It’s Not a Joke

Bri Sullivan on her blog responds to the Edgelords from The Next Aid Station podcast and their lazy ripoff of the ‘Here For The Women’s Race’ shirt:

This script has played out my whole life, and I think most women can recognize it immediately. I watched it play out again this week in trail running: a sport I love, a community I’m part of, a world that has lately been doing some genuinely exciting things around visibility for women. Unfortunately, alongside those exciting things, there’s been a creeping comfort with invalidating women – with making them the butt of the joke or invalidating women’s achievements and then saying women are dramatic for having negative emotions towards it all (read my piece on Rachel Entrekin and Cocodona 250, too). I want to talk about it. Not because I’m angry – I mean, I am, but that’s not the point – but because I think it’s worth really understanding why this keeps happening, what it’s actually doing, and what it costs all of us when we let it slide.

Bri should be commended here for doing the work explaining and outlining in detail of why their effort fell flat. I probably would’ve just called their copycat slogan a “fucking loser move”. But then again, I’m also a man, and I would’ve gotten away with it.

Bri in closing:

Women expressed discomfort with being erased from their own visibility campaign. Men responded by making a shirt that sexualized their presence in the sport. And the lesson drawn is that if women hadn’t been upset in the first place, none of this would have happened. Women’s feelings, again, are the origin of the problem. Not the actions. The feelings.

This.