a robust running opportunities. Now, as more and more women started to be interested in these officials around the world, both in the Olympic committees and in independent nation state federations started freaking out because all of the women were showing interest in running. And so they told FSF, I like, OK, stop calling yourself the Olympics like you’re threatening our stuff here. Like you have to chill. You like, fine. We will begrudgingly agree to the Olympics if you change the name of your games and kind of go away. And famously, the only events included when they were finally included in 1928 were the hundred meters, a hundred in the four by one plus high jump and discus. And at the end of the 800, when a few women were winded because who’s not winded after winning like the race in track and field, they were like, See, you’re threatening your babies. This is why you’re weak. This is why you can’t do it. And so it is a moment, though, in which you see women introduced and brought into the Olympics. But it’s not like with open arms. That’s the kind of framework I would think about when we’re thinking about women’s presence at the Olympics in general. It has always been pushing up against a door that seemingly is blocked or being pushed against from the other side.

S2: Your description of track is so similar to what with the journey with gymnastics was like when Olympic gymnastics was begrudgingly allowed to include women in 1936. It was never intended to be a parallel to the men’s gymnastics, which had all of these strength events and power events with women. It was never really intended to be a quote unquote athletic sport in the first place. It was an exhibition basically of feminine, ladylike grace, maybe a little balance. They were allowed balance. And of course, they’re their figures, their body fitness. It was almost like a pageant. In recent years, women’s gymnastics has become a little bit more like men’s gymnastics and a lot of ways because it’s become more athletic and acrobatic. But I wouldn’t call it balanced by any stretch. And it’s so much more complicated than that throughout the 20th century as the athletes, because they were athletes of women’s gymnastics, continued to become, you know, more athletic in spite of their governing bodies objections. There was a huge jump in athleticism. The biggest one probably came in the decade of the 1980s through the early 1990s, where women started sort of doing twisting double flips on floor, a standard. The uneven bars, which started as a balance event, kept sort of inching further apart. And giant swings and big release moves became that event. Central components. And now, especially in the era of Simone Biles, whose acrobatics exceed the ability of many of her male counterparts, athleticism is the absolute center of women’s gymnastics. But again, it’s still not that simple. Here’s a good example on the men’s side, with few exceptions, you almost never see skills being banned or devalued or undervalued because they’re too dangerous. There has certainly not been a case in recent years of a male gymnast inventing a new skill and then that skill being assigned a lower than expected difficulty value to discourage it from being competed as if the International Gymnastics Federation is its dad. And yet, one of the most reported gymnastics stories of the last few years is the punitive undervaluing of the Biles balance being dismount, which is the double twisting double back tuck. The fig explained that the move was too dangerous and they didn’t want to encourage athletes to chuck it, which is like gymnastics parlance for going for something outside your range. But only Simone Biles could ever even dream of doing that. Just not like athletes might chuck. Sometimes they don’t chuck beam dismounts like you don’t. If you chuck a beam dismount, you’re going to die. So this was hugely paternalistic on the Figgs part being like, we know better than you, young lady. And it’s just so insulting to think that a gymnast can’t trust herself not to die in competition. It’s hugely insulting. And so this idea that, you know, there’s gender equality in gymnastics now or even like women’s gymnastics is more popular. And so it’s even better and there’s no sexism in it. I would just, like, absolutely beg to differ.

S1: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so ridiculous. And I think one of the things that, you know, those examples point us to is that once you do somehow slinky and slide into that door, the restrictions at the Olympic at the elite levels in many of these sports, whether it’s literally how things are scored, what people wear or even what their natural body makes. Up is right, so in the 60s, you have gender verification test starting, which at the time the science and tech of it was literally parading in front of a medical board that would poke and prod you and decide if you were sufficiently woman enough and then give you a card, literally a card like a driver’s license that you had to carry around the game into the 90s. And the uniforms remain remarkably consistent, too. And if you remember when boxing was added to the games in 2012, officials wanted to have women boxers wear skirts. The reasoning, because how else would anybody tell that they are women? Just the I can’t even deal with half of this stuff as we move into the 2012 2016 cycles. Of course, you also have beach volleyball being pressured to change its dress code because before they were forced to wear bikinis or body suits and there was a huge push there, especially when we’re talking about just the policing of what people wear in general. It’s never just one thing. This games alone, we’ve had people reprimanded because their shorts are too short. The handball team is told that it’s not short enough. My co-host, Erin, on that is really right on this and pointing out that this is about control of bodies because we see this with the hijab ban. Right. Which is about covering and then we see it with uniforms. So it’s like you can’t do anything. You can’t wear anything. Right. If you have autonomy, it’s always going to come under fire. And that’s what we’ve seen. And so what we have is this like hyper policing of women when they do get to the Olympic Games. And that has had continuity right up until this pandemic games. And so we’ve seen that not only with handball uniforms, like I mentioned, but with things like swim caps, where the Afro swim cap designed to hold natural hair specifically by black Olympians, was denied being acceptable use, which is ridiculous because it’s not competitive advantage to put your hair up and not everybody’s hair is thin in fits under a swimming cap like these are the things that we are still seeing in operation at these so-called gender balance games.

S2: Yeah, I have actually never in my entire somewhat long life of watching the Olympics heard of any man’s uniform having a violation. It’s possible. I’m just not watching for it. But it’s interesting because of all with all of its problems, gymnastics, the uniform regulations are actually kind of progressive and they have become more so in the last few years. They’re allowed to wear a uniform that covers their head for religious reasons, although no one competing internationally currently does. And they’re also allowed to wear a uniform that covers their legs. And recently, the German squad has started competing exclusively in unitards, which is different than the sort of classic gymnastic leotard which has the sort of cutout legs and you see the you see their muscly legs and stuff. The Germans are taking a stand basically against they call it sexualization, which is a little bit it’s like a little bit reductive. But in the original German, it doesn’t seem quite as much. But basically what they’re saying is some gymnasts get really uncomfortable when they’re wearing leotards, either because of their period or just because they don’t want their crotch so prominent or because leotards cause wedgies all the time. And every single gymnastics skill in the entire world causes a wedgie. And gymnasts spend so much of their time taking their wedges out of their butts and they just don’t want to deal with any more. And they think that every gymnast should be able to wear what she feels the most comfortable in. And this is amazing, but they’re the only ones doing it. No one has followed suit yet. And it’s you know, they’re not like a top team. They didn’t make the final it’s a statement. It’s a wonderful statement. But like I would like to see an athlete from every high profile team rocking a unitard out there, too.

S1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that these are the type of things. Right. That makes the celebrations of these, like gender balance games feel so insufficient. It’s hard to feel like those words are sufficient when you have mothers saying, hey, we need to bring our children to the games because we’re nursing them. Right. We are literally nursing them and you’re making them stay at home. And that last basically right before the games they reversed and said, OK, fine, if you’re nursing, you can bring your kids. But as a Spanish swimmer pointed out, she still left her child at home. Why? Because they made them house at a completely different location. So for her to go actually logistically nurse or child meant that she would have to leave the Olympic Village, putting her team in. Herself at risk for covid because she’s breaking the bubble to go nurse multiple times a day, but that’s not sufficient and that is the stuff, that’s the structural stuff that makes those words ring hollow. Things can’t be applauded for being all equitable for women. If black women can’t swim with their natural hair in caps that work for them. When women with natural, indifferent testosterone levels have been banned entirely in mostly from the global south, which is quite honestly the other reason why I have no desire to sit here and think about anything being most equal in terms of gender. When we’re still operating on the strictest of binaries. It’s yet another both and I suppose. But the end is important not just to point out these gaps or the hypocrisy, but also because it compels us to consider what comes next. How do you finish that sentence and is also a gateway to the future to thinking through further possibilities. And that is the conversation we will have in just a second. We’re going to take a break here. But if you’re enjoying the waves, we would love it if you would like and subscribe to the waves wherever you get your podcasts.

S2: And if you want to hear more from Amira and myself on another topic, check out our Wavves plus segment, Gateway Feminism, where today Amira and I talk about one thing that helped make us feminist. I’ll be talking about deodorant and Amira. We’ll be talking about the NFL.

S1: So now we’re talking about what comes next, what comes after that, and if we know that there is still this huge distance to go in terms of gender balance or anything looking like equitable circumstances, both racially and about gender in the Olympics, what work is there to do? Well, there’s many brilliant folks in organizations that are hard at work at reforming the Olympics. But what if what comes next is, well, nothing if this is the best that the Olympics can do? Is it worth doing it all? The pandemic games certainly have amplified these issues. But anti Olympic organizers such as the Olympics have been cautioning about this for years. They’ve been mobilizing on the ground in Rio and L.A. and Tokyo to talk about the harm and destruction that usually follows the Olympics. And then besides from organizers and protesters outside of the games internally, there’s also, you know, feelings, especially in the pandemic, that are like ethically like should we be watching this? What does it compel? There was a clip of Australian swimming coach. I’m so excited that his athlete had one that he ripped off his mask and he’s running around and he’s shaking and dry humping the the rail. And the DEMA organizer volunteer is like trying to prevent him from doing this. And so many responses to that video were like a hot sport. Yeah. And it’s like, yo, like, what would he have done if she had lost right leg? Of course, the women’s gymnastics final, we saw Simone Biles really shockingly pull out. And there’s this conversation already happening that was about mental toughness and what you pushed through and a lot of throwbacks to thinking about Harrisburg. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, we are so conditioned within sports to say push yourself to a breaking point mentally and physically in the name of of gold, in the name of competition, in the name of this. And I don’t know if it’s the pandemic or what or maturity. I don’t know. But it’s harder to watch. It’s harder to say like, ah, participate in even as a fan. And yet it’s the Olympics, it’s seductive and it draws even the entire sports person in. And so I know that I might feel like watching one thing and then all of a sudden find an unknown athlete in an unknown sport at 2:00 in the morning and be completely in captured by it. In the words of Big Sean, I think don’t save her. She don’t want to be saved. Rebekah, is it time to let go of the Olympics?

S2: Well, you know, I had a much more confident answer to that before. And the women’s team gymnastics final happened. And as you said, Schuman had a sort of midair crisis in the middle of her vault and she kind of balked at a little bit. And then she pulled out of the rest of the competition. And she has told the press, she has said, my head wasn’t right. I was going to hurt myself. I made that decision for myself. And I cannot help but think that if, like the greatest gymnast the world has ever known has decided that the Olympics are not like she’s not going to Kerri Strug it. And by the way, Kerri Strug didn’t need to do that vault to win, and she shouldn’t have had to do that vault. The US had the scores to win. And by the double way, winning’s not really that important. And so I think that, like, if Simone Kanof out of the Olympics Simone the face of the Olympics, if she can. Nope. Out, I feel like we should all be doping out, too. But even before that, this is something I thought about so much. When the twenty twenty games were postponed, I thought, you know, all those anti Olympic people have such a great point. The cities are always decimated. It’s always such a junk show. But then selfishly I thought, oh God, if there’s no twenty, twenty Olympics and they’re just like, isn’t an Olympics, what is that going to do to the sport of gymnastics? What is that going to do to track and field and all the sports that depend on these so-called four year fans, you know, people who kind of only tune in during the Olympics for TV ratings and the TV ratings lead to ad revenue and the ad revenue leads to sponsorships, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. What is it going to do to these athletes if there’s no Olympics? Yes, there’s a world championships for track and gym and just about everything. And those events are watched religiously by their sports super fans. But the audience doesn’t even remotely compare, you know, four year fans exist completely due to this idea that the whole world comes together to compete and watch. And it’s this beautiful celebration of sports person, ship and togetherness, et cetera. And then I got to thinking, I don’t know, I feel like maybe the Olympics, like the world has grown out of them. The entire idea of the whole world watching the same thing at the same time is a relic that is a relic of the TV age, like who even watches TV now. So, you know, maybe my mom even DVR stuff. And the sort of continuous doping scandals from around the sports world are also a great reminder that like. Oh. Trees don’t really care about the sports person, Chip, and the togetherness, you know, what they want to do is when.

S1: Yeah, and I mean, what the IOC wants to do is turn a profit, right. Like, you know, this is why the IOC official last year was holding fast. I’m not canceling the games as the pandemic raged because literally they made the argument that one official said the the flames of the Olympic torch would extinguish covid. Right. Is why they cling to the site like this is utopian, apolitical site, this togetherness, etc., which, as we know, is not true. Right. It’s obviously a very hyper political space. And there’s all of these concerns, like you mentioned and beyond. And I think that, you know, part of that calculation when you when you talk about Schuman, you know, saying nope, right. Is also I couldn’t stop feeling the weight that she’s carrying. And I feel this very keenly, especially about black women who symbolically carry so much at the Olympic stages and have historically Naomi Issaka, of course, like lit the torch. She was like the last torch bearer in Japan, you know, the darling of the games. And she also, you know, we’re recording this on Tuesday. There’s a lot that will also happen with many other sports. And there it is. But the day we’re recording this week on Naomi Asaka exit, the Olympic Games after playing a really not great match for Handsworth all over the place. And of course, we saw what happened with Schuman. And I don’t know about you. I cried all morning and I cried because I can only imagine the weight that they’re carrying, in part because in my conversations with black women athletes across multiple sports, from rugby to volleyball to track to field water polo across the sports, there is this articulation of that burden, that symbolic burden. And it’s not just the names we know, even though that’s more visible and comes with things. But one of the things that they talk about is like it’s also a burden familiar to black women who are teachers or writers or cafeteria workers.

S2: You know, all of these women athletes and especially these incredible black women athletes, they have this voracious fan base. But the fan base, you know, it brings support, but oftentimes it also brings expectation. And this sense of entitlement, like, you know, we as fans are entitled to the incredible bodily labor of these women and these black women. And the fact is, they don’t owe us anything. They don’t know anyone anything. And that’s why I think what Simone did on Tuesday morning was such an incredible feat, because even though she’s the face of the games and she felt like the whole games were on her shoulders, she understood in that moment that she lost sight of where she was midair and that vault, she realized I’m the only one who can take this weight off my shoulders. There might be consequences to it because the structure isn’t in place to support me. But no one is going to take this off my shoulders. Everyone feels entitled to my body, to me possibly getting injured to me, possibly breaking my neck and dying. And I’m not going to do it. And what I would like to see is a new structure. That’s just a whole new paradigm where we do not feel entitled to the sacrifices of these athletes with almost nothing in exchange.

S1: Watching Naomi and watching Simone in this pressure to be great and there’s pressure to reveal things and talk to the press and the pressure to do all of this stuff, to see them set boundaries, to see Naomi saying, I don’t have to go to the slam to see someone say I don’t need to do this. And the thing that I think about as much as like that moment, it both inspires me and it makes me all emotional. But I think about the people who don’t have the platform or that financial backing that those women have to make those decisions to opt out. And so when you talk, Rebecca, about like what happens to these Olympic sports, I think that this is really the point. Right? I’m thinking about the inability to imagine other possibilities and what it requires to actually change the structure of how we do things right. What if we actually built a robust professional track apparatus so that we weren’t reliant on the Olympics? What if we supported gymnastics in various ways that made the Olympics less, you know, like a slam that Naomi can pull out of because she has other options? We create more revenue opportunities that don’t involve taking your clothes off for something or being marketable and, you know, which is usually racialized in certain ways. And that’s why I think it’s so important to remember the stories of the Woman World Games that we started with, for instance, because this was a model of Olympic competition. That was different and our current wasn’t inevitable, and even now with the changes we’re seeing, what supports are offered or how they will be played, that’s changing. But this is going to require big ideas and people in power to stop prioritizing money. If profit is not the end goal, does it become easier to think about ideas like Mina Kimes just offers like Olympic Island? Like what if we built an apparatus there and every four years a host nation just was in charge of like planning the party there and we stopped displacing people? What happens if we build a robust child care structure, Olympic Village daycare, if you will? These are the ideas that actually require us to like, get together. This is the togetherness that it requires where we can really up and everything we think we know about the Olympics to maybe envision another possibility to fill out a sentence after that. And that isn’t one that we’ve even thought of yet. You’re way, way, way, way, way, way with. Before we head out, we want to give some recommendations. Rebecca, what are you loving right now?

S2: Well, in the Olympics, gymnastics wise, I’m rooting for a Chinese gymnast named Guan Chenchen. She is a beam specialist and she comes from another plane of existence. She has literally the most difficult routine that anybody compete in the Olympics right now. And she’s just beautiful. I also recommend when you’re done listening to every single episode, the Waves has ever recorded another podcast called Blind Landing. It’s a short, limited serial podcast, and it tells you the secret story of a disastrous equipment error that turned the women’s all around gymnastics competition in the 2000 Sydney Olympics upside down.

S1: I have vague memories of it. I want to shout out to athletes. I want to shout out Anna Cockrell, a 400 meter hurdler, a woman I’ve had the pleasure of being on panels with and working with. Anna finished up her grad work at USC while helping to organize black student athletes there and forming organizations that propelled USC to take accountability in communities surrounding the university into account for Black Lives Matter and really raising the the mantle of like black trans women as well. It was she was tremendous. She’s talked a lot about mental health. She’s included in the piece I wrote for Slate, where black women athletes are talking about mental health and preparation in the games. And I just want to shout out Anna because I’m so proud of her. And I think that her work on and off the track should be so commended. I also want to shout out Cuban athlete Idalys Ortiz. You might remember her for her very bright braids in Rio. She won the gold before Rio won the silver in Rio. She’s in judo. And I want to shout her out because many of the Cuban athletes obviously have been navigating unrest in Cuba around the government’s handling of covid-19. Ortiz said as she left that she will fight convinced of what it means to be Cuban. They will do it with honor and adherence to values that distinguish them. And I just wanted to shout both of those athletes who I find tremendous on and off their athletic competitions out. And my recommendation I honestly just want to talk about Tyvaso all the time. If you haven’t watched the show today, LASO, the second season just started, you have more than enough time to catch up. It is my feel good show from the past year, but in particular for the Waves audience. It also does some wondrous things with female friendships in it that I think that we just don’t see too often. I think the first few episodes I was just waiting for rivalry and competition and backstabbing all these things. I’m kind of primed and used to, and it just wasn’t. There’s a great piece up by Liza Johnson right now in such media that expands on this point some more. So I would say in the words of Ted LASO, my last kind of parting thing is, you know, to Naomi, to Simone, to these athletes, I would say, do you know what the most happiest animal in the world is? And it’s a goldfish because as such a short memory and so in the words of Ted LASO, be a goldfish. That’s our show this week. The Waves is produced by Shane Roth.

S2: Susan Matthews is our editorial director with June Thomas providing oversight and moral support.

S1: If you like the show, please be sure to subscribe, write in, review wherever you get your podcasts. And please consider supporting the show by joining Slate. Plus, members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast and bonus content of shows like this one. It’s only one dollar for the first month. To learn more, go to sleep dotcom slash the waves.

S2: Plus, we’d also love to hear from you. Email us at the waves at Slate Dotcom.

S1: The waves will be back next week. Different hosts, different topic. Same time in. Hazlet plus listeners, thank you so much for your support of Slate and Slate plus podcast, we are here with Gateway Feminism, where we are going to talk about what got us going in feminism in the first place. Rebecca, let me ask you, what was your gateway to feminism?

S2: Well, when I was in elementary school, I you know, I watched a lot of TV, even though I wasn’t supposed to, and I started seeing all these ads for Secret Deodorant. And at the time their tagline was is strong enough for a man, but it’s made for a woman. And, you know, I hadn’t started puberty yet, so I didn’t understand even what deodorant was or what I did. And I especially didn’t understand, like I’m one of my parents had to explain to me, like, oh, some people think that men sweat more and are stinkier. And it just that didn’t seem right to me. And so I asked my parents, like, if there was a word for, you know, what that meant. And my dad explained to me, well, that’s it, Sexist at Sexist. And I was like, oh, that’s a thing. And so I decided to look for all of the Sexist magazine ads I could and make a collage for a project at school. And it was every single magazine like I couldn’t every single magazine ad was Sexist. And then suddenly every like everywhere I looked, everything was Sexist. And I started calling everything out and all my friends at school and all the boys especially, just like started making fun of me and being like, Oh, Rebecca’s here. Is it Sexist? Is it Sexist? Which itself was of course, very Sexist. And I’m still mad about it. And that’s when I started getting really mad. And I’ve never I’ve never stopped. How about you?

S1: Well, I’m a little bit on Brand in my gateway. There’s two things. There’s kind of one two punch and there both sports related. So my first word was touched down because I don’t know, it’s me and I wanted to be in the NFL. I dreamt of being in the NFL. I was obsessed with Emmitt Smith. I was convinced we were going to be the first like husband, wife duo. And I quoted his college stats and the kind of dashing of your dreams when you are, you know, young, five, six, whatever it was, when they let kids think they want to be astronauts or doctors or, you know, whatever president, emperor of the world. And yet my dream to be in the NFL had no space to even be fostered, even in a cutesy way. And I was like very aware. I remember being very aware of the fact that, like, I felt like that was completely plausible and things that I was hearing other people say that I felt was like not plausible at all, were being like a plotted or carried or whatever. And so I was like, what is it about my desire to play football that feels so impossible? And that made me, like, really angry. But around the same time I was opening, I had all these other opportunities to witness kind of other sporting environments, one of which in western Massachusetts is the Mary Vásquez Softball League, which is a league that was founded in the 70s. That is a lesbian softball league in western Massachusetts. And my mom didn’t play in it. They just were kind of like around it. But they’re our family friends did. So I would go to these games and all the teams had names like the hot flashes. And what it modeled for me, though, was it gave me a window to different type of sports where they were saying the word feminism. Right. They were saying like, well, this is how we play softball, where we’re not censoring competition and we are, you know, thinking about different abilities. And I was like, well, why do you do this like that? And I would sit on the bench and pass out orange slices and talk to the ladies. And one of the things that they were impressing upon me is there’s other ways to do things. And they kept using this word feminism to talk about why they had this league like that. And that really was my window. This is like one two punch of feeling very aggrieved about what little girls could do or not do, especially when it came to sports. But then also having this model and thinking for me, my first equation was feminism was like new possibilities. So I would have to say those were my kind of twin gateways into feminism.

S2: That is amazing. I am legitimately, I wouldn’t say angry, but like jealous that I never thought to name a band or a team with the amazing name.

S1: Exactly. I’m like like now I look back sometimes like hot flashes and like I think I also didn’t really get it then and I’m not sure, like, fully get it now. I can’t say somebody thing that I understand, but I appreciate it more. I’m like, oh, these are really witty and funny and just, you know, it’s really dope. And I think that it’s great to reflect on these kind of transformative moments. So that was our gateway feminisms. But we would love to hear about yours. So please contact the show, share it out and certainly. Email us the waves at Slate Dotcom, that’s the waves at Slate Dotcom. We would love to hear about how you discovered feminism.