…thanks for sharing your opinion, but Slacker has already answered my question and we have moved on.
I appreciate all of this, including the part we supposedly “moved on” from. Do you know what was on a little earlier? I remember that “Bunk’d” show, about counselor hijinks at a summer camp, but not the Cinderella movie.
Nothing better than foreigners who disdainfully paint all Americans with the same brush, even though only about a third of Americans support seating Kavanaugh on the Court (and I’m not among that third, by the by).
…“foreigners” and girls who appear to “be ever-so-slightly nonwhite.” Classy.
I haven’t painted all Americans with the same brush. My point is that it doesn’t matter how many Americans support seating Kavanaugh on the Court: its probably going to happen anyway. And girls are much more likely to be disappointed by that third of Americans who do support seating Kavanaugh on the Court than they are because on an episode of “Raven’s Home” a girl won a game of basketball against a boy.
This trope is not problematic. At most some girls might find it empowering. At worst it might make people like you cringe. It isn’t some " intermediary stage in the culture." Its just a scene in a kids TV show.
I agree. Fictional depictions of girls triumphant in sports don’t bother me in the least. Are they unrealistic? Well, depending on the show, they might well be. But a willing suspension of disbelief is all part of being a viewer/reader. And of all potentially unrealistic tropes, this one doesn’t even make my top 100.
The far more serious issues that you raise are the ones that I am also concerned about.
There you go with the insinuations again. :dubious: There is nothing unclassy about the word “foreigner”. My only niece and nephew, my sister’s kids, are foreigners (they may be dual American citizens, but they were born and raised in another country). Doesn’t mean I love them any less, but I would be annoyed if they spoke disdainfully about the US collectively without regard to our diversity of opinion or the planks in their own country’s eye.
And since you seem obsessed with my “ever so slightly nonwhite” verbiage, I will clarify that it is the “slightly” that I am side-eyeing. “Moonlight” is one of my all-time favorite films, but it did not try to make its lead character of ambiguous ethnicity to try to appeal to all demographics.
Real life example: Frank Butler, a marksman and trick shooter in a traveling show, would take matches against people in towns where his carnival traveled. One such challenger was 15-year-old Annie Oakley, who beat him in a best-of-25 challenge (he shot 24, she shot all 25). They were later married. A fictionalized account of their meeting can be seen in the musical Annie Get Your Gun, along with the song, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better”.
:dubious: Uh, I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean it this way, but your comment comes across as rather disdainful of the identities of multiracial/multi-ethnicity people. I mean, if you in fact happen to know that the character in that particular script was deliberately written as someone of multiracial descent in order to make it easier for viewers of different races to identify with her, that’s one thing.
But if you don’t know that (and it sounds from your remarks that you aren’t very familiar at all with the details of whatever show it was you saw, or even what it was called), then your assuming that the actor’s appearance is essentially a marketing gimmick for alleged “crossover appeal” between different demographics sounds a bit off.
There are lots and lots and lots of actual people in the world who could be described as looking “ever so slightly nonwhite”. They do not exist in some liminal space of “ambiguous ethnicity” as a makeshift combination of two (or three or however many) precisely defined racial/ethnic categories. Their own ethnicity is just as real as, and no more intrinsically “ambiguous” than, that of, say, the blondest bluest-eyed Norwegian or the darkest-skinned Sudanese. To describe them as such carries uncomfortable (although, again, doubtless inadvertent) echoes of old slurs like “half-breed”, “mongrel”, etc.
(Aside from that, right there with you on the magnificence of Moonlight, btw. Wow what a film.)
Yes, and I was a little skeptical going in. I thought it might be getting overpraised like “Black Panther”. But it is an absolutely luminous and sublime film.
NYT did a trend piece on ambiguous ethnic casting in 2003:
I really do think it’s a little unfair to actors of more distinct ethnicities. But it’s certainly better than when blonde and blue-eyed dominated.
Yes, so unrealistic, just never going to happen in real life…
The show sounds like Andi Mack. There is a character who is a girl of suspect ethnicity who plays basketball and she interacts with a male character who is on the basketball team. I have not seen them play one on one but it sounds like something that would be on that show.
All I can say is “meh”. It’s fictitious, and if it gets more girls into sports, I am all for it. And if it gives them unrealistic ideas about their prowess, well the athletic field is remorselessly Darwinian and they’ll learn soon enough. Plus learning about your limits is part of growing up.
Frankly, I find the “You go girl”, trope to be much more insidious with respect to the coaching of ostensibly professional female sports. It’s exasperating to see supposedly elite women athletes making errors that would get a school boy dropped. Coaching standard need to improve ASAP.
“Suspect”. Oy vey people. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Yes. In non-revenue sports, it is much, much easier to get a scholarship as a girl than a boy. The reason why is Football and Title IX and the NCAA.
Title IX guarantees that women have the same opportunities as men in athletics. What this typically means is that a university has to provide scholarships in equal proportions to men and women. (So at a school that is half men and half women, the scholarship budget for men’s and women’s athletics has to be the same.) Where you run into problems is that football and basketball take up the majority of men’s scholarships. Football can have 83 scholarshipped athletes, so you’ve got to dig out enough women’s sports to have 83 scholarships for them. Frequently Track and Cross Country take up a big chunk of those and the dirtiest secret is Rowing/Crew. If you really want your daughter to get an athletic scholarship, get her on a rowing team. DI schools have 20 scholarships for women on crew teams and it’s a small pool to choose from, but I digress. This also means that men’s non-revenue sports tend to get cut in favor of the football beast. I went to a DI school in the Big XII and we’re the only school that has a men’s soccer team so we play in the MAC. It’s too hard for the other teams to balance those 10 scholarships with women’s sports, so they have cut their teams.
Because of the football problem, all of the non-revenue scholarships for boys are fewer than girls scholarships. You mention Tennis and it’s a great example. A DI school is allowed to have 8 full scholarships for women, but only 4.5 for men. Soccer as I mentioned is allowed 10 boys (Actually 9.9) but women’s soccer gets 14. Even basketball gets 15 girls and only 13 boys. Football is the juggernaut before which all others must bow.
You are correct that it’s not guaranteed, but it is pretty close to being so. The overall average tends to produce more extreme manifestations at the tail ends of the bell curve.
Jordan Peterson makes the same point talking about aggression. (He’s on YouTube - I can dig it up if necessary.) Aggression is a common personality trait. Men are somewhat more aggressive than women. That is, if you pick any two people, one man and one woman, at random, the chances are about 60% that the man is more aggressive than the woman. If you look only at the outliers at the extreme ends of the curve, the chance that the man is more aggressive than the woman go way up. That’s why so many men are in prison for violent crime, and far fewer women. Because the average man is only somewhat more likely to be aggressive than the average woman, but the extremely aggressive person is overwhelmingly more likely to be a man.
The best basketball players in any given school are more likely to be selected than the average ones, either by self-selection or by being recruited. Thus comparing the best woman basketball player to the best male basketball player is highly likely to be comparing two outliers, and there are a lot more extremely good (for a given population) males than females. And the larger the school, the more likely this is to be true.
For X where X = things like sports and aggression and physical strength -
[ul][li]Most men have more X than most women[/li][li]Some men have more X than all women[/li][li]Some women have more X than most men, but there are very few of them, and[/li][li]No women have more X than all men.[/ul]Maybe some individual female basketball player can beat the average man at basketball. Beating the best male basketball player in that same population? Probably not.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
If so, then maybe SlackerInc will recognize this scene as the one he was talking about (scroll down to second photo).
One of the black comedians had a great bit on this. it went somewhere along the line of
“Yes, you can be anything you want… IF you are good at it… and IF they are hiring…and its still good if you know someone.”
I just want to toss this in.
I’m a big fan of the old TV series “The Twilight Zone”. One of the things of several episodes is very often, the good guys lose. Meaning everything such as the dolls dont find their way out of the bucket, a person does end up being eaten by aliens, innocent people do hang, motivated athletes still lose.
…I’m just calling it as I see it.
I’m not a foreigner. As far as I’m concerned *your *the foreigner.
I didn’t speak disdainfully of the US collectively. So what I said shouldn’t have annoyed you.
Huh.
So this TV show that you don’t know the name of that you don’t know who the actors were and you didn’t pay attention too and you only really watched a single scene hired an “ever so slightly nonwhite girl” for the purpose of trying to appeal to all demographics? Are you sure they didn’t hire this particular actress because she was better than everyone else at the auditions? Given your limited knowledge of what it was you were watching, how would you actually know? How are you even in the position to speculate about why they hired her, let alone be so confident in your assertion?
Ah, found it. Episode 25 of season 2. Buffy is an extremely athletic character, and previously made the boys’ basketball team earlier in the season. (And, yes, that happens sometimes.) She had moved away, but wound up moving back due to reasons, and was no longer on the team. Her friend is trying to convince her to rejoin the team, but she refuses.
The guy she plays is TJ. He’s the captain of the team, and originally hated that she made the team–to the point where he’d rather lose than pass her the ball when she’s open. But, after she’s gone, he realizes she really was good, and wants her back on the team. But, he says, he’s still better than her.
So they play 1 on 1. The game is close. The only scene I can find is her making the last basket and winning. Despite his having the height advantage, she seems to be faster. though it’s hard to tell with such a small clip. And she clearly uses psychology to distract the guy to get in the last basket.
It is not her winning that game that allows her to start a girls’ basketball team, given that she’s already good enough to be on the main team. Turns out, she had already been setting up a girls’ team before that, and this was why she hadn’t rejoined the boys’ team.
Unfortunately, this is a twist in the most recent episode of the show, and I can’t find any info about why they didn’t have a girls’ team before. But I would guess that there just wasn’t enough interest for a full team, and that Buffy found some girls to play with. The boys’ team already seems quite small, so I suspect this is a smaller school.
Those are also the schools where often a girl will play on the guys’ team, so it all fits.
As for the whole multiracial thing:
The show stars a half Asian character, who is played by a half-Chinese actress. She grew up thinking her mother was her sister–and I’m sure you know what that means. Her best friend is Disney’s first gay main character. So they don’t really have any reason to be trying to check any boxes.
Though, yes, the actress does seem to be multiracial: 1/4 black, 1/4 Latino, and 1/2 white. Given that she’s from Arizona, this is not all that uncommon.