(Delayed) Friday Randomness – March 23

This was nearly ready to go on Friday but then the weekend happened and an Olympic duathlon happened and stuff, so you’re getting all of these links on Monday.

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Baylor’s Brittey Griner is continuing to dominate when it comes to collegiate women’s basketball.  Now she’s making headlines as the second woman to ever dunk during an NCAA tournament.  The first was Candace Parker in 2006.  (P.S. Don’t read the comments.  Like you needed me to tell you that.)

Naturally, the women’s NCAA tournament has provided the sports world with abundant opportunities for #genderfail, one of which Lydia at Bloomer Girls has detailed in her post about ESPN’s unequal online coverage of the two tournaments.  I found this particularly interesting, as someone who works as a web content provider for a big media entity.  For instance, the fact that the “Women’s BB” navigation item is at the bottom of the menu means it was probably added on as an afterthought, and the fact that each tournament has a bracket with different functionality means that they actually went to the trouble of producing a bracket with less interactivity for the women’s tournament.  That’s a lot of extra work just to reinforce the second-class status of women’s basketball!  (h/t Gwen at Sociological Images)

A 10-year-old girl from New Jersey is the new world record holder in women’s weight lifting in the 97 pound division.  She squatted 215 pounds. Holy crap.  I wish I could be more eloquent but seriously…holy crap. (h/t Laura G.)

Elouise at feminaust writes about the street harassment she’s experienced since she’s started spending more time on her bike, and she wonders why it seems like the harassment has picked up: “Is there a residual anger in the male of the species that we are so carelessly flaunting our not-so-new found freedom?…Is it because in the course of powering our two wheeled vehicles that our bodies are placed in such a position as to arouse greater interest?”

Speaking of street harassment, I found this post on the subject to be really interesting, specifically the research that found men who harass women on the street say they are doing so to “either engag[e] in a sexual discussion with women, or an effort to ‘have fun and flirt.'”  However, the woman’s lack of interest in engaging in said discussion or her displeasure at being “flirted with” didn’t dissuade them – they just said they could tell that she wanted it even if she said she didn’t.  Because no one knows what a woman wants like a strange man who walks past her on the street.

Cute story alert!  A lady proposed to her girlfriend on the ice during an Ottawa Senators game and it is totally freaking adorable.

You know how people like to act like gender associations for pink and blue are, like, hard-coded into our DNA, despite them being relatively recent cultural inventions that were reversed as recently as the Victorian era?  Well check it out – it turns out that cheerleading, the femme-ist of sports, was once a boys-only thing: “Characterized by gymnastics, stunts, and crowd leadership, cheerleading was considered equivalent in prestige to an American flagship of masculinity, football.”  OH HOW THINGS CHANGE.

Autumn at The Beheld wrote a very interesting post about body image as something you literally conceive of, as an image of your body in your mind, and not just a collection of emotions and ideas about your physical self.  She wrote it a few weeks after she was diagnosed with mild scoliosis and she realized her ideas about her body had shifted in that time period.  I don’t really have anything cogent to say beyond that reading her words caused me to think a bit differently about how I think of my own body, which is always a good thing, I think.

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I’m still trying to raise money for Girls on the Run!  Just a little over a month remains before I hit the 26.2-mile course of the Big Sur International Marathon, and I’d like to raise as much as I can before then.  If you’ve got a few dollars to spare, please consider kicking them my way!  Thank you!

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