‘Cause I’m beating this horse good and dead before I move onto another topic to rage about, I wrote about hockey again, this time for my Metro column:

Both our hockey teams struck Olympic gold in Vancouver. The next day, hockey fever raged on for the NHL. But whither the women after the podium is packed away? Is there support for women’s hockey beyond the Games?

I polled a few hockey-obsessed friends: The answer was no. For one, there’s no high-profile league; even if there were, the game lacks speed and finesse, one said. Another said women don’t excite the way pugilistic NHLers do. Wait, where did that fuzzy feeling go? I thought we were proud of our golden girls.

Despite limited interest in the game itself, I love women’s hockey. The players push the envelope of what’s seen as acceptable for “the fairer sex.” Look no further than the constant chortling about lesbian players and coaches, and about Team Canada’s cigar-and-beer-fuelled celebration (which I maintain was a tongue-in-cheek jab at how male players celebrate) to understand its place in our social fabric.

Female hockey players have always been a bit subversive. The sport began with men, and as a result, fans have come to see the boys’ version as the way it ought to be played. Now, women are adopting it, but with a style that’s all their own. I must be among a minority of those who would welcome that kind of play — if this wasn’t the case, a North American league like the NHL would exist by now.

There are some examples of women in men’s hockey: Hayley Wickenheiser in European leagues; Manon Rheaume in NHL exhibition games — but one league said Wickenheiser shouldn’t play with men, while Rheaume was dismissed as a publicity stunt. Still, everyone rubbernecked — eager to see if these gals could overcome that unspoken notion that men always outclass women, and actually beat a guy.

It’s a difficult pill to swallow, acknowledging that some spectators will never be inspired by women for their sheer athleticism; that she will always be good … but only for a girl.

Add to that the talk that women’s hockey ought to be removed from the Olympics. Supporters cried foul, citing limited opportunities and underfunding, maintaining that it will just take time to establish the sport and develop a deep talent pool. I hope that’s the case. That would be golden.

What I didn’t have room to add was an observation that when it comes to women’s sports — not just hockey — we tend to love it with our minds, in a cerebral, affirmative sort of way that says, ‘Yes! We support your right to play any game you please (but I don’t have to watch it, right?)’ while we will always love men’s sports more intensely, elementally, and we will feel that love with our hearts — from the very core to the tips of our raggedy-ass, blue and white Maple Leafs clown wigs. No one ever sits on the edge of their couch in double overtime, hands locked in prayer and brow furrowed, fervently in prayer to the hockey gods, waiting and hoping their bunch of breathless and exuberant women to hoise a silver-plated cup, y’know?

I suppose you can’t force anyone to feel a pure sense of joy and passion for something if it doesn’t strike you that way, but I wonder how much of it is manufactured by a celebrity-driven, money-soaked, extremely powerful league and sponsor system, and how much is rooted in the athletes themselves and their willful determination. I don’t believe female players feel their love for their sport any less than male players do, nor that they are limited in passing on that sentiment to their audience. If you do, you should read Roy McGregor’s first hand account of the cigar-and-booze celebration, which made me love the women’s team all that much more.

Any sport that requires such a money sink is self-stratifying. It’s a terrible social phenomenon happening not just in amateur sports, but also in skyrocketing university tuition, extra fees required even in public school, laptops and other technological gadgets that are now virtually mandatory in academic and professional spheres. It also means at the highest level, the NHL, as in many other places in life, those that succeed are the ones that can afford it. It’s disheartening that all these opportunities are moving further and further out of reach of low-earning Canadians families.

…

When [hockey is] put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents. I think most Canadians believe we are a fair, free and equal country. Hockey, if it ever did represent that, doesn’t anymore.

The spirit of a nation comes from its people, emblematic of their shared experience, ethnicity, history or culture. Our spirit is that we lack all these, and instead take polite pride in them all. We are not one dish, one national dress, one language, one music (I would defect if Anne Murray or Celine Dion were our national chanteuses). How, then, can Canada reduce its sport to just one?

Read the whole thing here. I plan on elaborating a bit more on growing up in Hockeyville Richmond Hill later on this blog.

So, have you seen this?

Well, this, 8x.

Love Magazine (y’know, the one that put the outsized, in girth and personality, Beth Ditto on its cover for its first-ever issue) is putting eight naked supermodels on its “Fashion Icons” issue, due Feb. 8.

On its own, it’s not much of a crime. Fashion editorials in which clothes are out of frame are pretty par for the course, so there’s not much to be offended by at this point. (Though I still contend there should be — replacing fashion’s primary concerns with aesthetics, form, art with that of the human body, etc. etc.)

But then Katie Grand had to open her big fat yap and try to explain what was a mostly innocuous, kinda cool cover concept:

“For this issue of LOVE, we took eight women who are generally acknowledged as the most beautiful in the world, got them to show off their bodies — widely regarded as the most perfect in the world — and photographed them all in exactly the same position for the cover,” LOVE’s editor-in-chief Katie Grand told VOGUE.COM. “We did this to show how much they differed physically from one another, which is why we also printed their measurements.” (via The Cut)

Oh, okay. So you’re taking the eight most beautiful, genetically blessed women in the world, whose jobs are to fit sample size clothing (and thus, more or less have identical bodies), and comparing the minutiae of their forms? Yeah man, Kate Moss’s legs are stumps (or is that only because she’s a mere 5′ 6″ compared to her giantess peers?). Or maybe that youth is so fleeting that Moss — who was discovered TWENTY-TWO years ago — scarcely looks like a decade has passed, or that Naomi Campbell — who was discovered 25 years ago — looks better than my not-yet-24-year-old self. If you want to bring out the sociological hand-wringing, yeah, it’s problematic because readers could see this as some distorted signal that average resides somewhere between the two-inch difference in Moss’s and Lara Stone’s hip measurements.

Mostly, though, it’s just proof that PR spin has either reached a new low, more proof that journalists can’t do PR, or both.

Ah, Wikipedia. It always seems to be the night I’m scrambling to finish some other writing that I come across a subject that grips me, sending me down a rabbit hole of Googling and complete focus derailment.

Which is how I came to learn about Anna May Wong, a second-generation Chinese-American actress with Taishan roots. She started in silents but transitioned into talkies, but was forgotten for many a year as many a Hollywood star ends up. She was friends with Marlene Dietrich, her co-star in Shanghai Express (still below), and Leni Riefenstahl (isn’t that some terrible irony?) and for a while seemed to be headed for superstardom.

But Wong’s career hit an intersection of bad politics and yellow peril. It forced her into insulting stereotypical roles as evil dragon ladies, temptresses, or China dolls, which Wong was critical of. California’s anti-miscegenation laws (repealed in 1948) prevented fraternization, on or offscreen, between Asians and whites. It prevented her from landing lead roles, where she would have had to star opposite white men. In a famous case of yellowface, she was passed over for the heroine role in Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth,” which is about Chinese peasants, in favour of Luise Rainer.

Oh, and then because she chose the dishonourable career of acting, the Chinese people hated her for being a lascivious embarrassment to her people. Even so, she left for China, hoping to to discover a troupe of fellow Chinese actors that would enable them all to create their own opportunities. She also sent diary newsreels back to Hollywood, allowing theatergoers to explore China in a non-racist way. (I joke a lot about how Taishan people speak in the “hick” Chinese dialect, but in all seriousness, Wong sounds like a very smart, resourceful woman.)

The anti-miscegenation laws probably had some part in her never marrying, too. The above clip of jazz staple “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You),” here performed by Ella Fitzgerald in 1957, was co-written by Eric Maschwitz, a Brit with whom Wong had a lasting but obviously impossible romantic connection. A true torch song.

I always get obsessed with these injustices done toward women (and the Chinese, for obvious reasons… Rape of Nanjing, anyone?) — but this one runs a little deeper, since Wong seemed to be boxed in despite her best efforts. This one gets my feminist gas face.

Women are just so reckless — college gals like Geisy Arruda should learn to cover up, knowing that her male counterparts transform from mild-mannered men into beastly rapists-in-waiting when they get a sniff of a curvy blonde.

On Oct. 22, classmates of the 20-year-old tourism student at Sao Paulo’s Bandeirante University harassed, jeered and threatened her with rape when she showed up for class in a hot pink mini-dress.

According to Brazzil Magazine, about 20 female students followed her to the bathroom and attempted to force pants on her. Men trailed, trying to stick cellphone cameras up her skirt. Police officers finally showed up to subdue the ever-growing mob with pepper spray and extract a crying Arruda from a barricaded classroom, while the approximately 700-strong crowd shouted, “Puta! Puta! (Whore! Whore!)”

Then, the poor gal was informed she’d been expelled after the school took out a newspaper ad saying so. (She was reinstated Monday after a media and government uproar.) In contrast, several hecklers were suspended.

In case today’s lesson wasn’t clear, here it is from the university’s lawyer: “She always liked to provoke boys. The problem was not with her clothes, but the way she acts, talks, crosses her legs, and walks.”

I’ve heard that line directed at rape victims: What were you wearing? Why were you walking home alone? How much did you drink? Here’s a question: Does excessive thigh fill men with so much puritanical hysteria that mass rape seems like a reasonable response?

Brazil, like North America, is a hyper-sexualized culture. Though the media makes mention that Brazilian students dress modestly in jeans and tees, Brazil is still the land of Carnaval and G-strings, and skimpy dress is encouraged — that is, apparently, until someone actually does so; then she’s a “puta.”

Women can only take so much objectification before they become just things to ridicule, or — as was the case with a 15-year-old girl in Richmond, Calif., last month — just bodies to gang-rape in a school yard.

Arruda’s harrowing experience is a lesson: Men are not responsible for their actions, therefore women are.

So maybe it’s true what everyone says about university — the most worthwhile lessons are extra-curricular. No textbooks required; just a hot pink mini-dress.

There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

The third season of TV series Mad Men premiered this Sunday; in it, the staff at ad agency Sterling Cooper is jettisoned into 1963.

Oh, what a year it turns out to be: Housewives awaken from domestic stupor when The Feminine Mystique is published; Camelot tumbles; Beatles fans let out hormonal squeals; singer Sam Cooke writes his iconic song “A Change is Gonna Come,” about simmering racial tension in the South.

Mad Men, a show its creator Matthew Weiner has said is feminist, signals the third season’s tone in the opening minutes, when Sterling Cooper’s lone male secretary mutters, “This place is a gynocracy.”

Though Manhattan was a man’s world, the woman’s life is well-explored: they’re passed over for jobs; pre-marital sex makes them “strumpets”; men rape them; they consider abortions.

Consider Christina Hendricks’ account of how viewers reacted to her character Joan’s rape: “People say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers … It illustrates how similar people are today, because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape.”

I’ve heard viewers, male and female, fawn about the secretive Don Draper, but even the intelligent ones are in awe of this lying, cheating ass. Truly, inexplicably, women are drawn to his misogyny, and men want to be that.

I chuckled when Joan shows the new-girl secretary Peggy to her typewriter. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use,” she assures her.

Mad Men was set in a world on the cusp of change, edging its way to free love, desegregation and violent war — but they clung, and still we cling, to antiquated notions.

Every generation has its revolution, and ours is now. I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it is. It’s Afghanistan, where a law was passed that allows men to starve their wives for denying them sex. It’s Carleton University allegedly accusing one of its female students of “asking for” a sex assault by working late at night in a secluded lab. It’s women being interrogated before receiving birth control, the morning-after pill or an abortion.

Mad Men is a mirror, and if we look into it, we will see that our turmoil is as it always has been.

“I don’t like you like that.”

As shot by The Selby of the Libra Leather shop, which supplies buttery soft goods for the likes of Alexander Wang, The Row and Vena Cava.

— Hanneli Mustaparta

This is the retard cousin to my dog.