Golden Bears and weekly weigh-ins

I have a more serious post in mind for later today, but a pair of morning notes:

First:

Though it may only be of interest to a few, I am immensely frustrated by college football's Bowl Championship Series.   Despite a 10-1 record (our best since 1949), the Golden Bears will not be invited to our first Rose Bowl since 1959 -- as Cal fans had expected.  Despite being ranked 4th in the country in both major polls, we are not to be among the top eight teams in the country to play in a "BCS Bowl."  Instead, we are off to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego to play Texas Tech.

Since this gets lots of play in the media, and I imagine it isn't of interest to most of my readers, I won't rail on at length about the injustice of this slight.  I will point out, however, that Cal's typical graciousness may have harmed our cause.  In our final regular season game on Saturday night (in Hattiesburg, Mississisippi, against the Golden Eagles), Cal was leading 26-16 with less than a minute to play.  We were inside the Southern Miss 20 yard-line, and had an excellent chance to score another touchdown, putting us up 33-16 ( a result that might have appeared more impressive to the voters in the football polls).  Instead, the coaching staff ordered our quarterback to "take a knee", running out the clock and refusing to even attempt to run up the score on a defeated opponent.  If that action in any way contributed to the decision to exclude us from the Rose Bowl (and send Texas instead), then I'm prouder than ever to be a Golden Bear!

Of course, if Cal had gone to the Rose Bowl, I would have missed them.  For years, I've promised myself that I would see Cal play in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, something that has not happened in my lifetime.  This New Year's, however, I shall be in England with the family.  Since we live half a mile from the Rose Bowl itself, the idea of being thousands of miles away while my alma mater played in my backyard might have been tough to swallow.

On another note, my informal running posse did an easy 11 miles on Saturday morning.  We had a new runner with us, a gal I'll call "Dana" (not her real name.) I'd met Dana and her boyfriend ("Steve") a few weeks ago at another race, and they are good friends of another couple in the running group.  Dana is by no means a fast runner, but she's in fine shape, and was only a little slower than we were in climbing the hills. Dana came without Steve on Saturday -- it seems that they'd been fighting.  I'm not going to share the details of their fight, save for one thing that left us all flabbergasted:  Steve is obsessed with Dana's weight, and asks her to submit to weekly weigh-ins as a condition of remaining in the relationship.  As I said, she's strong enough to do an 11-miler, and she's obviously quite fit -- she's just not genetically designed to be slender.

While wondering what could possess a woman like Dana to stay with a cad like Steve (whom we all agreed is now banned from joining us on the mountain), I also wondered about his motive.   He obviously is not concerned about Dana's health; she's fitter than most.  It's an aesthetic issue, clearly.   I'm well aware that for many of my brothers, the physical attractiveness of their wives and girlfriends plays a huge role in their own self-esteem.  A great many men seem to be aroused by the arousal that their partner generates in other males, and derive a kind of competitive satisfaction from it.   From that standpoint, when one's gal gains weight (and is thus perceived as less desirable), one's own status is harmed. 

I am not making excuses for the likes of Steve.  I've known plenty of men like him before, though I always thought that runners (being the self-obsessed lot that we are) were more likely to be focused on our own bodies than those of our partners.  Most of the guys I run with (self included) are much more worried about their own flesh than that of their wives and girlfriends; I suppose that's one of the questionable benefits of being partnered with a certain kind of male narcissist!

In any event, the whole idea of "weekly weigh-ins" has been haunting me since Saturday, and making me more than a little angry. 

Comments

[zuzu]

it would be interesting if hugo had reversed the gender and told the story just to see the reaction. can you see my point, it is all about gender.

The first one to make a big stink about gender was Jeff JP, and then you, Joe.

It comes down to entitlement and control. Steve wants to control Dana and he feels entitled to set these conditions. Whether she goes along with them because she's used to body criticism doesn't change the nature of what drove him to make the comment.

I would have exactly the same reaction of seeing a control freak if Dana had been the one insisting on Steve getting weekly weigh-ins. Or, to take gender out of it, if half of a same-sex couple did the same to his/her partner. The difference is that because of cultural conditioning, it's more common for men to make demands like this and women to accept them as normal.

[Amanda]

I reversed the gender for you, joe, and even changed up some details to make it more pertinent to male insecurities. If a woman demanded that her boyfriend go through ritualistic penis measurements, how would that make you feel?

This is a classic case of "Women are responsible for male behavior."

Her reaction to him does not determine his behavior. If she walked out on him, he would find another emotionally wounded woman to control. Would you still blame Dana then?

[La Lubu]

and joe, this conditioning on Dana's part is not "past conditioning". It's present. It's constant. We live in a culture where it is considered acceptable to critique women's bodies. Where women are supposed to go to extreme lengths for an ever-extreme look. And when that look changes, women are supposed to change with it. When you work at a sewage treatment plant, you get used to the smell. It still stinks, of course, but you become somewhat immune to it...your olfactory sense becomes overwhelmed.

The reason we won't be seeing Dana weighing Steve in is not because women are saints and men are sinners. It's because this culture does not have a tradition or practice of men having to alter their bodies in order to please women. Men's magazines do not have "lose those ten pounds and get that girl!" or "is your wife cheating because you've gained weight?" articles. True, they have weight loss articles, or workout articles, but they revolve around actual health...not trying to alter one's body into a shape that is genetically not possible.

Part of the rise of the fat-positive movement can be attributed to the hyper-critical view of the female body. It's not an attempt to say "fat is good, thin is bad". It's an attempt to say "Basta! This is me, take it or leave it." Because I have yet to meet a woman born and raised in the United States who hasn't been called "fat". Not one.