From my Ms. Magazine blog post:
During the Winter Olympics, women athletes were garnering a lot of media attention, but don’t they always during Olympics season? What happens afterward? It’s like a vacuum comes and sucks all the energy and love for women athletes away. So how can we try to sustain that love?
One morning on the way to work, the Goddess spoke to me thru Frank Deford of NPR:
Ladies, to help your athletic sisters, you have got to descend on Las Vegas and demand the right to lose good money betting on games, just as men have forever. … There are a lot of reasons why girls from all over the country decide to go play their college basketball in a chilly little backwater called Storrs, Conn.–but a prime one is simply that UConn women’s basketball is popular. The home games bang out. The glass grandstand has been smashed there. The players are celebrities. They are treated, well, like men. But UConn remains the prime exception. Even as more and more women participate in sports, not enough of us, either sex, seem to want to watch—to care—when women play in teams. [emphasis mine]Even if we don’t go to Vegas, we can move from supporting women’s sports in theory to supporting them in reality by the simple act of going to a single event, sliding $10 under that glass window and saying, “One, please.”
