Now, I'm a big fan of Vanilla over at Half Fast, but I'm a little less than thrilled with one of his favorite terms, getting "chicked."  If a man gets passed by a woman at a race or while on a training run, then he's been "chicked." 

I fully understand that griping about this opens me up to charges of being a humorless feminist (to phrase it politely).  Yet, the inherent assumptions behind the phrase don't strike me as all that funny.  In his recent post, Vanilla speculated that the woman who passed him was "mannish" , on steroids, or a cyborg.  In other words, she wasn't a real woman.  The implication is that no woman who dares to be faster than a man could possibly count as a real woman.

Vanilla's tongue was firmly lodged in his cheek in this post.  He's joking.  I get that.  The problem is that it's only funny because people really believe this.  Women aren't supposed to compete with and beat men.  That's against the rules.  As a result, women who are strong athletes end up in some imaginary realm of not-women.  

This kind of garbage is a real problem for women athletes, whether they're professionals or weekend warriors.  For one thing, women are less likely to engage in physical activity than men, and there are real health consequences to that.  Women who are professional athletes are expected to be very feminine (and expressly heterosexual) when they're not competing.  New players in the WNBA are getting coached on applying their makeup during their orientation.  The message is loud and clear.  For a woman, it's not enough simply to excel on the court.  You have to prove that you're a "real" woman.

I'm not terribly fast, but I love to run.  Just like with women, I'm faster than some men and slower than most.  However, I consider myself an athlete.  I fully enjoy the process of changing my body through my own efforts. I wish more women would get off their couches and join me, and I hate to see stereotypes get in the way of that.