Womanly virtues Friday ...

A good argument gets overstated
Simcha Fisher gets going on a good argument about a girl's track team that performed better when they were allowed to wear loose skorts over their skin-tight compression shorts. And then she undermines herself by going further than the evidence justifies.

Here is what she says the take away from the experience is:

1. Boys will ogle at girls who expose their bodies.
2. Girls feel uncomfortable when they are ogled.
3. Girls get nervous when they feel uncomfortable, and can’t function well when nervous.
4. There is something wrong with dressing immodestly, so let’s stop pretending it’s normal.
5. Yay, Dunbar! And yay for their coach—sounds like a sensible, compassionate guy who cares for his athletes.

The first problem here is one of vocabulary. The second problem is precision.

Let's start with "ogle" which means, according to my Oxford Concise Dictionary, "to stare at lecherously".  Rather a loaded term, wouldn't you say? Ogling is rude and inconsiderate. So, right off the bat, we have made a negative and unfair generalization about boys.

Do boys look at girls in a sexual way? Why yes they do. Is there something wrong with that? Well, sometimes yes but let's come back to that some other day.

Let's move on to "uncomfortable". Girls are uncomfortable being looked at in a sexual way? Some of them no doubt are but unless agents of Satan are forcing girls to get dressed in ways they really, really don't want to, the evidence to the contrary here is so overwhelming I feel guilty even entering into such a lopsided dispute.

(And when it comes to the sexual experience of girls and boys there is an apt distinction between "uncomfortable in a bad way" and uncomfortable in a good way". Anne-Marie Ellis who sat in front of me in Grade 10 Math made me very uncomfortable in a  good way and my marks suffered as a consequence that year. Both my Math teacher and my parents were unhappy about it but I wasn't complaining.)

How about we choose a more neutral term like, I don't know, how about "self conscious'.

Then we can restate #3 above in a far more defensible form: "When girls are self conscious about being looked at in a  sexual way it tends to distract them in ways that hurt their performance in other areas."

And we might even soften it further and admit there are degrees. As Ms. Fisher correctly points out a mini-skirt-length skort over compression shorts is not exactly devoid of erotic interest. (I myself have a hard time imagining how any piece of clothing with an athletic young woman in it could be non-erotic.)

Could it be that the some girls aren't hampered by being looked at in a sexual way so much as they are hampered by being looked at in a sexual way while wearing clothes they don't feel their best in? I'm just guessing here but I'm thinking maybe that is a factor.

Here are some interesting quotes from members of the team:

“You look good, you run good,” Phillips, a co-captain, said. “It makes you feel different when you’re out on the track, like no one can come get you.”

Added teammate Manaiza Kelley: “I feel classy in it. I feel like a woman.”

Learning that dignity matters and that respecting the dignity that comes with being God's special creation are really good things to do for your own happiness is something that girls and boys need help with. I'll tell you one thing girls really like at that age: limits. They may not admit it, but the girls I grew up with and the girls I later taught all really liked knowing that there were certain limits on what can and cannot be worn.

The take away, I think, is that  if you want school girls to do well at sports or academics, you want to limit the ways in which their sexual self consciousness might hamper their performance. How about that Simcha Fisher?

Oh yeah, Yay coach! I agree absolutely.