How Roller Derby Challenges Stereotypes of Women in Sports (Re-Post)

This Thursday and Friday, I have the great privilege to be attending the Womensphere Emerging Leaders Summit (of which I'll be writing a solid retrospective next week), so rather than suspend posting, I'll be putting up two of my favorite posts from the past about women, leadership, and busting stereotypes. Enjoy!

This weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the roller derby championship bout of the Rat City Roller Girls in Seattle. It was at the Key Arena, which is a huge venue, and there were a ton of people who came to watch. It was a phenomenal bout with Grave Danger finally taking home the championship title.

For those who are unaware of this particular sport, roller derby is a sport played by women on roller skates who basically beat each other up – the main gist is that there is one jammer from each team who can score points by lapping all the other players and there are blockers who want to prevent the opposing team from scoring a point. Roller derby, like soccer, is extremely nuanced. There is a lot of skill and strategy involved, not only because you’re on skates, but also because you have to know when and how to position blockers so that you can get your jammer through. Watching the teams do it for the first time may seem like chaos, but once you realize all the different rules and strategies going on, it’s really satisfying. Oh, and did I mention the violence?

Anyway, as I was cheering myself hoarse and giggling at all the pun-filled derby names, I started thinking a lot about how roller derby is really an interesting sport. It’s not mainstream, it’s not money-making, and it’s not male-driven, which are three things that sports fans often opine as the reason that we like sports. Roller derby instead takes a lot of stuff that we assume about sports and turns them on their head. Here are a few that I’ve noticed:

1. It’s all ladies. In a country where women sports stars are often marketed for their beauty in order to drive ticket sales, roller derby prides itself on being a haven for women who are strong and fiercely competitive. The audience of this bout seemed pretty evenly split with male/female spectators, so that busts the stereotype that only women want to watch sports with women in them as well.

2. There’s no need for an athletic build. Athletes, women and men alike, often have to be a certain body type in order to enter into certain sports – in roller derby, there is a wide array of body shapes and sizes, and it instead depends on how well you can maneuver on wheels. Don’t get me wrong: these ladies are athletes. I cannot tell you how many muscles it takes to man those skates, but there is no necessitated body type for one to become a roller derby star.

3. Sexuality, vulgarity, and intelligence are prized. You only have to look at the names of some of their derby names to know that derby girls are nerds. And sexy ladies. And badasses, all rolled into one. In mainstream sports, when tennis players like the Williams sisters want to flaunt their sexuality, they are shamed – in roller derby, they are beloved. And there are no “dumb jocks” on these teams; all of these women can show off their wit just as they can show off their skills.

4. Violence and strength. No one can tell me that these ladies are pushovers. Women who are strong often are pegged as having masculine traits, but I believe that roller derby challenges the assumption that strength is an inherently masculine property.

I encourage you to take in a local roller derby bout whenever you have the chance – I myself am working on trying to become a roller girl sometime in the future. See you out on the track!

Read more of my opinions on women and feminism, as well as how I got into roller derby.

Fear of Falling: Skating and Thoughts on Exercise

Me as a tennis player, back in the times of yore.

This weekend, I start going to the Gotham Girls Rec League Level 1 for beginning skaters. I'm extremely excited - but also very nervous! I have been skating sporadically throughout the summer, but this is the time where I will be getting back to it in earnest. I am happy to say that I am getting better and better each time I get back on, but I still have a knee-jerk reaction to hold back when I start going "too fast" or feel myself toppling over. Perhaps this is the common fate of humankind (Thou shalt not roll on wheels as a form of locomotion), but I have seen so many brilliant players that do it effortlessly that I can't help but feel envious.

On a similar note of self-reflection, I have realized that I was at one point accustomed to getting 2 hours of exercise 5 days a week for at least half the year. It was a realization that made me go "whoa" aloud in my bedroom at 1am. I used to be a tennis player who, while not very good, really enjoyed the game and the exercise involved in it.

I completely forfeited that when I came to college.

And I've come to realize that exercise and movement is actually something I really need to be consistently happy. Perhaps because I was getting that throughout high school, I grew accustomed to it and felt that it was an integral part of my life. But now, when the choice is sleeping a little longer or getting in an hour of exercise, I choose to hit the snooze button.

College may give me a lot of choices in lifestyle, but it binds with the same force. With the pressure of classes, homework, my job, and my internship all going down at once, I really have to carve out the hours for everything else - from art to exercise, they get pushed off to the side.

I am seeing how important it is to make that time happen. Skating for 2 hours every week will be just one of my first steps.

Interested to read more about roller derby? Read my post about How Roller Derby Challenges Stereotypes of Women in Sports.

3 Ways to Follow Your Dreams (Even the Tiny Ones!)

At the end of yesterday’s post, I wrote about my dream of becoming a roller girl someday. Thus far, that dream may be one of the most daunting ones I’ve ever undertaken. It requires the patience to develop a skill that does not come naturally to me – who thought that me, the wall hugger at the skating rink, would be willing to fall on her face just to learn how to jump on skates? And so, today, I wanted to impart a sort of action plan for how I will be following that dream and how you can follow your own.

How Roller Derby Challenges Stereotypes of Women in Sports

This weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the roller derby championship bout of the Rat City Roller Girls in Seattle. It was at the Key Arena, which is a huge venue, and there were a ton of people who came to watch. It was a phenomenal bout with Grave Danger finally taking home the championship title.

For those who are unaware of this particular sport, roller derby is a sport played by women on roller skates who basically beat each other up – the main gist is that there is one jammer from each team who can score points by lapping all the other players and there are blockers who want to prevent the opposing team from scoring a point. Roller derby, like soccer, is extremely nuanced. There is a lot of skill and strategy involved, not only because you’re on skates, but also because you have to know when and how to position blockers so that you can get your jammer through. Watching the teams do it for the first time may seem like chaos, but once you realize all the different rules and strategies going on, it’s really satisfying. Oh, and did I mention the violence?

Anyway, as I was cheering myself hoarse and giggling at all the pun-filled derby names, I started thinking a lot about how roller derby is really an interesting sport. It’s not mainstream, it’s not money-making, and it’s not male-driven, which are three things that sports fans often opine as the reason that we like sports. Roller derby instead takes a lot of stuff that we assume about sports and turns them on their head. Here are a few that I’ve noticed:

Nerd Girl Inc: Learning to Skate

Today, breaking from my regularly scheduled life, I went for a skating lesson downtown.

My morning was spent navigating the Village first to acquaint myself with the obscure location of Mercer Playground, which has no fixed address, but is instead wedged between other addresses and cannot easily be located on Hopstop...

Then, I got lost traipsing around in hopes of finding the NYU gallery that was housing Marlena McCarty's work (you can find a description of the show here), which I really enjoyed outside of the requirement by my drawing teacher to go see it.

And then back to the Playground, where I first made contact with some very cool aspiring derby women and waited around in the November cold for Lezly, a.k.a Skate Guru.
I needn't tell you how frightened I am with outdoor roller skating.
I love the idea of skating about, being agile and going at high speeds, but for now, I am just a clumsy unbalanced girl that can't bend her knees to save her life. Today was the start of my education.
I wanted to pursue outdoor classes so that I can practice anywhere - for any skaters in NYC, you already know there is a dearth of indoor roller rinks around here, as most of them have closed down. So, I suited up and started flailing about in the hopes that I could figure out this bizarre talent of rolling around on four wheels.
Lezly appeared at around 12:35pm and immediately ordered us out of our skates. Much like in yoga, we practiced changing our weight distribution, which seems easy enough on the ground. But in skates, it's a whole different matter. I clung to the fence until I finally figured out the basics, then kept layering on more and more advice. I got better in very tiny increments.
Throughout the class, I felt a tinge of embarrassment - as anyone does when they are new at something. Why wasn't I a natural skater by birth? This is something no one will ever answer to me. I fell once, hard, on my hip. But, by the end of the lesson, I felt much more in control than I ever had on skates.
As you might say, I'm working on it.

8,403 words.

Read more Nerd Girl Inc. posts and check out the related series, Caught My Eye.