Instead of playing in a championship baseball game, Paige Sultzbach and her team won’t even make it to the dugout.

A Phoenix school that was scheduled to play the 15-year-old Mesa girl and her male teammates forfeited the game rather than face a female player.

Second baseperson Sultzbach voluntarily had sat out her team’s last two games against Our Lady of Sorrows, which has a policy prohibiting co-ed sports. “It was on their field and I felt the need to respect their rules,” she said. But she wasn’t about to miss out on the state championship.

So OLoS did instead. In a statement to the press, they said:

This policy is consistent with the traditional approach of education. As a Catholic school we promote the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education.

Our school aims to instill in our boys a profound respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can be respected with difficulty.

Translation: We have not prepared our boys for the likelihood that they will someday get their asses handed to them by to a girl.

Mesa Prep remains undefeated this season and stands as state champions thanks to Our Lady of Sorrows’s forfeit. This has to stick in the craws of any of the OLoS players who would have loved to have a stab at the state championship, gi-irl on second base or not. It also has to stick in the craws of the other teams in the ACAA Western Division, who certainly would have been happy to take on Mesa Prep in OLoS’s place. But I’m guessing the craw in which it sticks the most is that of Sultzbach, who watched her team beat OLoS twice on their turf and is now deprived of the opportunity a) to spank them on neutral ground, and b) to actually compete in the state championships and enjoy victory on her terms.

“The very idea that such stereotypes are so strong, they’d actually forfeit a game simply because a girl was on the field,” [American Association of University Women Director of Public Policy Lisa] Maatz said. “Does she have cooties?”

(As always, if you have anything even remotely spoilerish, leave it in comments to the original post and link to it here using just the names of the characters involved. The management appreciates your support.)

Next up: Next Saturday, June 2, we’re going to finish the book with chapters 19-27. If you feel like taking on Catching Fire next, start getting ready for that.

I have been dreaming. Dreaming and dreaming of creating an organization that offered empowering support for new mothers facing difficulties. I dream of a place where we have low cost housing during the pregnancy, that is drug free, homey and safe. A place where women can come and do nurturing activities like prenatal yoga, gardening, eating healthy regular meals, learning to keep a healthy sleep and wake up time, cultivating positive behaviors and growing into the mothers they hope to be for their children. I dream of this space being completely non-religious based, offering emotional support without pressure to comply with any religious creed or dogma. A space that is pro-choice and that a woman would be connected with abortion oriented counseling and services if she decided that were the path she needed. A space where spirituality can be cultivated in individuals who desire to do so with honor for their own decisions about the spiritual, ethics, what compassion means, and cultivating and growing those traits in a shared space.

I dream of a place that as women begin their parenting journey, the program works to help them get child support payments or TANF and food stamps and insurance– and provide housing for at least 6 months at an extremely low rate to allow mothers to stay at home with their children. I dream of this being a community where women can grow into caring for their infants with support from older mothers, and fellow moms, with access to mommy and baby activities to promote bonding and healthy development of mommy and baby. When women do go back to school they will be assisted to get any scholarships and government funds available to go to school, make a nominal rent payment and otherwise spend time with their child. Help with learning disabilities and executive dysfunction, life management, focusing on tasks and in person coaching with gaining skills to achieve at school would be provided. Counseling, therapeutic activities such as meditation and exercise and more would be available to help moms support their own health and work through any emotional or psychological issues they need help with. Family meal time and activities that encourage a healthy family oriented environment with play and music and dance activities for the whole family would be available.

This kind of program would of course, only be of interest to mothers who want these things for their children. But more and more people dream of giving and enriching, emotionally supportive, cognitively stimulation, developmentally appropriate, and physically healthy and nurishing environment. And it very frequently feels inaccessible to many mothers.

I dream of creating a community living space where housing cost could be reduced and through efforts of members on site many of the costs of creating and enriching environment and involved family space could be reduced making a wholesome lifestyle accessible even to those who have obstacles getting through school or making enough money to support their family in an enriching way.

I dream of an environment where a mother could work part time and still pay her bills and have time for afternoons and summer with her child. A place where there are art classes, cooking activities, robot building, engaging classes and sports and activities and arts for kids to get involved in— and women really had the ability to give their children the lives they dream of– while being able to protect allowing mothers to spend more at home time and relaxation time with their children (and simply for themselves to be more refreshed fulfilled human beings and therefore more present and available when with their children).

I dream and I dream. I have huge obstacles to ever getting through school. I have serious mental and executive function problems and daily functioning is difficult. I believe that all mothers like myself who struggle and yet wish they had more help to be the mothers they wish to be— should have better support than we have now which is therapy/meds. And that is it. Mothers need community. We need each other, to do activities with each other and to share the difficulties and the joys and to carry the hardship of the chores and getting through daily life and making good things happen for our children. Many of us struggle and stuggle in isolation and I don’t think it has to be this way. I dream of something more. I dream of the help I wish existed for me, being available for all of us who need it. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Right now, I only see Christians providing services to mothers who choose to parent children of unplanned pregnancy– or in difficult cirumstance. We need feminists who value women, who value nurturing others not simply because they are mothers but because even after becoming a mother we, as women, are still human beings. Don’t we want a world where our daughters still matter as people even after they give birth? Where society still believes their needs matter, even if in a sense a childs needs will always take a certain priority? Supported, connected, valued women, make better mothers.

Debbie says:

For a show set in Miami in 1959, the director and casting director are discovering that women who haven’t had breast augmentations are hard to find.

Producers discovered many women of South Florida have been surgically enhanced beyond anything natural to the late 1950s. “I’ve actually had better luck finding synchronized swimming groups than I did finding real boobs,” said Bill Marinella, local extras casting director

For Magic City (a Starz network show set in 1959), … Marinella had to look out for a long list of period-inaccurate body features: implants in breasts, yes, but also lips and butts; tattoos; shaved chests and waxed bikini areas, too-skinny females and too-ripped men.

“We need girls with the big hips and the curves. And down here, everybody is so fit,” he said. “It’s like tiny little waist and big boobs, pardon the French. But we have to be really careful about how we go about the casting process. It’s a huge challenge.

I’m almost certainly expecting too much of a simple entertainment article, but this story is deeply lacking in context. The journalist, Kenny Malone, doesn’t quite grapple with whether or not this represents a problem (other than for the powers behind Magic City). He doesn’t leave us feeling that widespread breast augmentations are either a good or a bad thing. He quotes Marinello as saying “everybody is so fit,” which seems to be about small hips and no curves.

Reading the article, you get the feeling that (other than breast augmentations), women’s bodies have magically morphed from one shape to another, as if advertising and other tools of social control are not factors, as if the fashions in women’s bodies transform the actual bodies in some mysterious, unexplained way. There’s no sense that women diet and sweat and toil to make these physical changes in our own bodies, no sense that women cry into their our pillows at night if we can’t make our bodies fit whatever happens to be the norm in the decade we live in, a norm that is generally not made by women. Also, of course, Malone has no understanding of the way the fashion in women’s bodies gets smaller when women’s political/social strength gets more visible.

Even the plastic surgery that is the focus of the article seems to happen without much volition or conscious choice. If over 300,000 American women had breast augmentation in 2011 (that’s about one percent of the entire U.S. population, about 2% of all women), this may be correct. A lot of breast augmentation may be happening “because everybody’s doing it,” or because “it’s next on the list.” Nonetheless, trends like this don’t happen in a vacuum–why is everybody doing it? What’s the pressure on everybody to do it? What is it costing them, and what are they not able to afford or do because of it. One glaring omission in the article is any quotation at all from a woman who has had the surgery.

Malone objectifies women in such a matter-of-fact, unaware way that it’s easy to miss, but if you read the article with any care, you’ll see that absolutely the only interesting thing about women in Miami is whether or not they’ve had breast augmentation, and whether or not they’d be less likely to have had it in Los Angeles.

Every pair of living breasts I’ve ever known has been attached to a real human being, who has pressures on them and reasons to do what they do. I’m starving for newspaper articles which take this into account. What’s more, I think more articles which did take this into account would be real ammunition against the war on women which we see played out in the U.S. halls of power.

When it comes to early pregnancy, surprising new evidence indicates that Romney and most everyone else have it backward: Having a baby early does not hamper a young woman’s economic prospects, as Romney implies. Rather, young women choose to become mothers because their economic outlook is so objectively bleak.

The problem of teen/single/unwed motherhood is one of the relatively few issues liberals and conservatives seem to be able to agree on these days. The right is more likely to pitch the issue in terms of marital status (“single moms”) and the left in terms of simple age (“teen moms”), but both sides reach the same basic conclusion. Raising a child is difficult. Raising a child without help from a partner is very difficult. Doing it at an early age is going to substantially disrupt one’s educational or economic life at a critical moment, with potentially devastating consequences for one’s lifetime. Therefore, preventing early nonmarital pregnancies (whether through liberal doses of contraception and sex education, or the conservative prescription of abstinence cheerleading) would seem universally desirable.

In fact, low-income women who gave birth as teens aren’t poor because they gave birth as teens; they chose to give birth as teens because they’re poor.

What really causes birthrates to vary are demographics and state-level economic variables. In particular, teen girls whose mothers have little education are much more likely to give birth than girls with better-educated mothers. Even more interesting is the way that economic inequality amplifies nonmarital births to teen moms. In particular, “women with low socioeconomic status have more teen, nonmarital births when they live in higher-inequality locations, all else equal.” The measure of inequality used here is not the fabled gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but the gap between the median income and incomes at the 10th percentile. It measures, in other words, the gap between poor people and the local typical household.* It may be a proxy for how plausible it would be for a girl from a low-income household to rise into the middle class. The more difficult that rise seems, the more births there are to unmarried teens.

The upshot is that teen motherhood is much more a consequence of intense poverty than its cause. Preaching good behavior won’t do anything to reduce its incidence, and even handing out free birth control won’t contribute meaningfully to solving economic problems. Instead, family life seems to follow real economic opportunities. Where poor people can see that hard work and “playing by the rules” will reward them, they’re pretty likely to do just that. Where the system looks stacked against them, they’re more likely to abandon mainstream norms. Those who do so by becoming single teen moms end up fairing poorly in life, but those bad outcomes seem to be a result of bleak underlying circumstances rather than poor choices.

In other words: Class mobility is key. And where teenage girls don’t see much potential for moving upward — and they’re often right in that assessment — they have babies earlier than they would if their prospects were more promising.

Laurie and Debbie say:

A connection of ours who does excellent community work, including in the field of fat activism, has asked us to summarize how we create community involvement (especially diversity of involvement) in our work. Because all of the work we did before Body Impolitic was done before the explosion of social media, much of it would be done differently now–and at the same time, we both believe that face-to-face contact is a profoundly important piece of connecting to any community.

The basis of most of our social change work is Laurie’s photography, which is fine art first, and then becomes a tool for social change. A working artist all her life, Laurie became a photographer initially to create Women En Large. She says, “Artistically, I envision the world in black and white. I never considered being a color photographer. When I’m shooting, I don’t think about the message. I’m too busy working with the model to capture a mood, a facial expression, a pose in which they are comfortable, or a particular combination of visual balances. Each photograph is a stand-alone work of art.”

The way we integrate text with exhibitions of the photographs is one way we bring social change in to the fine art context. All museum and gallery shows have embedded text by models and others. The presence of the text strongly encourages the audience to see the work in a community context, fine-art photographs and related words, showcasing the diversity within an identified group.

Developing appropriate wide-ranging diversity in the photographs, as well as developing appropriate complementary text, requires a great deal of community work. From the very beginning of our collaboration in the United States, we have reached out to the community of people being photographed (fat women for Women En Large, men for Familiar Men, and later Japanese women for Women of Japan).

All three portrait suites are designed to provide an opportunity for people in the group being photographed (fat women, men, women in Japan) to see people “who look like them.” In a media-saturated culture, whether in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan, or around the globe, we are inundated with (photo-manipulated and literally unattainable) images of whatever the most conventional current representations of beauty happen to be, and almost no images of anyone outside the standard. Whether the marker is race, ethnicity, skin color, age, weight, class, ability, or anything else, those who do not come close to the conventional, unrealistic “norms” are, in our experience, hungry, often desperate, for attractive, respectful images of people they can imagine themselves being.

Each portrait suite includes a wide range of people in the group being photographed, including differences in age, race, ethnicity, class, size, etc. To accomplish this, we needed to show early photographs to the widest possible range of potential models, hear people’s suggestions and ask as many questions as we can think of: what do you want to see in these pictures? Who is missing? What kinds of images do you wish you had available? What do you have to say about the topic? What works? What doesn’t? What could we be doing better? We use the responses to these questions to continually refine and improve the work.

Over and over, during all three projects, when people saw photographs of people like themselves, or like people they cared about, they were deeply touched, which translated into a desire to work with us on the project. People became invested in seeing the work completed, and widely available.

People she knew introduced Laurie to models, from college professors to sewing-machine operators. Ideally, she and the prospective model would have tea, looking at some sample photographs and text and discussing the project. Very often the models had already been introduced to the work. She asked the models to decide where they wanted to be photographed. The places they chose reflected how they lived and perceived themselves. Laurie wants the portraits not only to convey a sense of the person being photographed, but also to provide a sense of their lives that went beyond a photograph taken in the moment.

This comment from one of the Women of Japan models is exactly what Laurie strives for:

I assumed that I would be asked to pose as a “model Ainu,” and so I prepared my traditional Ainu garment to be photographed in. And so when I was asked to pose as “My naked self” and as “a woman,” I felt suddenly quite nervous. To be honest, my real intention was to be photographed wearing the Ainu traditional dress. But, Laurie’s passion was communicated to me through the lens of the camera, your “naked self,” “pose as you like,” and yet I feel that my face was still quite nervous. Laurie said “relax” with a smiling face, and waited until I felt comfortable – I felt happiness from my heart. To sit or stand in front of a camera lens is no simple task, and this was definitely a good experience for me.

- Komatsuda Hatumi, Women of Japan model and collaborator

Both in the United States and in Japan, we most often speak and write about the fine art and social change aspects of our work, and in both places (including in this post) we have also been invited to speak specifically about our practices of community involvement and how they work.

Community outreach to groups you don’t personally identify with takes far more time, effort and creativity than outreach to “people like you.” Without thinking about it, you know where “people like you” gather, what general things they expect and want, what messages they will respond to. And they are inclined to trust you simply because they recognize you. “People not like you,” on the other hand, will by definition have different experiences, expectations and motives, and be slower to trust. And groups are always composed of individuals, and general assumptions about the group are dangerous. It’s all about taking time, building trust, watching and listening, being open to change how you do things because you value the input, and making the diverse involvement deep, long-term, and necessary to the project.

(A different version of this post is in our essay on “Body Image in Japan and the United States” for the journal Japan Focus.)

Looking at Urban Fantasy we see a lot of vampires. A lot of vampires. Sparkly vampires, sexy vampires, daylight walking vampires, sexy vampires, magic vampires, sexy vampires, viking vampires, sex vampires – did we mention sexy vampires? Yes, lots and lots of sexy vampires.

Who are men. Nearly always men – especially when we look at Urban Fantasy on television. Men men and more sexy men wall to wall – and very very few women. Of course, part of this is because most of the human protagonists are women and Urban Fantasy is extremely heteronormative and will only pair them off with a male love interest. But looking at the few female vampires we can dig up and it’s not a great sign – we seem to have 3 models: children, servants and enemies.

Much of the models that we see in vampire stories involve an ancient male vampire and a young, often innocently virginal human female. You would think that when a relationship forms between a female vampire and a young human male that the pattern would simply repeat, but such is not the case. Female vampires are quite often infantalised, though they are at times well over a thousand years old. The best example of this is Rebekah from The Vampire Diaries. She is 1000 years old and in comparison to every other vampire on the show, she is absolutely childlike. Rebekah has thus far concerned herself with proms, dances and even becoming a cheerleader. Why oh why would a person who has seen so much history be interested in these things, especially after spending so many years trapped in a coffin?

When Bill was forced to turn Jessica into a vampire on True Blood, she was just a young teenage girl who had not seen much of the world. True to form, she was also a virgin. When she discovered that she had been changed, Jessica delighted in cursing, as this was something that she was not allowed to in her parents home. It was the act of a child rebelling against that which she had been taught. Much of Bill and Jessica’s relationship takes the form of father/daughter, based in the fact that Bill is her creator. He only reluctantly takes responsibility for Jessica, after Eric makes it clear that he will not. Jessica has matured over the years and has really begun to figure out exactly who she is; however, thanks to being turned into a vampire when she was still a virgin, her hymen reforms after each act of sexual intercourse, thereby constructing her as a perpetual virgin.

In Interview with a Vampire, Lestat turns Claudia into a vampire after finding Louis feeding from her, in the hope of forcing Louis to stay with them. In the novel, Claudia was only about 6 years old at the time she was turned, though she was portrayed to be between 10-12 in the movie. Even when Claudia has long past the age where she would find dolls interesting, Lestat continues to gift her with a doll on the anniversary of the day he turned her. Claudia is desperate to grow up and put away childish things but she cannot because she is trapped in the body of a child, though she has the mind of a grown woman. Her age means that she is forever dependent upon an adult vampire. Claudia never does achieve her freedom and dies at the hand of the theater vampires, her very existence seen as a threat.

In the Sookie Stackhouse novels, Sophie Anne was a strong powerful vampire, who was incredibly intelligent. In HBO’s True Blood, we are treated to a very different Sophie Anne. When she tried to command Eric, she quickly learns that he is stronger than her, and this results in him not only restraining her, but threatening her. Sophie Anne is unable to defend herself. She whimpers, whines and pouts for much of the time that she is on screen. Her only power comes from her title and that makes her little more than a figurehead whereas Eric who is simply a Sheriff has loyal followers, great strength and is constructed continually as a powerful vampire.

If a female vampire manages to escape the infantilisation, her second choice is that of servant. Most Urban Fantasy female protagonists are surrounded by men – they often have surprisingly few female friends and other women around them are either enemies or servants – women who exist for the greater glory of the protagonist rather than having fully developed roles of their own.

Twilight has the greatest collection of these servants – with Esme who exists to be the eternal mother, Alice the walking magic 8 ball and Rosaliee, who gets upgraded from enemy to servant when the blessed Bella falls pregnant (a ridiculous phrase that never ceases to amuse me – it’s like she tripped and staggered to her feet with a full womb).

Even True Blood’s most awesome Pam exists as Eric’s sidekick. And while she may snark about it mightily, that means being dragged into other people’s schemes for which she often suffers – both being tortured by the Magister for Eric and later being cursed to rot during Bill’s battle against the Necromancer Marnee. She has little of her own independent motives – in fact, while all the men are busy having sex every which way with any woman they can, Pam manages to only score once – an oral sex scene in which she manages to stay fully clothed and her make up completely unmussed (now there’s a rare vampire talent for you!)

Of course, we have to round off with the villains. For some reason (and this is definitely a trope that we will visit another time) an Urban Fantasy protagonist and bona fide strong woman (with lots of Spunky Agency) cannot abide the presence of other strong women. They’re like magnets, it seems, like repels. And so, with any strong female protagonist, there has to be a strong woman who hates her – and so eters the last role of the female vampire.

From Lorena – who manages to be both and evil sadistic murder and, far greater a sin, competition for Sookie’s man to evil, aggressive Nan Flannagan who presumes to dictate to the men, True Blood definitely has its quota. In Vampire Diaries we have the clearly antagonistic Katherine (who is set so far to be Elena’s direct enemy that she’s literally Elena’s double) and yet another antagonist who had the bad taste to dare to compete for the heroine’s menfolk. We have the ambiguous Rose who dabbles with been an enemy and an ally before being killed off to remove all doubt. Even Twilight had its collection – Victoria was a major antagonist for two of the films (fixated, of course, on the female protagonist) and Rosalie set herself up as Bella’s enemy almost at first sight (though, to be fair, I was pretty much Bella’s enemy on first read as well).

And what happens to bad guys? Yes they die. Well not Rosalie – she’s lucky enough to come to her senses and start worshipping at Bella’s feet fertile womb, saving herself from death by upgrading herself to a servant.

Of course there are some exceptions (but usually they can fit in one of these categories) but those exceptions usually die quickly before they can attempt to overturn the trope – certainly before they become long running characters. At best they get a token walk on before we return to the men and their child-like female counterparts.

And this is disturbing – in a genre that is saturated by vampires, there are so few women and those women we do have are so limited to such narrow roles – the child, the enemy or the servant.