Ah, yes. “More Intensity.” The pivotal line of one of my favorite scenes in Lost in Translation, a film so simplistic, it’s (brilliantly) near-bombastically cerebral in its dissection of the complexities of communication. Intensity, the inherent human trait, the syntax of the very instincts that successfully dragged human beings through the annals of evolution, has become an almost esoteric expression diluted by a phlegmatic society adamant on a collective Paris-Hilton blase-ness serving as a way of life. Somehow, I really don’t think this is what the ancient Eastern Zen Masters had in mind.
What has inspired me to speak so pretentiously, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Right Said Fred. Yes, Right Said Fred and its tongue-in-cheek one-hit wonder about being too sexy to do anything or be anything, managed to divert my attention from the difficult quandary of whether I wanted to eat a cup of yogurt before I worked out or after, to my annoyance at the way society sends mixed messages about people taking life by the balls and ripping them out its throat via its tiny little pink asshole.
When I played sports when I was younger, the hardest thing was walking that fine line between throwing myself into a competition to challenge my body and my mind’s ultimate potential and willpower, and adhering to what the coaches deemed “lady-like competition” while fighting the attitude of many of the participants that sports were just a form of afterschool social club (aka orgy of conformity and viscious cattiness). Maybe the problem in my day was the lack of prominent pro women’s sports associations, so the most us girls could aspire to was getting a varsity jacket and being called a “dyke” behind our backs. Nevertheless, I found girls’ sports to be as much about the politics of gender roles as about athletic competition.
The best games I ever played were when we felt entitled to go all out and assert our full potential. It was all about the game. We weren’t girls playing sports. We WERE the competition. For those few hours during the game, the win was all that mattered. We could hate each other off the field and have plenty of shit to say about each other, but on the field, we were parts of a whole and we respected each other for the role we each played, and in those intense stretches, outside of life and death, we shared the strongest currents of willpower and emotional bond.
I love watching the Olympics because the women competing are paradigms of athleticism and focus; they are proud of their intensity. But I’d like to throw in something to think about. These women who made it to the highest level of competition are not only outstanding athletes, but have managed to stay true to themselves and their focus despite the social pressures that cause so many talented female athletes to drop out. Yes, all athletes face external pressures coming from a variety of sources. But women really have to develop a great deal of inner strength and personal pride to work against the invisible gender barriers that society unfairly holds dear.
I think the biggest shame that playing girls’ sports taught me, was that even in an arena in which intensity is appropriate, it wasn’t encouraged enough and due to peer pressure, it was often discouraged. I think this attitude is reflective of a bigger problem in society, in which women, other than in certain arenas such as performance arts, can’t go all out and do things to the extreme–ie. show extreme displays of anger, joy, sadness, aggression, etc–without being deemed frightening or crazy. Intensity is equated with extremes which is equated with instability. It is the nuclear explosion, the small seed that can wield so much power, that its power must logically be destructive.
I am an intense person. In sports, I went in shoulder first into every catcher; I crashed the boards for every rebound and I dove for every ball. I have five knee surgeries to show for it but I always found my way back to the competition. I fought for my teammates on the court, even took punches for them, despite absolutely hating some of them for the backstabbing things they did to me off the court. And now that I’m older, I know that intensity doesn’t dissipate with age. It’s still there and those who are closest to me have felt it, simmering under the surface. It’s in the things I do, my writing, my work, my philosophies, my relationships. But I know I don’t feel comfortable showing it to people, thus my love of and my need for stretches of time in which I have the freedom to be alone to allow myself to encompass the full potential of myself.
I love being a woman, but for better or worse, we are the underdogs. Yes, society dictates to men how they have to maintain the ideal of being the strongest, the smartest, the best. But to say that men have it equally as bad as women in terms of gender roles is like saying that a championship basketball team that has to play as well as it did the year before, has it as rough as the last place team whose best player has to play blindfolded JUST BECAUSE he plays for the last place team. One is hampered by the pressure of meeting high expectations while the other is blighted by imposed impediments.
That said, I believe that while men may be the physically stronger sex, women are the internally stronger sex. We have learned to sprint with braces while others ran free; we have learned to fight with daggers while others fought with swords. And despite these challenges, we have succeeded. We have faced the amorphous shadow of grievance nicknamed “human suffering,” tasted it, and learned to give it a name and use it as an ally. And when the physical battles are not enough to defeat certain enemies, it is the spirit of the woman who knows how to weave the suffering into the fabric of the universe, so that, like children, we can be soothed by knowing that everything in our world is still where it should be, and all is not lost.
You give a boy a cape and a plastic helmet and he thinks he’s a superhero. But everyone knows that just by believing things doesn’t always make them so. I have seen a “man” crying on the floor, screaming about the pain of a minor injury like a spoiled child with a paper cut, and I have seen a woman with sharp, jagged bone piercing through bloody skin, asking if she could walk off the field rather than be carried, for the sake of her dignity. And you ask me to buy into chimerical social constructs?
I’m sorry, but HELL no.
Fuck you, misogynistic men who perpetuate this cycle of women being the lesser sex. You are the very ones I have seen bawling on the floor, demanding to be taken care of. And fuck you women who allow this cycle to perpetuate–those who flaunt your lack of self-worth through boastful promiscuity and pathetic caricatures of sexual dominance; those who turn on other women and destroy them in hopes to be the only one left standing in a barren, antagonistic landscape; and those who sit by passively, squandering your potential and letting your life add up to less than the sum of its promising parts. You, who do not make the most of yourself, who avoid the challenge and do not live and love intensely to the most of your potential, are the ones who lose the most in this brilliant but short-lived game.