Mark is a former welder in his late 30s who is close to losing his home. A serious accident five years ago left him unable to work. He gets $780 in social [...]]]> I’ve got another story on OpenFile Calgary about homelessness. I spent an evening on the road with a homeless outreach program.

Mark is a former welder in his late 30s who is close to losing his home. A serious accident five years ago left him unable to work. He gets $780 in social assistance from the Alberta government—it costs him $900 to maintain his trailer and pay his basic bills. Mark is trying to get onto the province’s Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) program, which will raise his income to $1188 per month, but no one will follow up with him on his case.

Mark’s case is not uncommon for the Homeless Outreach Prevention Engagement (HOPE) team. The mobile homeless outreach program affiliated with the Calgary Urban Projects Society (CUPS) uses a cell phone and a mini-van to connect with Calgarians who are at risk for becoming homeless.

Photographer Andy Nichols came along for the ride as well, and his photos are just stunning. I am so excited that my story is running beside his work.

“I suck at basketball!”

These are the excuses many women use when they are trying to explain why they don’t want to play in a recreational sports league. They’re just not good enough. Which is an unfortunate figment of their imagination.

The truth about rec sports leagues is [...]]]>

WNBA player Lauren Jackson

“I don’t know how to play basketball!”

“I suck at basketball!”

These are the excuses many women use when they are trying to explain why they don’t want to play in a recreational sports league. They’re just not good enough. Which is an unfortunate figment of their imagination.

The truth about rec sports leagues is that none of the guys are that great either. Yeah, there’s always one or two guys on the team who essentially carry the rest of the team (by the nature of being better than everyone else), but most of us lump around the middle and are totally average.

The difference is that men have confidence when they play sports. Men take those selfish, absurd shots that they never are going to make because they’re chasing the glory moment. Men yell obnoxiously from the bench and over-coach the rest of their team. Men pass mostly to each other and rarely to women. They also pile on women because they are often the weakest link on the field/court (and sports chivalry is, of course, when they let that startled fawn have a free pass. So gentlemanly!).

These are the reasons why women don’t play sports. Because of guys. Stay with me.

I believe that many men don’t intimidate women on purpose. They don’t intentionally create an environment that excludes women because guys have been excluding women their entire lives in sports, and they just don’t think about it.

I don’t know about you, but my gym teachers never really tried that hard to make the girls feel comfortable in team sports. I remember feeling absolutely humiliated that I could never hit the ball in baseball, and my gym teacher letting the guys taunt me. I still refuse to play baseball. (Which definitely means I need to play baseball this summer.)

(Also, let us look to professional sports leagues and the insane value that is placed on men’s sports versus women’s. Kobe Bryant made $53.2 million last year. The highest paid WNBA player, Lauren Jackson, earned $103,500 last year. And you can’t even watch the WNBA on normal TV.)

I find that the most confident female athletes I know are the ones who played on women’s teams for years. They got to develop their skills in a good environment and they know they can school the shit out of some guy who “played basketball in high school.” I’m totally going to encourage my daughter to play team sports.

Since I never really played team sports in school, other than a couple of years on my high school rugby team, I like to challenge myself in adult rec leagues.

I am playing recreation basketball for the second season in a row right now. I’m still not very good. I worry about losing control while I’m dribbling, I don’t have the confidence to try any “fancy moves” and I used to always pass the ball to a boy to shoot because I didn’t want to hold the responsibility of screwing up the shot.

I’m trying to do this less. I know that if I put effort into it, I can get better at basketball.

I know that the boys aren’t going to start passing to me unless I improve because that’s just the way it is. They’re going for the shot, and if they can’t make it, they’re going to pass to someone who can. That is, to be fair, how team sports work. But it’s still annoying because it’s recreation league and everyone is supposed to have equal play.

Whenever I hear women making excuses about how they’re unworthy for recreation sports, I’m going to make more of an effort to encourage them. We’re really not that bad. We just haven’t been given the same opportunity for practice. How are you supposed to get better if no one passes to you? You just gotta keep playing, learn to be selfish and to start taking those dick-measuring shots too.

Maybe if more women start playing sports, the cheers will be less pleasantly surprised when we do get the ball in the net. I hate that.

Here are a few new episodes that I’ve recorded for Yeah, What She Said.

We’re hunting for new guests for upcoming shows. Do you know anyone who would be a super guest on our program? We can do phone interviews, so they don’t have to live in Calgary. Let me know [...]]]>

Here are a few new episodes that I’ve recorded for Yeah, What She Said.

We’re hunting for new guests for upcoming shows. Do you know anyone who would be a super guest on our program? We can do phone interviews, so they don’t have to live in Calgary. Let me know in the comments or by the emails!

• Mapuche indigenous women in Chile — Jennie and I interviewed Jocelyn Kelln, a masters student at the U of C, about her research on the Mapuche women. We talked about organization (matriarchy vs patriarchy), political participation, cultural identity and more.
• Market Collective — Geea and I interviewed Angela Dione, co-founder of Market Collective, which is a monthly arts show that promotes local talent in Calgary. Dione was one of Avenue Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40, and she is someone who genuinely tries to make Calgary more awesome. It’s inspiring.
• Montreal Massacre and Gender-Based Violence — Jennie and I could barely get a word in edgewise during our Dec. 6 show thanks two articulate, thoughtful and awesome guests that we had on the show — Lana Wells and Lisa Lorenzetti, two specialists on gender-based violence.
• Personal Finance — Jennie and I interviewed Leslie Scourgie, a local finance consultant and author, about personal finance. Scourgie was on the Oprah Winfrey show at 17 due to her money smarts.
• Good Girls Marry Doctors — Jennie and I interviewed Josephine Tsui about her project, “Good Girls Marry Doctors,” that looks at the cultural expectations North American Asian women face.

Photo is of Eunice Randall, an early radio engineer and announcer

Year of the [...]]]>

"The Beautiful Girls" was incredibly writing about women, and every woman I know was stirred by this final scene.

So 2011 was the Year of the Girl, yes? Mindy Kaling wrote a book that everyone loved, Rookiemag.com launched, HelloGiggles.com (not really a fan, but it counts) launched, Tina Fey wrote a book that everyone loved, Bridesmaids came into the world, etc.

Year of the Girl! (And woman, maybe! Depends on your stance on the infantilization of women in the media!)

The over-arching themes that emerged from the Year of the Girl are:

• Feminism is cool! (But make sure it’s packaged in a cute, fun way if you’re Kaling, Deschanel or company.)
• Lady friends are cool!
• Girls getting it for themselves is cool!
• Being happy and yourself is cool!

If it sounds like I’m mocking all of this a little bit, it’s because I am. I loved the Year of the Girl. I think it’s amazing that so many women wrote books, launched ventures, got pilots off the ground; women really had a good year in media. Progress is progress. But I do think that it came at a price.

For the most part, the women who “won” 2011 fit a specific mold: pretty, cute, friendly, fun, smart and self-deprecating. So basically, non-threatening.

Mindy Kaling writes about her love of diets and shopping in between quasi-feminist missives in her book. Zooey Deschanel’s character on The New Girl bothers me a lot because although she is smart and funny, she’s also weird, infantilized and not a real adult person. Think about it, who would actually be able to sustain a relationship with a person like that in real life? The constant need to babysit her insanity would drive me crazy. (But I will say that her pretty hair transfixes me like a python every week.) Also, HelloGiggles.com is named HelloGiggles (what does that even mean?! That is not English!).

Tina Fey is really the only person who escaped the expectation of being cute/pretty/fun/klutzy/self-deprecating, and I would largely attribute that to the fact that she is older and more established. Pop culture ain’t so friendly to older women and they obviously get a pass on the expectations of attractiveness placed on younger women, because how could an older woman possibly be sexy? (Never mind that every guy I know would get with a woman 15 years his senior any day of the week.) Fey’s book is more outwardly feminist than Kaling’s, for similar reasons, I would imagine.

However, something that emerged from the Year of the Girl that I have nothing but happiness about is legit girl cliques.

If you’re a citizen of the internet who follows any of the aforementioned women on Twitter, or really just reads about them, you’ll know that they are all deep in romances with women they admire. Fey/Poehler? Fucking unstoppable. Kaling, and the Ronson sisters, her old friends from university and Lena Dunaham? Nerd heaven. And Zooey Deschanel started a website with two relatively unknown women, of all people.

I don’t know, but I think the Boys Club may have competition. Of course, this is not entirely true because the Boys Club runs Hollywood/made these women/are the reason they have jobs. (Kaling brings up Greg Daniels, the creator of the US Office and the guy who discovered her, frequently in her book and how she owes him everything.) But I think these girl cliques are a legit, real start of something different. It’s so nice to see culture icons for average girls tweeting at each other and starting little projects together. If I have to hear another psychopathic Taylor Swift song about some chick who stole her latest crush, I might stab my ears. Don’t even mention Angelina Jolie/Jennifer Aniston — it’s not 2005.

Tavi Gevinson, the fashion blogger who rose to prominence by writing The Style Rookie, wrote a post about getting over Girl Hate on Rookie. Gevinson’s ideas aren’t particularly new or revolutionary about the genesis of Girl Hate (jealously, insecurity) and why it’s bad for you (insecurity, psychotic behaviour), but it highlights an emerging trend: Girl Hate isn’t as cool.

I think the decline of Girl Hate really began with Mean Girls, Fey’s brilliant movie about bitches (required viewing for everyone). She might have been one of the first people in recent pop culture memory to speak to my generation (women under 30/35) and say, “Everything about the way you treat each other is bullshit, you know that, right?”

We’re starting to move toward a point where being beyond Girl Hate is the new cool. Or at least, that’s how I’ve been trying to conduct myself.

As someone who went through a brief, but terrible period of mean girl-ness, the first thing I realized is that it kind of ruined my life, in addition to the target’s. Later on I realized that not being a bitch and being nice to people, even the mean ones, is kind of awesome (duh). It gives you the superiority and sense of confidence that women are chasing in the first place by being a mean girl.

What is replacing Girl Hate, slowly and surely, are girl cliques. But good girl cliques. The kind of girl cliques where you band together and support each other’s shit — No Boys Allowed. Having a girl clique is the new cool. Mindy Kaling tweeted today about how Charlotte Ronson named make up after her, I mean, seriously?!

Maybe some of this girl clique-ness is part of the performance piece that is all of Hollywood, but I like the idea, and I think it works in real life. Girls have always had friends, but as I approach the mature, dignified and reasonable (lolz) age of 25, I’m about ready to close ranks and figure out exactly which women in my life are in it for the long haul. (This is a phenomenon also associated with getting older: choosing your friends wisely.)

Girl cliques are important because things aren’t perfect yet. Boys still run the world, Beyonce lied. (Tangent: I am getting frustrated by the direction of Shit Girls Say. The first episode was pretty fantastic, but it’s taking a turn for the immature and cruel faster than I hoped.)

Also, girl cliques are important because one day, I really just want permission to be a total douchebag in a Jay-Z/Kanye West situation. I love their music so much but generally find them offensive as human beings (Not Jay-Z individually, but when he hooks up with Kanye, help!) Girls can’t act like arrogant, absurd individuals. It’s unacceptable. But all I really want in life is to write rap songs about my awesome hair (they rap about their penises constantly) and how I make bank.

Is this too much to ask?