Out of line
Jan. 6th, 2012 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI heard on the radio news earlier that there's a 50p coin with a special football design (because Olympics). There was a clip of the guy burbling "I'm not an illustrator or a designer or anything, so I thought I'd explain the offside rule."
Halfway through this i wanted to shout "so why didn't they get an illustrator or designer to do this?!" (like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball: "whose nephew are you?"; it's not like there's a shortage of designers and illustrators looking for jobs, I bet) but in the time it took me to take in a big breath for shouting, he'd finished the sentence and at that point I could only shout "Oh for fuck's sake!"
The thing about the offside rule is that it's not just notoriously supposed to be impossible to understand, it's supposed to be impossible for girls and women to understand.
When you type the word "offside" into Google, its fourth suggestion (after sensible things like "offside in rugby" and "offside rule" is "offside rule for women." Which brings delightful things like a shoe-shopping analogy "for explaining the offside rules to a nagging girlfriend while trying to watch the game" and Forget about being from Mars or Venus, the biggest difference between men and women is their ability to comprehend the offside rule, where women are "let in" on the "secret."
First time I watched a football game in a bar with people I knew, the one with less civliized ideas about gender roles made sure to explain the offside rule to me, precisely because of this trope. He didn't explain particularly well (this is someone who tried to explain cricket to me while not mentioning for ages that there are two batsmen on the pitch at the same time) but it was still sufficient that I have understood it ever since: my poor little female brain did not overheat.
There's no consolation for having to carry around misogynistic jokes in my pockets, but this comes closest: the coin got the offside rule wrong.
Halfway through this i wanted to shout "so why didn't they get an illustrator or designer to do this?!" (like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball: "whose nephew are you?"; it's not like there's a shortage of designers and illustrators looking for jobs, I bet) but in the time it took me to take in a big breath for shouting, he'd finished the sentence and at that point I could only shout "Oh for fuck's sake!"
The thing about the offside rule is that it's not just notoriously supposed to be impossible to understand, it's supposed to be impossible for girls and women to understand.
When you type the word "offside" into Google, its fourth suggestion (after sensible things like "offside in rugby" and "offside rule" is "offside rule for women." Which brings delightful things like a shoe-shopping analogy "for explaining the offside rules to a nagging girlfriend while trying to watch the game" and Forget about being from Mars or Venus, the biggest difference between men and women is their ability to comprehend the offside rule, where women are "let in" on the "secret."
First time I watched a football game in a bar with people I knew, the one with less civliized ideas about gender roles made sure to explain the offside rule to me, precisely because of this trope. He didn't explain particularly well (this is someone who tried to explain cricket to me while not mentioning for ages that there are two batsmen on the pitch at the same time) but it was still sufficient that I have understood it ever since: my poor little female brain did not overheat.
There's no consolation for having to carry around misogynistic jokes in my pockets, but this comes closest: the coin got the offside rule wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-09 10:24 pm (UTC)